Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (63 page)

In those days doctors still made house calls, so the following day when the physician came by to examine the H family, he also took a look around their home. As soon as he examined the
old furnace in the basement, his suspicions—and those of Brother H—were confirmed. “He found the furnace in very bad condition, the combustion being imperfect, the fumes, instead of going up the chimney, were pouring gases of carbon monoxide into our rooms,” Mrs. H reported. “He advised us not to let the children sleep in the house another night. If they did, he said we might find in the morning that some of them would never wake again.”

Unlike most ghost stories, this one ends with the family living happily ever after. Mr. and Mrs. H took the doctor’s advice and moved out of the house until the furnace could be repaired. When they moved back in, the eerie sights and sounds…were gone.

A lot has changed since 1912, but one thing hasn’t: Carbon monoxide poisoning is still the leading cause of accidental poisoning deaths in North America. The reason it’s so deadly is that carbon monoxide is odorless and tasteless, and it doesn’t irritate your airways when you breathe it. That makes it very difficult to detect, and a concentration of as little as 400 parts per million can be fatal. Often the first sign that something is wrong with the air is when someone loses consciousness.

The good news: Hardware stores now sell carbon monoxide detectors (similar to smoke detectors) for about $40. If you have a gas furnace, clothes dryer, or other appliance, or if you have a fireplace or a wood-burning stove, investing in a carbon monoxide detector can mean the difference between life and death…or ghosts and no ghosts.

From time to time, modern carbon monoxide ghost stories still find their way into print. An article in a 2005 issue of the
American Journal of Emergency Medicine,
for example, describes the case of a 23-year-old woman who collapsed while taking a shower after she saw what she thought was a ghost. The problem was traced to a new gas water heater, which had not been properly installed and was leaking carbon monoxide into her home.

Jails and prisons have been around since early colonial times. But there were no such things as penitentiaries—prisons designed to
reform
people convicted of major crimes, not just punish them—until the first one opened in Philadelphia in 1790. The concept of long-term confinement for rehabilitation originated with Quakers in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. The first actual penitentiary was a small building with rows of cells built at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia in 1790, the original idea being to keep prisoners in solitary confinement so they could be reformed through spiritual contemplation.

In early 1956, Millie and Baron Macombo, a pair of western lowland gorillas at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, successfully mated, and on December 22 Millie gave birth to a baby girl, who was named Colo. She was the first gorilla of any species to be born in the U.S. and the first born in captivity anywhere, even Africa. Colo has since given birth to three infants herself and still lives at the Columbus Zoo, making her the oldest captive gorilla in the world. (And in 2003 she became a great-great-grandmother.)

Around 1638 Stephen Daye and his family emigrated from London to the the newly founded town of Cambridge in Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was under contract to the Reverend Joseph Glover, who was also on the journey and who had paid for the Daye family’s passage. To repay that debt, Daye was to set up a printing press, which had been brought along on the ocean voyage and would be the first press in the colonies. Glover died during the voyage, but Daye still owed the work to Glover’s widow, so he set up the press in her house. In 1639 he published America’s first broadsheet—a single sheet of paper meant for public posting. Then he printed
the first almanac, written by celebrated colonial sea captain William Pierce. And in 1640, he printed 1,700 copies of
The Bay Psalm Book
, a new version of the Book of Psalms translated directly from Hebrew by several local ministers. The book, the first published in North America, became very popular—it went through numerous editions and was even distributed back in Britain.
Extra:
Most historians believe that Stephen Daye may have had some printing experience, but that he was actually a locksmith by trade. His works were riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, leading one colonial historian to call him “an exceedingly illiterate printer.”

Cricket was invented in southern England in the 1500s and was spread across the world by British colonists. The earliest recorded match in the United States was played in 1751 between teams called New York and London XI in the area of Manhattan that later became the Fulton Fish Market. The game took a long time to catch on in the states, but actually became quite popular in the mid-1800s…until it was eclipsed by baseball.

In 2005 Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, studied 62 prehistoric burial grounds located in various regions of North America. He discovered that for a period of about 700 years, beginning 2,800 years ago, progressively more and more young people were being buried. Why? Bocquet-Appel says it had a lot to do with a baby boom. The era coincides with the shift from hunting and gathering to farming in North America. That resulted, as it did at different times in different locations all over the world, in permanent dwellings being built, and food supplies becoming more secure, which resulted in a rapid increase in population—and more people, paradoxically, meant more people dying young.

The oldest continuously inhabited city in the continental United States is St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish in 1565. When those settlers arrived, they were pleased to discover wild
muscadine
grapes, which they used to create the first wine ever made in North America. (Native Americans didn’t make wine.) Sometime over the next few decades, the first cultivation of grapes began, resulting in several varieties, the best known being the
Scuppernong
, or Big White Grape, still found in the Southeast today. Scuppernongs were used to make some of the most popular wines in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and they’re making a comeback today. According to the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, muscadine grapes contain more
resveratrol
—a natural compound that lowers cholesterol levels—than other grapes.

