Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (23 page)

Created in 1931 by an out-of-work architect named Alfred Botts. He hoped he could support his family by inventing a successful word game, but before the game was refined, he had his job back. That was just as well; when he finally showed his handmade Criss-Cross to toy companies, they insisted it had no potential—it was too intellectual.

In 1948 Botts and a friend went into business manufacturing the game—now called Scrabble—in an old schoolhouse. It was an unsophisticated cottage industry that enabled the friend to barely eke out a living. But in the summer of 1952, for no apparent reason, Scrabble suddenly became a fad. In two years the partners went from selling fewer than 10,000 games a year to selling more than 4 million. To meet the growing demand, the rights were sold to Selchow-Righter, and 30 years later, Scrabble ranks as the second-best-selling game in history.

RUBIK’S CUBE

Devised by Hungarian mathematician Erno Rubik in 1974 as an aid for teaching math concepts to his students. Rubik realized the puzzle’s possibilities as a toy and ended up selling 2 million of the cubes in Hungary alone—a total of one cube for every five Hungarians. In 1980 the Ideal Toy Corporation bought the rights, and the puzzle became a worldwide craze. Rubik reportedly became “the first self-made millionaire in a Communist country.”

LINCOLN LOGS

In 1916 Frank Lloyd Wright went to Tokyo to supervise construction of the Imperial Palace Hotel, a magnificent building assembled with an inner frame of wood so it would withstand earthquakes better. Wright brought his son John with him, and as John watched workers move the huge timbers required for the structure, he came up with an
idea for a wooden construction toy. When he returned to America, John created Lincoln Logs.

SILLY PUTTY

In 1945 an engineer at a General Electric laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, was assigned the task of trying to create synthetic rubber. One day he combined boric acid with silicone oil. The result: a bizarre substance with a variety of fascinating properties (it bounced, stretched, and could be broken with a hammer), but no practical use. It became a New Haven conversation piece.

Several years later a marketing man named Peter Hodgson saw a group of adults playing with the stuff at a cocktail party. Hodgson was putting together a mail-order catalog for a toy store at the time, and decided to include this “nutty putty” in it.

The response was amazing. Even without a photo, the putty outsold everything in the catalog except crayons. Hodgson knew he had a winner—so he bought $147 worth of putty from G.E. and packaged it in little plastic eggs (it was Easter time). In the first five years, over 32 million containers of the stuff were sold worldwide.

SLINKY

Richard James, a marine engineer, was trying to invent a spring that could be used to offset the effects of a boat’s movement on sensitive navigational instruments. One day he knocked a sample spring off a high shelf—but instead of simply falling, it uncoiled like a snake and “crawled” down to the floor. James realized he had a toy product, gave it a name, and formed the James Toy Company to manufacture it.

One pound of round steak: 41¢

Average hourly wage at the Ford Motor Company: $1.38

Dinner and show featuring comedian Sid Caesar: $2.75 per person

Average wage for a registered nurse: $200 per month

One year’s tuition at Yale University: $600

Water.
Toothpaste is 30 percent to 45 percent water. Which means you’re paying about $2 a pound for that water.

Chalk.
The same variety that schoolteachers use. What is chalk? It’s the crushed remains of ancient ocean creatures. The exoskeletons retained their sharpness during the eons when they were buried, and they are one of the few things tough, yet gentle enough, to clean the hardest substance in the body, tooth enamel.

Titanium dioxide.
This stuff goes into white wall paint to make it bright. On your teeth, it paints over any yellowing for at least a few hours, until it dissolves and is swallowed.

Glycerin glycol.
To keep the mixture from drying out, glycerin glycol is whipped in. You may know it as an ingredient in antifreeze.

Seaweed.
A concoction made from the seaweed known scientifically as
Chrondrus crispus
. This oozes and stretches in all directions and holds the paste together.

Paraffin.
This petroleum derivative keeps the mixture smooth.

Detergent.
What good would toothpaste be without the foam and suds? The answer is: it would be perfectly fine . . . but the public demands foam and suds.

Peppermint oil, menthol, and saccharin.
These counteract the horrible taste of detergent.

Formaldehyde.
The same variety that’s used in anatomy labs. It kills the bacteria that creep into the tube from your brush and the bathroom counter.

Does this list of ingredients for toothpaste turn you off?

Take heart. Studies have shown that brushing

with water can be almost as effective.

Americans will eat 90 acres worth of pizza today.

The potato chips Americans eat each year weigh six times as much as the
Titanic
.

According to the USDA, the average American ate 1,950 pounds of food in 2003.

The average family eats 6,000 pounds of food in a year.

Americans buy 40 million Ritz crackers every day.

If you’re an average American, you’ll eat 5,666 fried eggs in your lifetime.

The average American eats the equivalent of 28 pigs in his or her lifetime.

The average American eats 21.4 pounds of snack foods each year.

The average American consumes 87 hot dogs a year.

Twenty-nine percent of Americans say that most of the meals they eat are made from leftovers.

Nine boxes of Jell-O are sold every second.

As late as 1950, pork was the most popular meat in America.

The average American family spends more than $2,000 a year dining out.

Americans, on average, eat 100 pounds of beef a year—about 50 percent of it as hamburger.

The single most ordered item in American restaurants: french fries.

Americans consume an average 736 million pounds of peanut butter each year.

Americans throw away an estimated 27 percent of their food every year.

If you’re left-handed, you’re definitely outnumbered. Lefties make up only 5 to 15 percent of the population.

If you’re a female southpaw, you’re even more unusual—there are roughly 50 percent more left-handed males than females.

The artwork found in ancient Egyptian tombs portrays most Egyptians as right-handed. But their enemies are portrayed as left-handers, a sign they saw left-handedness as an undesirable trait.

Ancient Greeks never crossed their left leg over their right, and believed a person’s sex was determined by their position in the womb—the female, or “lesser sex,” sat on the left side of the womb.

Roman customs dictated that they enter friends’ homes “with the right foot forward” . . . and turn their heads to the right to sneeze. Their language showed the same bias: the Latin word for left is
sinister
(which also means evil or ominous), and the word for right is
dexter
(which came to mean skillful or adroit). Even the word
ambidextrous
means “right-handed with both hands.”

Lefties are more likely to be on the extreme ends of the intelligence scale than the general population: a higher proportion of mentally retarded people and people with IQs over 140 are lefties.

Why are lefties called southpaws? In the late 1890s, most baseball parks were laid out with the pitcher facing west and the batter facing east (so the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes). That meant left-handed pitchers threw with the arm that faced south. So Chicago sportswriter Charles Seymour began calling them southpaws.

What did traditional Christians believe was going to happen on Judgment Day? According to custom, God blesses the saved with his right hand—and casts sinners out of heaven with his left.

Only city whose main street can be seen from space: Las Vegas, Nevada.

The weight of the sun’s light on Earth’s surface: two pounds per square mile.

Top speed of astronauts traveling to the moon: 24,679 mph.

The longest a lunar eclipse can last: seven minutes, 58 seconds.

Galileo called Saturn “the planet with ears.”

A light-year (the distance light travels in a year) is about 6 trillion miles.

There are 169 known moons in our solar system (so far).

Do you know how long it takes Earth to go around the sun? Forty-six percent of Americans don’t. (It’s a year.)

Twenty-four people have traveled to the moon, but only 12 have landed on the surface and walked around.

The closest black hole, known as V4641 Sgr, is 1,600 light-years from Earth.

Jupiter is large enough to fit all the planets of the solar system inside it.

A year on Jupiter is 12 times longer than a year on Earth.

Forty-one percent of the moon is not visible from Earth at any time.

The average meteor is no larger than a grain of sand.

Some material brought back from the moon is 4.72 billion years old.

GATORADE

According to
60s!
, by John and Gordon Javna: “In 1965, Dr. Robert Cade was studying the effects of heat exhaustion on football players at the University of Florida (whose team name is the Gators). He analyzed the body liquids lost in sweating and within three minutes came up with the formula for Gatorade. Two years later, Cade sold the formula to Stokely-Van Camp. Soon, annual sales were well over $50 million and Gatorade could be found on the training tables of over 300 college sports teams, 1,000 high school squads, and all but two pro football teams.”

7-UP

According to
Parade
magazine: “In October 1929, just before the stock market crash, St. Louis businessman Charles L. Grigg began marketing a beverage called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. His slogan: ‘Takes the “Ouch” out of grouch.’ The drink was a huge success during the Depression, perhaps because it contained lithium, a powerful drug now prescribed for manic-depressives. The drink’s unwieldy name was later changed to 7-UP. The ‘7’ stood for its 7-ounce bottle, the ‘UP’ for ‘bottoms up,’ or for the bubbles rising from its heavy carbonation, which was later reduced. The lithium was listed on the label until the mid-’40s.”

DR. PEPPER

In Virginia in the 1880s, a pharmacist’s assistant named Wade Morrison fell in love with his boss’s daughter. The pharmacist decided Morrison was too old for his daughter and encouraged him to move on. He did, settling down in Waco, Texas, where he bought his own drugstore. When one of his employees developed a new soft drink syrup, Morrison named it after the man who got him started in the pharmacy business—his old flame’s father, Dr. Kenneth Pepper.

Lethologica is the inability to remember a word.

Hawaii’s state fish is the humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

Loosely translated, the word
carnival
means “flesh, farewell.”

Aglet is the plastic or metal tip of a shoelace.

Pogonology is the study of beards.

A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.

A melcryptovestimentaphiliac is someone who compulsively steals ladies’ underwear.

A selenologist studies the moon.

A “beer can fancier” is called a canologist.

The only contemporary words that end in -
gry
are angry and hungry.