Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (45 page)

In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, Mary Walker was just 29 years old. She tried to join the Union Army but was denied a commission because of her gender. So she volunteered instead and became, first, a nurse and then an acting assistant surgeon—the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army. For almost two years, she worked on the Union front lines and then was appointed to the 52nd Ohio Infantry. (She may or may not have acted as a Union spy during this time, too. No one seems to be sure.)

In 1864, dressed in an officer’s uniform that she’d modified to fit her, Walker crossed into Confederate territory to treat civilians (or spy on the Confederate soldiers), and she ran right into a group of rebels. Their commanding officer captured her and sent her to jail in Richmond, Virginia. Four months later, Walker was released during a prisoner exchange—and was greatly pleased that she’d been traded “man for man” for a Confederate officer. She served out the rest of the war practicing medicine at a women’s prison in Kentucky and at an orphan’s home in Tennessee.

For her wartime service, Mary Walker was paid $766.16 and initially granted a monthly pension of $8.50, less than that of most war widows. (Eventually, her pension increased to a whopping $20 a month.) But President Andrew Johnson recognized her service and awarded her a Medal of Honor. All was well until the marshals knocked on her door in 1917.

When Mary Walker died in 1919, she still had her medal but she’d been removed from the government’s list of medal winners. Finally, in 1977, she was vindicated. President Jimmy Carter and an Army board reinstated the award, citing her “distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication, and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex.” She remains the only woman ever to be so honored.

There are lots of ways to make small but noticeable differences to help the environment:

The ThighMaster

Prior to 1984, the FCC limited the amount of airtime broadcasters could give to commercials: 18 minutes an hour. After 1984, when that law changed, it paved the way for infomercials—long blocks of ads that can run half an hour or an hour. Infomercials became staples in the late-night hours, when viewership is low and ad rates are cheap.

The ThighMaster infomercial debuted in 1991, promising better-toned and attractive legs through the use of a remarkably simple contraption that used a steel coil to provide resistance training for the upper legs. The slam-dunk part of the ad was its spokeswoman: leggy, 1970s blonde bombshell Suzanne Somers. The ad opened with a close look at her long gams while an announcer (Somers’ husband, Alan Hamel) proclaimed, “Great legs! How’d you get ’em?” It turned out the world wanted to ask that question too—and the answer was available to them for just $19.95 (plus shipping and handling).

Within two years, six million ThighMasters had been sold, and the man behind the infomercial, Peter Bieler, was on his way to making $100 million on the product. Bieler knew that infomercials were the way to advertise and make money. His formula for the right combination of attention-getting elements included: a good product that people wanted, a spokesperson viewers were interested in, and a not-subtle, tongue-in-cheek approach. Bieler
was not the inventor of the ThighMaster, and how he found it is a tale itself.

A woman named Anne-Marie Bennstrom invented the device in the 1980s and called it the V-Bar. Bennstrom was a chiropractor and physical medicine therapist from Sweden, as well as a cofounder of The Ashram, a no-holds-barred weigh-loss retreat near Santa Monica, California. The Ashram attracts celebrities and the wealthy for its grueling programs that begin at 6:00 a.m. and involve rigorous weight training, mountain climbing, water exercises, and not very much food. Famous graduates of the course include Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, and Shirley MacLaine.

Initially, the V-Bar was being used less for exercise and more as an aid for injured skiers, who could work their sore muscles with it. It was in that capacity that it came to the attention of Joshua Reynolds, heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco company. Reynolds is often mistakenly credited with inventing two things: the ThighMaster and the mood ring. In reality, he invented neither. He just knew a good product when he saw it. (He correctly predicted the mood ring fad of the 1970s and put them on the market quickly, which is why some people think he invented them.)

Reynolds took the V-Bar design and renamed it the V-Toner. Sales were hardly overwhelming. With very little marketing or word of mouth, the V-Toner was mostly a dud, until Reynolds paired up with Bieler.

