Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (28 page)

President Theodore Roosevelt kept a pet macaw parrot named Eli Yale.

GREAT ESCAPES

Harry Houdini performed all over New York City and on Coney Island, the city’s seaside amusement park. Sometimes he worked alone; other times, he performed with his brother Theo, and later, Bess Rahner, a singer and dancer he married in 1894.

But his magic shows weren’t particularly interesting, and his tricks weren’t unique. So in 1895, Harry, Theo, and Bess joined a traveling circus, hoping to gain more experience performing for a wider group of people. That’s where Houdini found his true calling as an escape artist.

In their circus act, he and Theo performed a trick where they switched places inside a locked trunk. People loved it, and Houdini spent hours each day trying to improve it. He also experimented with escapes from handcuffs, safes, and other locked objects.

The more escapes he put in his act, the more famous he became. Houdini even ran an ad offering $100 to anyone who gave him a pair of handcuffs he couldn’t get out of. (No one ever came up with any.) Finally, in 1900, he put on a show at Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London’s police department, where he was chained to a pole but escaped. After that, he became a superstar.

HARRY IN A CAN

Houdini perfected dozens of escapes, but his most famous usually included locks, handcuffs, and being buried alive or submerged in water. One of his most famous tricks was the “Milk Can Escape.” Houdini called it “the greatest escape I’ve ever invented.” It worked like this: A handcuffed Houdini climbed into a milk can. (In the early 1900s, dairy farmers often delivered milk in decorated metal cans that stood two or three feet high.) Then his assistants filled the can with water, locked him inside, and surrounded the can with a screen so that the audience couldn’t see how Houdini did the trick. About two minutes later, he appeared from behind the screen, dripping wet and gasping for breath…and the audience cheered.

Like excitement? You may not want to move to Boring, Maryland though it might be better than living in Middelfart, Denmark.

Many people thought Houdini must have had supernatural powers to be able to perform the tricks he did. But the truth was just that he practiced constantly and was incredibly skilled with locks. In the case of the “Milk Can Escape,” he only had to break the seal of the lid, wiggle his way out of the can, and then pick the lock on his handcuffs.

JUST SAY BOO

Houdini’s other passion was debunking ghost stories. In the early 20th century, a group of people called Spiritualists said they could talk to the dead by holding special ceremonies called séances. People paid huge amounts of money to come to the séances, hoping to speak with their deceased loved ones. Sometimes the loved ones even appeared as ghostly apparitions…or so people thought.

Houdini didn’t buy it. He was so skilled with trickery that he believed the ghosts who showed up had to be illusions. So he attended séances all over the United States, revealed the tricks, and exposed the hosts as frauds.

CURTAIN CALL

One of Houdini’s stage tricks was to allow someone to punch him hard in the stomach while he remained standing and didn’t flinch or show any pain. How did he do it? By doing vigorous exercises ahead of time to strengthen his stomach muscles, and then tightening them before the blow to protect his internal organs. One day in 1926, a fan asked if he could try it out. Houdini agreed, but the fan hit him before Houdini was ready. The blow ruptured his appendix, and he died a few days later.

It wasn’t the end of Houdini, however. Spiritualists tried to contact his ghost. (He never answered.) And hundreds of magicians and escape artists who came after him—including David Copperfield and David Blaine—list Houdini as an inspiration.

Want to learn how to do your own magic tricks?
Grab your white rabbit and materialize on
page 145
.

Popular fast-food snack in Japan:
Takoyaki
, or octopus dumplings.

Everyone has phobias, even Uncle John. (He’s got “dirtythroneophobia.”) Here’s a list of some phobias he finds funny—plus a few that make him cower in fear.

Ablutophobia:
fear of washing or bathing

Selenophobia:
fear of the moon

Ecclesiophobia:
fear of church

Dentophobia:
fear of the dentist

Genuphobia:
fear of knees

Geniophobia:
fear of chins

Lachanophobia:
fear of vegetables

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:
fear of long words

Hodophobia:
fear of traveling on roads

Octophobia:
fear of the figure 8

Triskaidekaphobia:
fear of the number 13

Paraskavedekatriaphobia:
fear of Friday the 13th

Scolionophobia:
fear of school

Philemaphobia:
fear of kissing

Panophobia:
fear of everything

Phobophobia:
fear of phobias

In Indonesia, don’t touch another person’s head—it’s considered offensive.

What’s the best way to send messages during wartime? Hire a special group of Americans to create an unbreakable code.

F
EELING INSECURE

During World War II, the U.S. Army and Navy were having a terrible time sending messages within their ranks. The Japanese had found ways to intercept and break every code the Americans came up with. Not wanting to have that same trouble, the Marines needed a code the Japanese couldn’t crack. A man named Philip Johnston provided the solution.

LANGUAGE OF THE FEW

In 1942, Johnston was living in California and working as an engineer. But as a child, he’d spent most of his time on Navajo Indian reservations all over the United States. His father was a Protestant missionary who brought the family along while he did his work, and as a child, Johnston had played with Navajo children and learned to speak their language.

Now in his 50s, he heard that the U.S. Marines were looking for a way to send secret messages to each other, and he immediately thought of his childhood friends. The Navajo language seemed perfect: it was only spoken—there were no written words—and very few people in the world could understand it.

Planning a trip to the moon? Don’t bother to take a compass The moon doesn’t have a magnetic field, so a compass won’t work.

WHALES AND HUMMINGBIRDS

Johnston took his idea to Major James E. Jones, who was stationed at a Marine base in Oceanside, California. Jones thought the idea was interesting, but he wasn’t sure it would work because there weren’t any Navajo words for military terms. They couldn’t just use English words for things like “tank”—that would make the code easy to crack.

But Johnston had a solution. Instead of using English words, he suggested they assign Navajo words to stand in for the military terms the language lacked. For example, they could use the Navajo word for “whale” to mean “battleship,” and the word for “hummingbird” could mean “fighter plane.”

Jones was impressed, and he asked Johnston to demonstrate the code for his commanding officers. Everything went so well that, in the spring of 1942, the Marines were allowed to hire and train 29 Navajos for the job. They became known as “code talkers.”

READY FOR BATTLE

Those first 29 men helped to create the code. They decided which words would mean what, and then memorized the list…about 450 words. But what if they needed a new word, one that wasn’t on the list? They had a solution for that, too. In those cases, the message sender would transmit what sounded like a mixed-up collection of Navajo words. But the message receiver would know to translate the Navajo words into English. Then, the first letter of each English word would spell out the word being sent. For example, a message might look like this:

tsah
=
N
eedle
wol-la-chee
=
A
nt
ah-keh-di-glini
=
V
ictor
tsah-ah-dzoh
=
Y
ucca

And the word would be “Navy.”

READY FOR ACTION

The first 29 Navajo code talkers headed off to war in 1942 and were stationed all over the Pacific. By 1945, more than 350 Navajos had joined the Marines as code talkers. They played a role in almost every major American victory over the Japanese, especially the crucial 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. According to one of the soldiers, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

The Japanese managed to intercept many of the Navajo messages, but they were never able to crack them. Finally, in August 1945, thanks in part to the Navajo soldiers, the Americans and their allies won World War II.

The white rhino and black rhino are both the same color: Gray.

In the wild world of animals, some are wilder than others. (The first part of the story appears on
page 7
.)

P
OLLY WANNA ROLLER-SKATE?

Kiri, a Congo African gray parrot from Seattle, Washington, is a star roller skater. She wears small skates that her trainer, Tani Robar, taught her to use, and shows off her roller disco moves…for peanuts. During her shows, as applause eggs her on, Kiri pushes each leg forward until she reaches the end of the stage. Then the parrot turns, skates back to center stage, and twirls in a circle.