Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (22 page)

“But one thing especially impressed primitive man, and that was how the rabbit used his hind legs. There are only two other animals, the greyhound and cheetah, whose rear feet hit the ground in front of the forefeet when running swiftly. Also, rabbits thump the ground with their hind legs as if ‘speaking’ with them. So their hind feet came to be looked upon as a powerful charm against evil forces.”

SUPERSTITIONS, by Peter Lorie

“The idea of a hare’s foot as a lucky charm…arose out of the primitive medical belief that the bone of a hare’s foot cured gout and cramp, though the bone had to be one with a joint in it intact, to be effective. Carrying a hare’s foot bone, with joint, would keep away all forms of rheumatism.”

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SUPERSTITIONS, by Edwin and Mona Radford

“The origin of the superstitions concerning the luck of the rabbit’s foot lies in the belief that young rabbits are born with their eyes open, and thus have the power of the Evil Eye, and can shoo away the Evil One.”

EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINS OF EVERYDAY THINGS, by Charles Panati

“The rabbit’s habit of burrowing lent it an aura of mystery. The Celts, for instance, believed that the animal spent so much time underground because it was in secret communication with the netherworld of numinia. Thus, a rabbit was privy to information humans were denied. And the fact that most animals, including humans, are born with their eyes closed, while rabbits enter the world with eyes open, imbued them with an image of wisdom for the Celts; rabbits witnessed the mysteries of prenatal life. (Actually, the hare is born with open eyes; the rabbit is born blind. And it is the rabbit that burrows; hares live aboveground. Confusion abounded.)”

When Uncle John was a kid, he had squirt guns that shot 5 to 10 feet at most, and that was only if you pulled the trigger so hard it hurt. Today, there are water toys that shoot 50 feet or more. Here’s the story.

B
OY WONDER

Lonnie Johnson loved to tinker. As a kid, he used to take his brothers’ and sisters’ toys apart to see how they worked. By high school, he’d graduated to mixing rocket fuel in the family kitchen. One year he used scrap motors, jukebox parts, and an old butane tank to create a remote-controlled, programmable robot…which won first prize in the University of Alabama science fair. Not bad for a kid from the poor side of Mobile, Alabama.

UNDER PRESSURE

Johnson got an engineering degree from Tuskeegee Institute and wound up working at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. But he still spent his spare time tinkering. He recalls that one evening in 1982, “I was experimenting with inventions that used water instead of freon as a refrigeration fluid. As I was shooting water through a high-pressure nozzle in the bathtub, I thought ‘Wow, this would make a neat water pistol.’”

He built a prototype squirt gun out of PVC pipe, plexiglass, and a plastic soda bottle. Then he approached several toy companies…but none of them thought a squirt gun with a 50-foot range would sell. Johnson even looked into manufacturing the toys himself, but couldn’t afford the $200,000 molding cost.

BREAKTHROUGH

In March 1989, he went to the International Toy Fair in New York and tried to sell his invention again. This time, the Larami Corporation was interested. They arranged a meeting with Johnson at their headquarters in Philadelphia. When everyone was seated, Johnson opened his suitcase, whipped out his prototype, and shot a burst of water across the entire room. Larami bought the gun on the spot. Within a year, the “Super Soaker” was the bestselling squirt gun in history.

Uncle John was sitting in the bathroom, thumbing through the
Wall Street Journal
(surprisingly good bathroom reading, on occasion), when he came across this historical tidbit.

T
his, in brief, is the story of the first computer programmers—how much they gave to history, [and] how little history gave back to them….

FOR WOMEN ONLY

The year was 1945. The clacking of adding machines and clouds of cigarette smoke filled a university-owned row house along Walnut Street [in Philadelphia]. Inside, dozens of women calculated trajectories to help wartime artillery gunners take aim. Men, the Army reasoned, lacked the patience for such tedium—a single problem might require months of work.

The army called the women “computers.” One of them, Jean Bartik, was a 20-year-old math prodigy recruited from the farms of Missouri. Another, Betty Holberton, was the granddaughter of an astronomer who spent her childhood steeped in classical literature and language. The women formed a tight fellowship, drawn together by youth, brains, and the war effort…

THE COMPUTER AGE

One day word spread that the brightest “computers” were needed to work on a new machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or
ENIAC
—a steel behemoth, 100 feet long and 10 feet high, built of 17,480 vacuum tubes in an engineering building at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the first electronic computer, intended to automate the trajectory calculations the female computers performed by hand.

Running the ENIAC required setting dozens of dials and plugging a ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of the machine, a different configuration for every problem. It was this job—“programming,” they came to call it—to which just six of the young women were assigned: Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kay Antonelli, and Frances Spence, as well as Ms. Bartik and Ms. Holberton. They had no user’s guide. There were no operating systems or computer languages, just hardware and human logic. “The ENIAC,” says Bartik, “was a son of a bitch to program.”

HOW THEY DID IT

The first task was breaking down complex differential equations into the smallest possible steps. Each of these had to be routed to the proper bank of electronics and performed in sequence…. Every datum and instruction had to reach the correct location in time for the operation that depended on it, to within 1/5,000th of a second.

Yet despite this complexity, the Army brass considered the programming to be clerical work; that it was women stringing the cables only reinforced this notion. Their government-job rating was SP, as in “subprofessional.” Initially they were prohibited as security risks even from
entering
the ENIAC room, forcing them to learn the machine from wiring diagrams. When finally admitted, they sometimes had to straighten the clutter of gear the engineers left overnight.

