Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (45 page)

• Release of the crime drama
Heist
was moved a month forward to November 2001 because of a scene in which Gene Hackman’s character outsmarts airport security and brings a bomb on a plane.

• Although it had already been released in early 2001, the rock band Jimmy Eat World changed the name of their album
Bleed American
to
Jimmy Eat World
after 9/11. The original title seemed lurid in light of terrorist attacks on American citizens.

*        *        *

SPACED-OUT SPORTS

“The trouble with officials is they just don’t care who wins.”

—Tommy Canterbury, basketball coach

“I have a God-given talent. I got it from my dad.”

—Julian Winfield, Missouri basketball player

“Ninety percent of putts that are short don’t go in.”

—Yogi Berra

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime catch that only happens every so often.”

—Randy Moss

“I might just fade into bolivian.”

—Mike Tyson

“No comment.”

—Michael Jordan, on being named one of the NBA’s most reporter-friendly players

Youngest champion diver: Fu Mingxia (she won the women’s world title at age 12 in 1990).

TICK TOCK TIMELINE

What better way to tell the history of clocks than with a timeline?

P
RE-HISTORY
Early humans had no way to keep accurate time, but did they need to? Following the sun’s path across the sky told them when it was morning, midday, afternoon, and night—enough to gauge when their prey (or predators) were out. Clocks wouldn’t become necessary until the advent of civilization, when humans stopped roaming the plains and started building cities.

•
1500 B.C
. The world’s first timepiece, the sundial, appears in Egypt. Using a pole, or
gnomon
, to cast the sun’s shadow, a clock is etched into the dial face to give a somewhat accurate reading of the time of day, but only if it’s sunny out. (The day is divided into 12 two-hour segments.) The sundial spreads first to Greece and then to the rest of the civilized world, where it will be the common (and only) timekeeping device for more than a millennium.

•
400 B.C
. The earliest version of a mechanical clock, the
clepsydra
, or water clock, appears in Greece. It measures time by dripping water at a constant rate from one bucket, through a small hole, into a second bucket. The receiving bucket has marks along its side corresponding to the time of day. While not as accurate as a sundial, it could at least tell rudimentary time at night or on cloudy days.

•
250 B.C
. In Greece, a mechanical bird is attached to the clepsydra. It whistles when the water reaches a predetermined level, creating the world’s first alarm clock.

•
A.D. 980
The Saxon king Alfred the Great measures time with specially made candles that are designed to burn at a constant rate. It’s not very reliable.

•
1300s
Sandglasses, also known as hourglasses, are used in cold climates (where water freezes). One problem is that the coarse grains of sand gradually wear away the center hole and shorten the time it takes for the sand to pour through, which throws off the accuracy. On ships, a 28-second sandglass is used to gauge speed: A wooden log is attached to a rope and then thrown overboard. The speed at which the rope, which is knotted about every 47 feet, runs out gives us the nautical term
knots
.

It takes 14 seconds for water at the top of Venezuela’s Angel Falls to reach the bottom.

•
Late 1300s
The word “clock” first enters the English language. It comes from the medieval Latin
clocca
, meaning “bell.” Linguists believe it is an onomatopoeic word, resembling the sound a bell makes when it clangs (which is used to alert townsfolk as to the time). The word won’t be used in its modern form until the late Middle Ages, when large clocks begin to replace the bells in bell-towers (such as Big Ben in London).

•
1400s
European scientists begin work on a fully mechanical clock, which spawns the
verge and foliot
system, a
T
-shaped device driven by lead weights that move one hand around a clock face. A toothed wheel is turned by the main gear, which is designed to turn, then stop, then turn again, at regular intervals. The ticking clock has arrived.

•
1450
The spring-driven clock makes its debut. The weights are replaced by springs, but the technology is still in its early stages. Result: as the spring unwinds, the clock slows down.

•
1504
Peter Henlein of Germany creates the first portable—but not very accurate—timepiece that can be carried in a pocket.

•
1577
The minute hand is invented by Jost Burgi. He adds it to a clock that he is making for Tycho Brahe, an astronomer who needs a more accurate clock for stargazing (so he can better predict the movement of the planets and stars). Minute hands won’t be common on clocks until more than a century later.

•
1602
Like Brahe, Galileo Galilei needs an accurate timekeeping device for his astronomical work. After noticing that a pendulum swings at a constant rate, he draws up plans for a pendulum clock, but never builds one.

•
1657
Dutch clockmaker Christiaan Huygens markets the first pendulum clock, claiming it will “keep equaller time than any now made.” The pendulum replaces the foliot of earlier clocks. The toothed wheel is still there, momentarily preventing the gears from advancing, but it is now the regular swing of the pendulum that determines the rate at which the wheel advances.

First African-American to star in a dramatic TV series: Bill Cosby, in
I Spy
.

•
1650s
French mathematician Blaise Pascal combines a piece of string and a pocket watch to create the first wristwatch, an idea that will take more than a hundred years to catch on.

•
1680s
The second hand begins appearing on a few specially made clocks, but also won’t be commonplace for another century.

•
1714
English Parliament offers a cash prize of £20,000 to anyone who can solve “the problem of the longitude.” Without accurate sea clocks, ship captains can only guess how far east or west they’ve traveled. Sandglasses can only tell them their speed; pendulum clocks are accurate, but only work on level ground; spring-driven clocks still don’t keep good enough time. Over the course of a monthlong sea voyage, even slightly inaccurate timekeeping can result in a ship going hundreds of miles off course.

•
1761
After nearly 40 years of experimenting, Englishman John Harrison answers Parliament’s challenge by inventing a clock that works at sea. Improved steel manufacturing allows him to utilize springs that are far superior to those used in earlier clocks. Harrison, a skilled metallurgist, uses some metals that expand and others that contract—important because of the extreme changes in temperature that chronometers are likely to encounter at sea. Harrison’s clock loses only five seconds in six weeks. It not only makes sea travel much more safe and reliable, it makes him rich.

•
1783
Benjamin Hanks, a Connecticut goldsmith (and a former Revolutionary War drummer) patents the first self-winding clock.

•
1787
The mechanical alarm clock is invented by Levi Hutchins of New Hampshire, but the alarm can only go off at 4 a.m.

•
1845
The U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., begins dropping a
time ball
at noon each day. This allows ships on the Potomac River to set their chronometers precisely before heading out to sea. Other harbors around the world soon begin the practice. The final year the Naval Observatory will use its time ball is 1936. The ball won’t be dropped again until midnight, December 31, 2000, to mark the new millennium.

•
1875
A popular song by Henry Work begins with the lyrics “Oh, my grandfather’s clock…” From now on pendulum clocks will become more commonly known as grandfather clocks.

Pithy fact: The white membrane in citrus fruits is also called the “rag.”

•
1876
Seth Thomas Jr. of New York City patents the first mechanical alarm clock that can be set to go off at any time.

•
1886
The R.W. Sears Watch Company (later changed to Sears Roebuck) begins manufacturing the first mass-produced wristwatches.

•
1905
A German clockmaker named Hans Wilsdorf sees three things wrong with wristwatches: they’re not very accurate, not very reliable, and not very fashionable. He tinkers with existing watches and starts the process of correcting all three problems. With his brother-in-law he starts the Wilsdorf & Davies Watch Company in England. In 1908 they change the name to Rolex.

•
1923
British watch repairer John Harwood creates the self-winding wristwatch. It is much smaller than older watches, which required an exterior knob, or crown, to wind the watch, and also allowed dirt to get in the gears. Rolex adopts the technology and perfects it in 1931 with its “Perpetual Rotor,” a mechanism now seen as “the basis for self-winding movements.”

•
1926
The Rolex Oyster is released, the world’s first waterproof timepiece (not counting the hourglass).

•
1927
A Bell Laboratories scientist named Warren Marrison creates the first quartz clock, accurate to within two thousandths of a second per day. The technology will soon be used in wristwatches.

•
1945
The idea of creating atomic clocks is presented by American physicist Isador Rabi. He suggests using a method called
atomic-beam magnetic resonance
. Simply put, this means finding an atom that continually vibrates at a constant, measurable frequency. Four years later, after finding the hydrogen atom too unstable for the task, the National Bureau of Standards creates the world’s first atomic clock, using ammonia.

•
1957
The Hamilton Watch Company unveils the first electric watch. It uses the same balance-wheel mechanism that has been in clocks for centuries, but now a battery powers it instead of a spring, eliminating the need to wind the watch.

•
1960
Using quartz technology, Bulova markets the first digital watch.

Say what? THERE ARE ABOUT 4,000 WAX GLANDS IN EACH OF YOUR EARS.

•
2000
Keeping time is more important than ever in modern society. Between watches, clocks, cars, cell phones, microwave ovens, radios, and DVD players, and computers, more than a billion new timepieces enter the world each year.

•
Into the Future…
Scientists are finding that even atomic clocks may not be the most accurate way to keep time, at least with the method we’re using now. Here’s the technical lowdown from the Science Museum in London:

Errors in the timekeeping of atomic clocks are mainly a result of the fact that the atoms are moving. If the atoms are made to move more slowly, accuracy increases.
Caesium fountains
are still in their experimental phase but have already achieved accuracies of one second in 15 million years. It is thought that by taking one into space, they may be made ten times better. An even more advanced type of clock is the
trapped ion machine
, which may eventually reach an accuracy of one second in 10 billion years.

But even with all the advances that have been—and will be—made in timekeeping, we may never be able to create a clock that is accurate enough to ensure that everyone will show up to a meeting on time.

*        *        *

FUTURE TENSE

In spring 2005, MIT engineering student Amal Dorai set out to prove that time travel is possible. But instead of testing scientific theories (traveling at light speed, going through a black hole), he invited time travelers of the future to a “Time Traveler Convention” at MIT at 10 p.m., on May 7, 2005. People from the future would be aware of such a congregation, he said, and if time travel was really possible, they’d show up. Nobody showed up. So that proves time travel doesn’t exist, right? Not necessarily. Dorai’s theories: Perhaps there’s a cataclysmic event in the near future, in which humanity will be wiped out; or perhaps the people of the future are too dumb to figure out time travel; or maybe future humans find present humans boring and decided not to come.

Average speed of a dog sled being pulled by 10 dogs: 15 mph.

KID STUFF

Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. Here are a few of the remarkable kids featured in Elizabeth Rusch’s book
, Generation Fix.

Z
ACHARY EBERS
of St. Louis, Missouri, was 14 when he thought up Breakfast Bonanza, a program that helps feed kids in school breakfast programs over the summer. He collected 5,000 boxes of cereal to give to food banks and pantries.

DUSTIN HILL
, 14, didn’t let his battle with cancer stop him from getting fresh fruit and vegetables to hungry people in Portland, Oregon. He founded PlanIt Kids, a group that tends his organic garden and gathers produce from U-Pick farms to feed the poor.

LACY JONES, KATE KLINKERMAN
, and
BARBARA BROWN
, ages 16, 15, and 15, started Don’t Be Crude, an oil-recycling program in rural Texas, as a 4-H project. Since then, their program has kept more than 30,000 gallons of used oil and herbicides out of the ground in their community.