Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (9 page)

Picking up the Pace

That changed when the first high-speed hydraulic elevator was introduced in the early 1870s. It could travel an amazing 700 feet per minute—which created new problems: Otis’s original safety mechanism stopped a falling elevator instantly by grabbing the guide rails that held the elevator in place. It worked fine when the elevator was only travelling 40 feet per minute. But at 700 feet per minute a sudden, jarring stop could be as bad for the passengers as letting the car plunge to the ground. The Otis brothers fixed this in 1878 when they patented a braking system that slowed the elevator gradually. In 1890, they perfected the first electric elevator...and the skyscraper era was underway.

OTIS FACTS

Today, the Otis Elevator Company is the largest elevator company on earth, with 66,000 employees in 1,700 different offices. It has built elevators for the White House, Eiffel Tower, Vatican, and even the space shuttle launch pad.

Part II of the World’s Tallest Buildings is on
page 138
.

Publicity is the mother’s milk of Hollywood, and over the years, it has been refined to an art by a handful of practitioners. Here are three publicity stunts that built Hollywood legends.

“I
VANT TO BE ALONE.”

Background:
When Greta Garbo came to Hollywood from Sweden in the 1920s, she didn’t realize how conservative America was. In her first newspaper interview, she mentioned casually that she was living with director Mauritz Stiller. Today that’s no big deal, but in the ’20s, it was a shocking revelation.

Publicity Stunt:
When MGM head Louis B. Mayer heard about the interview, he was furious. He banned Garbo from ever speaking to the press again. That suited Garbo fine—she was shy anyway. But how to explain it to the press? Someone in the MGM publicity department came up with the famous quote: ‘I vant to be alone.’”

THE SEARCH FOR SCARLETT

Background:
Producer David O. Selznick wanted the perfect actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in the film adaptation of
Gone with the Wind
, so he launched a nationwide talent search that lasted (coincidentally) for the two years it took to prepare for filming. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Tallulah Bankhead all wanted the part. So did Katharine Hepburn, who told Selznick, “the part was practically written for me.” “I can’t imagine Rhett Butler chasing you for ten years,” Selznick replied.

“George Cuckor, the intended director, was sent scurrying southward to scout locations, but also, supposedly, to check out high school plays for ingenues,” explains a film historian. “To keep the game of who-will-play-her alive, every female willing to try out was tested.” Newspapers and radio stations kept the country updated on the progress of the search.

According to legend, just when the search seemed hopeless, Selznick’s brother escorted a young British actress named Vivian Leigh onto the set. They signed her on the spot.

Publicity Stunt:
Selznick had Leigh in mind for the part from the very beginning. But there were two problems: Leigh was a foreigner, which might not go over well with Southern audiences, and she was in the middle of a scandalous affair with actor Laurence Olivier (both were married to other people at the time). M. Hirsch Goldberg writes in
The Book of Lies:

A scenario was devised in which Vivian Leigh would be discovered at the last minute after an extensive search for the right Scarlett had not been successful. In this way the foreign-born aspect would be diffused, especially since Scarlett, the character, and Vivien, the actress shared the same Irish-French background. And with Olivier and Leigh agreeing not to move for a divorce at the time, the scandal would be abated in the flurry of good news that the Scarlett part had finally been settled.

WONG KEYE, PIANO TUNER

Background:
When Barbra Streisand announced that she wouldn’t give any interviews to promote
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
, publicity man Steve Yeager was stuck—if the star wouldn’t cooperate, he’d have to find another publicity angle.

Publicity Stunt:
Yeager called AP gossip columnist Jim Bacon and “suggested we do a story on one Wong Keye, a mythical tone-deaf Chinese piano tuner who was tuning all the pianos on the Streisand movie.” Bacon agreed. According to Bacon, in his book
Made in Hollywood:
“The story was written with appropiate tongue-in-cheek. It told how Wong Keye had started out in life as a fortune-cookie stuffer in a Chinatown bakery, then sold exotic fish for awhile until he found his niche tuning pianos. Since then he had been in great demand because he was such a superb piano tuner.

What Happened:
It worked—the story ran all over the country, and was picked up by the London
Daily Mirror
, which even ran a photo (an actor hired to dress up in Chinese costume). Bacon even got calls from piano owners asking how they could get in touch with Keye. “But the funniest repercussion of all,” Bacon writes, “came when Streisand—who had refused to give interviews in the first place—complained to the producer because the piano tuner in the movie was getting more publicity than the star.”

Post-It Notes now seem like a logical and obvious product. In fact, you’re probably so used to seeing Post-Its around your house or office that sometimes it’s hard to imagine there was a time when they didn’t exist. Actually, they began as a mistake, and almost didn’t even make it into the market. Here’s Jack Mingo’s story of how they were invented.

S
TICKIES

In 1964, a 3-M chemist named Spencer Silver was experimenting with a new adhesive. Out of curiosity, he added too much of a “reactant” chemical...and got a totally unexpected result: a milky white liquid that turned crystal-clear under pressure. He characterized it as “tacky” but not “aggressively adhesive.”

He also found that it was “narcissistic”—i.e., it tended to stick to itself more than anything else. If you put it on one surface and stuck a piece of paper on it, either all or none of the adhesive would come off when you peeled off the paper.

STICKY SITUATION

Silver was intrigued with the stuff, but couldn’t get his superiors at 3-M excited. So he wandered the hallways of the company giving demonstrations and presentations. He nearly had to beg 3-M to patent it.