Finally, in February 1946, the scientists were ready for the ENIAC official unveiling. A test problem involving the trajectory of a 155-millimeter shell was handed to Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton for programming. The machine performed flawlessly, calculating the trajectory in less time than it would take the bullet to land. After the demonstration, the men went out for a celebratory dinner. The programmers went home.

LIFE ISN’T FAIR

In the 50 years since, their legacy is confined mainly to Movietone footage and sepia photos—women standing alongside the machine, as if modeling a Frigidaire. Why was history so ungenerous? Partly because in the awe surrounding the machine itself, the hardware was seen as the whole story. In addition, three of the programmers married engineers with top jobs on the ENIAC, making them wives first in the eyes of the history makers and history writers.

A copious, definitive history of the ENIAC, written by the Army ordnance officer who commanded the project, merely lists the programmers’ names (misspelling one of them) and identifies which of the engineers they married.

The greater injustice is not history’s treatment of the women but its resistance to revision….[For example,] until [an enthusiastic historian] made an issue of it, most of the programmers had not even been invited to the gala dinner…celebrating the 50th anniversary, of the ENIAC.

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MOTHERS OF INVENTION

Here are two women you may never have heard

of, but who may have affected your life.

Mother of Invention:
Kate Gleason, a New York architect in the 1920s.

The Invention:
Tract housing

Background:
After watching engines being put together on a Cadillac assembly line, Gleason decided to try using mass production techniques to build affordable housing for soldiers who’d returned from World War I. Her first development was “Concrest,” a 100-unit concrete housing project. Its six-room homes sold for $4,000 each.

Mother of Invention:
Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn and restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, in the 1930s.

The Invention:
Chocolate chip cookies

Background:
One afternoon Wakefield was baking a batch of “chocolate butter drop” cookies for her restaurant. She decided to smash a semisweet chocolate bar into tiny chunks and dump the pieces into the batter, rather than take the time to melt the bar first. She figured the chunks would melt into the batter in the oven, and the cookies would be indistinguishable from her regular ones. She was wrong—and her customers loved the difference. Today Americans consume more than 150 million pounds of chocolate chip cookies every year.

On
page 46
we told you the story of “Broadway Open House” the first late-night TV talk show. The show had its problems and was cancelled after 13 months, but it led to “The Tonight Show,” the most successful talk show in history. Here’s the next installment in the story.

S
ILENT NIGHT

“Broadway Open House” went off the air on August 24,1951, and NBC’s late-night airwaves remained dark for three years. But Pat Weaver was still convinced that a late-night talk show could be successful. In 1954 he gave it another shot.

This time, rather than create a show himself, he hired comedian Steve Allen, a panelist on the CBS quiz show “What’s My Line,” to do it for him.

MR. TONIGHT

Allen had been working on his own talk-show format off and on for several years. In the 1940s, he was the midnight disc jockey on L.A.’s CBS radio affiliate. He spent so much time telling jokes between songs—and building a huge following in the process—that the station changed the show’s format to live comedy, complete with a studio audience.

Before Allen went on the air, hardly anyone in Los Angeles had listened to radio late at night. But the show quickly became an institution. Big celebrities began dropping by to plug upcoming movies and do interviews.

CBS recognized Allen’s promise and brought him to New York, where he briefly hosted a daytime TV show. But CBS didn’t have a whole lot more for him to do. He was cooling his heels on “What’s My Line” when he got the call from NBC.

“THE TONIGHT SHOW” IS BORN

On September 27, 1954, “The Tonight Show” premiered. Gene Rayburn (who later hosted “Match Game”) was the announcer, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme made regular appearances, and Skitch Henderson conducted the orchestra—which even then included Doc Severinsen on the trumpet. Don Knotts, Tom Poston, and other comedians performed skits, and Bill Dana, one of Allen’s writers, invented his character Jose Jimenez on the show.

JUST PLAIN FOLKS

Allen also had several ordinary—albeit odd-—folks who made regular appearances, including Mr. Shafer, a fast-talking farmer from upstate New York; Mrs. Sterling, an elderly woman who pestered Allen for presents; and Professor Voss, a quack who advocated bare-chested walks in the snow and drinking a gallon of water before breakfast each morning.

But the highlight of the show was Steve Allen and his improvisational comedic style. Today ad-lib gags are a staple of late-night talk shows, but in the early 1950s
everything
was scripted in advance—and Allen’s make-it-up-as-you-go-along format was revolutionary. He conducted man-on-the-street interviews with pedestrians walking past his studio; he dressed up as a border patrol officer and flagged down motorists to inspect their cars for illegal fruit. A few minutes later he flagged a taxi, threw a salami into the back, and told the driver to take it to Grand Central Station. (He did.)

THANKS, STEVE

Allen’s freewheeling style was more like David Letterman’s than Johnny Carson’s. And the similarity is no accident. Letterman, only seven years old when the first segment of “The Tonight Show” aired, grew up watching the program. Years later, he sent his writers to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York to screen old Steve Allen shows and look for ideas. Steve Allen covered himself in tea bags and was dunked in a huge teacup; David Letterman covered himself in Alka-Seltzer tablets and got dunked in a huge glass of water. Steve Allen jumped in huge vats of Jell-O, so did Dave. Steve Allen sent a camera out the back door and into the street, and then ad-libbed with the people who walked by; Dave did the same, making neighborhood merchants some of the biggest stars of his show.