Bieler had worked his way up in the marketing field for years, becoming an executive with Procter & Gamble. He was also a video producer. He left that behind, though, in 1990 to form Ovation, Inc., a company dedicated to infomercials. He wouldn’t have to wait long for his dream product to come to him.

Reynolds approached Bieler about working together to promote the V-Toner, and Bieler was impressed. He knew it had potential. First, he renamed it the ThighMaster, and then he went to work looking for the face—and the legs—that would sell
it. He found Suzanne Somers, former
Three’s Company
star and Las Vegas lounge act. With her striking figure and beautiful legs, Somers was perfect for the role, and she still had just enough fame to carry the program—but not enough fame to make her too expensive.

Somers’ infomercials helped create a media whirlwind around the product, which soon began selling 75,000 units per week. The infomercial was also spoofed on several TV shows, which just added to the frenzy. Ovation, Inc. spent about $9 million on advertising the ThighMaster in 1991. That investment paid off many times over—more than 10 million have been sold.

The craze also rejuvenated Somers’ career, leading to further television roles and her status as a fitness guru. She’s written several diet, fitness, and anti-aging books since and now owns the ThighMaster World Corporation. Bieler and Reynolds are no longer associated with the product.

Nanotechnology

While technology continues to make data smaller and devices more lightweight (for example, thin laptops), nanotechnology goes even further into the miniature world—down to the microscopic level, in fact.

Nanotechnology is the science of designing electronics and mechanics at the atomic level. To give you an idea of how small that is, consider this: one nanometer (NM) is one-billionth of a meter (about a hundred-thousandth of the width of a human hair), and nanotechnology concentrates on sizes between 0.1 NM and 100 NMs. Nanotechnology aims to build chips, circuitry, and other mechanical devices one atom at a time, pushing the limits of technology to the point where one bit of data could be represented by just an electron.

In an effort to prove that science is fun (!), researchers in Israel made headlines in 2007 when they were able to fit the entire text of the Hebrew Bible (39 books) on an area smaller than the size of a pinhead—half the size of the pinhead, to be exact. Doctoral student Ohad Zohar supervised the project and proudly pointed out that the area the 308,428 words were printed on—a tiny piece of silicon—was the size of a grain of sugar. And it took Zohar and his band of scientists only about an hour to do it.

The process was surprisingly easy. The scientists first covered the silicon surface with a tiny layer of gold. Then they put the
words on to that surface by focusing a particle beam at it—this blasted microscopic particles at the silicon and carved away the gold, etching the words into the silicon.

The laser beam they used is called a focused ion beam (FIB). FIB technology grew out of research in the mid-1980s and has been a major breakthrough in nanotechnology. FIB technology uses ions from gallium, a metal that becomes a liquid at room temperature, to make deposits—which in turn created the “etching” for the Bible.

Nanotechnology originally was devoted to building machines, robotics, and computer technologies at the microscopic level, and it’s been around for decades. It began as an idea in 1959 proposed by physicist Richard Feynman, who was speaking at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. “What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale,” Feynman said. And he did, in a way that inspired a new movement in science. He continued,

The idea was brought further along in the 1970s by K. Eric Drexler, the first person to earn a Ph.D. in Molecular Nanotechnology from M.I.T. Nanotechnology development continued throughout the 1980s, with amazing discoveries on molecular and atomic levels.

In November 1996, U.S. scientists from a variety of agencies began meeting to further the discussion and understanding of nanotechnology. In 1998, they officially became the Interagency Working Group on Nanotechnology, renamed the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2001, when President Bill Clinton declared the science a federal initiative. Americans love to think big, but they don’t want to be left behind on the submolecular level either.

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has identified at least 11 risks that the world will face from the development of nanotechnology, ranging from economic problems like price-fixing to its use in terrorist activities. Every submolecular discovery may fill casual observers with wonder, but it’s also cause for trepidation—at least a little bit.