Silver was sure there was a use for his adhesive—he just didn’t know what it was. “Sometimes I was so angry because this new thing was so obviously unique,” he says. “I’d tell myself, ‘Why can’t you think of a product? It’s your job!’”

EUREKA

Finally, in 1974, someone came up with a problem to match Silver’s solution.

Every Sunday, Arthur Fry, another 3-M chemist, directed the choir in his church. He always marked songs in the hymnal with little scraps of paper. But one Sunday, while signaling the choir to stand, he fumbled his hymnal and all the bookmarks fell to the floor. As he frantically tried to find his place, he thought, “If only there was a way to get them to stick to the page.” That’s when he remembered
seeing Silver’s “now-it-sticks, now-it-doesn’t” demonstration years earlier....And while the choir sang, he started thinking of situations where semi-sticky paper might be helpful.

The next morning, he rushed to work and tracked down some of Silver’s adhesive. He found there were still problems to work out—like how to make sure the adhesive didn’t come off on the document—and he worked with company chemists to solve them. He even created a machine in his basement that would make manufacturing easier by applying the adhesive in a continuous roll. When he was done, he found that the machine was bigger than his basement doorway...and it couldn’t be disassembled without ruining it. So he knocked out a part of his basement wall.

NOT YET

Fry and his team began producing prototype Post-Its. As a form of informal marketing research, they distributed the sticky notes to offices around the building. They were a hit. “Once you start using them,” one enthusiastic co-worker told him, “you can’t stop.”

Despite in-house success, the 3-M marketing department didn’t believe Post-Its would sell. They kept asking: “Why would anybody buy this ‘glorified scratch paper’ for a dollar a package?” Their lack of enthusiasm showed up in test-marketing. It failed miserably.

STUCK ON YOU

Fry’s boss couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t succeed if marketed properly. After all, they were using thousands of them at 3-M. The company decided to try a one-shot test-market blitz in Boise, Idaho. Their sales reps blanketed Boise with free samples and order forms. The result: a 90% reorder response from the companies that received samples—more than twice the 40% the company considered a success.

Post-Its went into full national distribution in 1980 and caught on across America. They’ve since become an international hit as well.

“The Post-It was a product that met an unperceived need,” says Fry. “If you had asked somebody what they needed, they might have said a better paper clip. But give them a Post-It Note, and they immediately know what to do with it.”

Everyone’s got a question or two they’d like answered. Here are a few of those questions, with answers from some of the nation’s top trivia experts.

M
AKE A WISH

Q:
How do trick birthday candles (which keep relighting after being blown out) work?

A:
“The wicks are treated with magnesium crystals. The crystals retain enough heat to reilluminate the wick after the candles are blown out. Because the magnesium-treated wicks retain heat so well, experts recommend extinguishing the candles permanently by dipping them in water.” (From
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
, by David Feldman)

FOILED AGAIN

Q:
Does it matter which side of the aluminum foil is used?

A:
“The dull and shiny sides of the foil have no special meaning; they are simply a result of the way that the foil is made. In the final rolling step of the manufacturing process, two layers of aluminum foil are passed through the rolling mill at the same time. The side that comes in contact with the mill’s highly polished steel rolls becomes shiny. The other side, which does not come in contact with the heavy metal rolls, comes out dull.

“Shiny or dull, it does not matter.” (From
Why Does Popcorn Pop?
, by Don Voorhees)

UMM...WHAT WAS THAT?

Q:
Is
it true that elephants never forget?

A:
Believe it or not, yes. “We know this because of an experiment many years ago by a professor in Germany. He taught an elephant to choose between two wooden boxes, one marked with a square, the other with a circle. The box with a square had food in it, the other didn’t.

“It took 330 tries before the elephant figured out that ‘square’ meant ‘food.’ Once it got the idea, though, things went a lot quicker. Soon the professor could put any two markings on the boxes. The elephant would experiment a few times, figure out which sign meant ‘food,’ then pick the right box from there on out.

“The professor came back a year later and tested the elephant again using the old markings—circles, squares, and so on. Amazingly enough, the elephant
still remembered
which markings were the signs for food.

“That’s why elephants are so popular in circuses. It may take them a while to learn the act, but once they’ve got it, they’ve got it for good.” (From
Know It All!
, by Ed Zotti)

TEE-HEE

Q:
Why don’t we laugh when we tickle ourselves?

A:
“The laughter which results from being tickled by someone else is not the same as laughter that comes from being amused. When someone tickles us, the laugh is a reflex action [that] is really a cry of distress, essentially begging the person to stop stimulating our sensitive skin. When we tickle ourselves, we’re not at the mercy of someone else. If the feeling becomes too intense, we stop. Therefore, no distress signal is needed.” (From A
Book of Curiosities
, by Roberta Kramer)

OIL’S WELL

Q:
What’s the world’s tallest man-made structure?

A:
“It is not the Sears Tower, which is 110 stories and 1,454 feet high. A Shell Oil company offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is more than twice as tall as Chicago’s Sears Tower. Altogether, it rises 3,280 feet from seabed to flare top. Thirty-five ‘stories’ are above water level. Installed in 1994, it is the world’s deepest oil platform. The $1.2 billion rig is called the Auger Tension Leg Platform, or Auger TLP for short. It’s the first tension leg platform that combines both oil and gas drilling and production in U.S. waters. Designed to withstand 72-foot-high waves in 100-year hurricanes, it can sway up to 235 feet off center without damage. It was built to survive a 1,000-year storm.” (From
Blue Genes and Polyester Plants
, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne)