Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (8 page)

—Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”

—Milton Berle

“If...everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of [chasing women] and drinking, you’d have no government.”

—Senator Barry Goldwater

“If you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any.”

—Congressman John F. Kennedy in 1946

“There they are—See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil.”

—Bob Dole, on a gathering of ex-presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon

When signs in a foreign country are written in English, any combination of words is possible. Here are some real-life examples.

“Guests are prohibited from walking around in the lobby in large groups in the nude.”

—Havana hotel

“If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it.”

—Moscow hotel

“It is forbidden to enter a woman even if a foreigner is dressed as a man.”

—Seville cathedral

“Visitors two to a bed and half an hour only.”

—Barcelona hospital

“All customers promptly executed.”

—Tokyo barbershop

“We highly recommend the hotel tart.”

—Torremolinos hotel

“I slaughter myself twice daily.”

—Israel butcher shop

“Because of the impropriety of entertaining persons of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is requested that the lobby be used for this purpose.”

—Colon restaurant

“All vegetables in this establishment have been washed in water especially passed by the management.”

—Sri Lanka restaurant

“Gentlemen’s throats cut with nice sharp razors.”

—Zanzibar barbershop

“Very smart! Almost pansy!”

—Budapest shop

“Swimming is forbidden in the absence of the savior.”

—French swimming pool

“Dresses for street walking.”

—Paris dress shop

“Go away.”

—Barcelona travel agency

This started out as a “Random Origins” page...until we noticed that everything on the page was invented by French people. Ooh La-La!

D
RY CLEANING

In 1825, the maid of a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Jolly knocked over a camphene (distilled turpentine) lamp on a table, spilling the camphene all over the table cloth. The harder she rubbed the tablecloth to get up the camphene, the cleaner and brighter it became. Jolly, who made a living dying fabrics, added fabric cleaning to his business. By the mid-1850s there were thousands of
dry
cleaners (the process used no water) all over France.

NON-STICK FRYING PANS

Teflon or polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) was discovered by the Du Pont company in 1938. Teflon
pans
were invented in the mid-1950s by an engineer named Mark Gregoire, who got the idea from something his wife said to him as he was leaving to go fishing. Gregoire used PTFE to keep his fishing line from sticking, and his wife complained that there was nothing like PTFE to keep her pots and pans from sticking. He founded the Tefal company to make Teflon coated pans in 1955. Today, more than 75% of U.S. kitchens contain at least one non-stick pan.

STETHOSCOPES

In 1816, a French pathologist named René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec happened to walk through the courtyard of the Louvre as some kids hunched over two ends of some long pieces of wood. When the kids at one end tapped the wood with a small pin, the kids at the other end could hear it as it travelled through the wood. Laënned wondered if the same principle could be used to study diseases of the heart. That afternoon he rolled up a piece of paper into a narrow tube and placed it on the chest of a man suffering from heart disease. He called it a “stethoscope,” from
stethos
, the Greek word for “chest.”

Want to go to the moon? During the late 1960s, in one of the more unusual business promotions in airline history, Pan American World Airways began taking reservations for a commercial moon flight scheduled to depart in the year 2000. Of course, it never happened. In fact, today, there’s no moon flight...and no Pan Am. This selection is from our book
Uncle John’s Indispensable Guide to the Year 2000.

B
RIGHT IDEA

On December 21, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr., and Williams Anders—lifted off from Cape Kennedy. Their flight was covered extensively on TV, and the world was captivated by the spectacular images of space they beamed back.

During one of Apollo 8’s transmission blackouts, two executives at Pan Am (then one of America’s premier airlines) decided on a whim to call ABC-TV. They announced that the airline was now accepting reservations for flights to the moon—which would begin by the year 2000.

SURPRISE SUCCESS

The next day, the
New York Times
reported that Pan Am had been deluged by inquiries. What began as a practical joke quickly turned into a publicity bonanza. Pan Am established the “First Moon Flights Club” and began sending out reservation confirmations.

Unbelievably, when Pan Am began running TV and radio ads with the tag line “Who ever heard of an airline with a waiting list for the moon?”, TWA announced they would accept reservations, too.

DETAILS, DETAILS

In 1969, one Pan Am official estimated the cost of a round-trip ticket to the moon—based on six cents a mile—at $28,000. “It will be the longest and most expensive commercial airline flight in history,” reported the
New York Times.
“But the first flight to the moon will also be the most in demand.”

Membership cards for the First Moon Flights Club were issued to residents of every state and citizens of more than 90 countries. “The amazing thing you find,” one official told the
Times
, “is that most of these people are very serious about the whole idea.”

ENOUGH, ALREADY

By 1971, more than 30,000 people (including future president Ronald Reagan) had signed up. That’s when Pan Am decided to suspend reservations.

Membership cards are a collector’s item today, and Pan Am is just a memory. In the 1980s, the company declared bankruptcy. Then in 1997, entrepreneurs bought the name and began operating a
new
airline as Pan Am; in 1998, they declared bankruptcy, too. A few months later, the name was transferred again...to a railroad. They have no moon flights planned.

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PREDICTIONS FOR 2000

Commuting:
“However the [businessman of 2000] travels...he will not be obliged to handle the controls by himself. He may well be able to doze or read, while, from a distant point, his car or plane will be held on its course by short-wave impulses.”

—Arthur Train, Jr.,
The Story of Everyday Things
(1941)

Home Life:
“In the year 2000, we will live in pre-fabricated houses light enough for two men to assemble....[We’ll] cook in our television sets and relax in chairs that emit a private sound-light-color spectacular.”

—New York Times
, January 7, 1968

Food:
“The businessman in 1999 [will only need] a soup-pill or a concentrated meat-pill for his noonday lunch....Ice-cream pills [will be] very popular.”

—Arthur Bird,
Looking Forward
(1903)

Last winter, Uncle John was reading a book on architecture (you know where he was). He was looking at a picture of the Empire State Building, and it suddenly occurred to him that everyone knows the building—but hardly anyone knows its history. His
Bathroom Reader
antennae went up—it sounded like a perfect subject for this edition. And here it is—an expanded version that includes other skyscrapers as well.

H
OW HIGH CAN YOU GO?

Question:
What was the invention that made tall buildings feasible?
Answer:
The elevator.

In 1850, few buildings were taller than 4 stories tall. This was partly because construction materials and techniques weren’t suitable for tall buildings yet. But even if they had been, there was no reason to bother going any higher—no one would have wanted to walk up that many flights of stairs.

The closest thing anyone had to an elevator was a hoist. This was simply a platform connected to ropes and a pulley that could be used to move heavy objects from one floor of a building to another. Guide rails running from floor to ceiling kept the hoist from swinging back and forth, but it was still very dangerous—if the rope broke, there was nothing to stop it from plummeting to the ground, killing anyone riding in it...or standing nearby. Accidents were common.

MR. OTIS REQUESTS

In 1852, the hoist at the Bedstead Manufacturing Company in Yonkers, New York, broke and the superintendent assigned a master mechanic named Elisha Graves Otis to fix it. Otis had seen many brutal mishaps with hoists....So he decided to add a safety feature to the one he was building.

He took a spring from an old wagon and connected it to the top of the platform where the rope was tied. When the the rope was pulled taut, the spring was compressed. But if the rope broke, the spring released
and shoved two hooks into the guide rails, holding it in place and preventing it from falling.

Otis’ contraption was simple, and was intended primarily to carry freight. But it was actually the first “safety” elevator—the first one that could reliably carry human passengers.

STARTING OVER

Not long after, the Bedstead Manufacturing Company went out of business and Otis lost his job. He decided to head west to join the California Gold Rush...but before he could leave, another furniture company hired him to build two new “safety hoisters;” two men had recently been killed using an old one.

The company paid Otis with cash, a gun and a carriage which convinced him to stay. On September 20, 1853, he opened a business in Yonkers selling “Patented Life and Labor Saving Hoisting Machinery.”

Seeing is Believing

Unfortunately, Otis couldn’t sell even one more elevator. So he decided to demonstrate his contraption personally. He entered it in an exhibition on “progress in industry and arts” at the Crystal Palace in New York City. When a substantial crowd had gathered, Otis climbed into his hoist, went up about 30 feet, and as onlookers gasped in horror, had his assistant cut the rope with a knife. The rope snapped, the hoist lurched briefly...and then stopped in place. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe,” Otis called down to the crowd.

Public demonstrations like this generated some sales, but business remained slow for the first few years: Otis sold 27 hoists in 1856, all of them designed to carry freight. In 1857, in an attempt to expand his business, he designed his first passenger elevator, a steam-powered model capable of lifting 1,000 pounds 40 feet per minute.

UNSUNG HERO

Otis died from diphtheria in 1861 at age 49. He left a business that employed fewer than a dozen people and was only worth about $5,000. The first true skyscraper was still many years off, so it’s likely Otis never fully realized the impact his invention would have on mankind.

UPS AND DOWNS

Otis’s sons, Charles and Norton, took over the business following his death. In 1868, they patented a speedier and more elaborate steam elevator. But since there were no electric controls, the elevators required a lot of manpower: Someone had to ride inside the car to operate it (via a rope connected to the steam engine in the basement), and elevator “starters” had to be posted on every floor. Their job was to yell into the elevator shaft to the elevator operator whenever someone needed a lift.

The shouting system was crude, but it worked. The only problem was that it meant buildings could only be as high as the elevator starters could shout. Also, since the elevator was powered by a steam engine that burned coal, the elevator shaft eventually filled with steam and thick smoke, limiting the amount of time people could stand to spend riding in it. This also served to restrict the height of buildings. Elevators, which made tall buildings feasible, were starting to become an obstacle to further growth.