Mirrors (62 page)

ORIGIN OF ADVERTISING

The Russian physician Ivan Pavlov discovered conditioned reflexes.

He called this sequence of stimulus and response “learning”:

the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

hours later, the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

the following day, the bell rings, the dog gets fed, the dog salivates;

and the process is repeated hour after hour, day after day, until the bell rings, the dog is not fed, but he salivates anyway.

Hours later, days later, the dog continues salivating when the bell rings, even though his plate is empty.

POTIONS

The Postum Cereal Company led you down Happiness Road to Healthy City and on into the Sunlight. There was something religious about those shimmering bowls in the ads, one cereal was even called Elijah’s Manna. And their Grape-Nuts prevented appendicitis, tuberculosis, malaria, and tooth decay.

In 1883, Professor Holloway spent fifty thousand pounds sterling advertising a product made from soap and aloe, an infallible remedy for the fifty diseases enumerated in the ad.

Dr. Gregory’s stomach powders made your belly like new, thanks to the exotic combination of Turkish rhubarb, calcined magnesite, and Jamaican ginger. And Dr. Varon’s liniment, “approved by members of the Royal Academy of Medicine,” cured colds, asthma, and measles.

Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil, which had nothing to do with snakes, was a mixture of kerosene, camphor, and turpentine that did away with rheumatism. Sometimes it also did away with rheumatics, but that bit of news was left out of the advertisements.

The ads did not mention the morphine in Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, undoubtedly manufactured by an easygoing family. And neither did the ads explain why the word “coca” was in the name Coca-Cola, “the ideal brain tonic” invented by Dr. Pemberton.

MARKETING

At the end of the 1920s, advertising beat the drum to spread marvelous news: “Fly, don’t ride.” Leaded gasoline made you go faster, and going faster meant getting ahead in life. The ads showed a car going at a snail’s pace, and the embarrassed child inside: “Gee, Pop, they’re all passing you!”

Gasoline with lead additives was invented in the United States, and from the United States a barrage of advertising imposed it on the world. In 1986, when the U.S. government finally decided to outlaw it, the number of victims of lead poisoning around the planet was incalculable. It was known all along that leaded gasoline was killing adults in the United States at a rate of five thousand a year, and causing irreparable damage to the nervous systems and mental development of millions of children.

The principal authors of this crime were two executives from General Motors, Charles Kettering and Alfred Sloan. They have gone down in history as generous benefactors of humanity. They founded a hospital.

MARIE

She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and she won it twice.

She was the first woman professor at the Sorbonne, and for many years the only one.

And later on, when it was too late to celebrate, she was the first woman accepted into the Panthéon, the portentous mausoleum reserved for “the Great Men of France,” even though she was not a man and had been born and raised in Poland.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Marie Sklodowska and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered a substance that emitted four hundred times more radiation than uranium. They called it polonium, in honor of Marie’s country of birth. Next, they began experimenting with radium, three thousand times more powerful than uranium. They invented the word “radioactivity,” and they received, jointly, the Nobel Prize.

Pierre had his doubts: were they the bearers of a gift from heaven or from hell? In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he recalled the case of Alfred Nobel himself, the inventor of dynamite:

“Powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. But they are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead people to war.”

Very shortly thereafter, Pierre was killed, run over by a horse-drawn cart carrying four tons of military materiel.

Marie survived him, and lived to see her body pay the price of her success. Radiation gave her burns, open sores, and horrible pain until she finally died of pernicious anemia.

Her daughter Irene, who also won the Nobel Prize for her achievements in the new realm of radioactivity, died of leukemia.

FATHER OF THE LIGHTBULB

He sold newspapers on trains. At the age of eight he started school, but he lasted only three months. The teacher sent him home, explaining, “This child is too dumb.”

When Thomas Alva Edison grew up, he patented eleven hundred inventions: the incandescent lightbulb, the electric locomotive, the phonograph, the movie projector . . .

In 1878, he founded what would later become the General Electric Company and set up the first electric power plant.

Thirty-two years later, this illuminator of modern life sat down with journalist Elbert Hubbard.

He said:

“Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine, instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire.”

And he also said:

“Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel.”

TESLA

Nikola Tesla always claimed to have invented the radio, but Guglielmo Marconi got the Nobel for it. In 1943, after years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that Tesla’s patent was first. He never heard the news. He had been in his grave for five months.

Tesla always claimed to have invented the alternating current generator, which today lights up the cities of the world, but the invention got a bad reputation because it was first tried out frying condemned men in the electric chair.

Tesla always claimed he could light a lamp from twenty-five miles away without any wires, but when he actually did so he blew up the power station in Colorado Springs and got run out of town.

Tesla always claimed he had invented little steel men guided by remote control, and rays that could photograph the inside of the body, but few took seriously this circus magician who spoke regularly with his deceased friend Mark Twain and received messages from Mars.

Tesla died in a hotel in New York with his pockets as empty as they had been sixty years before when he got off the boat from Croatia. To honor his memory, the unit of measure for magnetic flows is now called the Tesla, as is the coil that produces over a million volts of electricity.

ORIGIN OF AERIAL BOMBARDMENTS

In 1911, Italian airplanes dropped grenades on several settlements in the Libyan desert.

The test proved that attacking from the air was quicker, cheaper, and more devastating than land offensives. The commander of the air force reported:

“The bombardment has been marvelously effective at demoralizing the enemy.”

The experiments that followed also featured European massacres of Arab civilians. In 1912, French airplanes attacked Morocco, selecting densely populated targets so they would not miss. And the following year, the Spanish air force tested, also on Morocco, a novelty from Germany: fragmentation bombs that sprayed deadly shards of steel in all directions.