Seo Jae-pil was born in Korea in 1864. While still a teenager, he joined a reform movement working for equality, and in 1884 he took part in the Kapsin Coup, a bloody attempt to take over the country. Seo’s entire family was killed in the three-day melee, but Seo escaped and fled to Japan, where, in 1885, he boarded a ship for San Francisco, changing his name to Philip Jaisohn along the way. In 1890 he became a naturalized American citizen—the very first Korean to do so. He was also the first Korean to receive a college degree in the United States (a medical degree from George Washington University in 1892); founded
The Independent
, the first Korean newspaper in America; and in 1945 became the first Korean-born American to receive a medal from Congress, for his service as a physician during World War II. He died at his home in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 1951. A statue of Jaisohn stands in front of the South Korean embassy in Washington, D.C.

Swedish-American painter Gustavus Hesselius (1682–1755) was one of the New World’s first professional (and first widely acclaimed) portrait painters. On September 21, 1721, he received a £17 commission from St. Barnabas Church in Prince George’s County, Maryland, for a painting of “our Beloved Saviour and ye Twelve Apostles at ye last supper.”

Hesselius’s
The Last Supper
is the first known instance of a public art commission in American history. The painting was lost when the church was rebuilt in 1773 and wasn’t rediscovered until
1914. Since then it has been displayed at various museums, but today is back at St. Barnabas, where it hangs in the choir gallery.

In 1895 Herman H. Kohlsaat, editor of the
Chicago Times-Herald
, heard about an 1894 “horseless carriage” race from Paris to Rouen, France. It had been sponsored by the newspaper
Le Petit Journal
, so Kohlsaat decided to sponsor a similar race. He placed an ad promising $2,000 to the winner, and at 8:55 a.m. on a snowy Thanksgiving Day in 1895, six automobiles left Jackson Park in downtown Chicago on a 54-mile race to the town of Evanston and back. Three were Benz automobiles imported from Germany, and three were American-made, two of them electric-powered. The winner: J. Frank Duryea, who with his brother Charles had founded the first American company formed for the sole purpose of making cars: the Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. Duryea covered the distance in 7 hours 53 minutes, averaging a rip-roaring 7.3 mph along the way. The win was a boon for the company, which sold 13 vehicles the next year. The Duryea brothers went their separate ways some years later, and although Charles continued to form car companies, he had only limited success, and the Duryeas ended up a footnote in automotive history, disappearing in the shadow of the juggernaut that was the Ford Motor Company. (But at least they’ll always be known as the winners of America’s first automobile race.)

In 2009 a political battle took place in Minnesota between the Democratic Party and Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty. After the governor made a speech criticizing President Obama, the Democrats sent out an online press release denouncing the remarks. At the bottom of the release was a link that was supposed to have gone to a YouTube video of Pawlenty’s speech, but instead went to one called “Chinese Grandma Learns English,” which featured a kid tricking his grandmother into saying several swear words. The Democrats blamed the goof on an “outside researcher” and promised to double-check their press releases in the future.

 

TERM:
Match

MEANING:
A small piece of wood or cardboard used to light a fire

ORIGIN:
From the Greek word
myxa
, which meant “lamp wick”—and also meant “mucus.” The idea was that an oily wick sticking out of a lamp’s spout or nozzle resembled snot dangling from someone’s nose. (Really.) Myxa became
micca
in Latin, then
meiche
in Old French, and finally the English
match
in the 1330s. The term wasn’t applied to what we think of as a match until 1831, a few years after its invention by English chemist John Walker. (And matches were also called “lucifers” for many years.)

 

TERM:
Greenhorn

MEANING:
Novice

ORIGIN:
It goes all the way back to England in the 1400s, when it referred to a young ox with immature, or “green,” horns. (The horns weren’t actually green; the reference was probably taken from unripe, or “green,” fruit.) Around 1650
greenhorn
became a nickname for young, recently enlisted soldiers, and by the 1680s it was being used for novices in any field.

 

TERM:
March Madness

MEANING:
Nickname for the NCAA’s basketball championship tournament

ORIGIN:
In 1939 Henry V. Porter, an athletic administrator for the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), wrote an article entitled “March Madness” for the organization’s newsletter. It was about the enthusiasm of the fans of Illinois high-school basketball, which held its yearly championship tournament in the month of
March. The phrase was associated solely with Illinois high-school basketball until 1982. That year CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who began his career as a sportswriter in Chicago and had undoubtedly heard the term before, used it to refer to the NCAA college tournament, which also takes place in March. It caught on, and in 1996 the IHSA sued the NCAA for using the phrase on their official merchandise. The NCAA won in court, but the two groups agreed to form the “March Madness Athletic Association,” giving the IHSA control of the name on the high-school level, while the NCAA owns it for college.

 

TERM:
Digs

MEANING:
Home, or rented rooms

ORIGIN:
“Digs” is a shortened version of “diggings,” first used by gold prospectors in the 1820s Georgia Gold Rush, the first gold rush in the United States. Prospectors would go into the wilderness, set up camp, and “dig” for gold, and the area around their mines and camps became known as “diggings.” By the 1830s, the term was being used in reference to the rooms in the boarding houses that sprang up near successful mines. “Diggings” spread around the English-speaking world as a nickname for any rented rooms. Decades later, in the 1890s, it first appeared in its shortened version,
digs
—in England. And even then, the word had the same casual, hip feel to it that it has today, as shown in this 1893 publication by English bicycle enthusiast John Augustus Lunt, writing about a tour of North Wales: