Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (42 page)

Gossip:
Wrigley never gave the twins free gum—even though fans were always walking up to them and asking for it. “We never got a free pack of chewing gum in our lives,” Jane remembers. “So we’d buy our own gum to give to people on the street.” They were also never allowed to chew gum in their commercials. According to Joan, “We were told that Mr. Wrigley had said, ‘I never want to see gum in the mouths of the Doublemint Twins. My girls do not chew gum on-camera.’”

The write stuff: Famous storyteller Hans Christian Anderson couldn’t spell.

Some people become famous because their names become commonly associated with an item or activity. You know the names, now here are the people
.

Andre Marie Ampere.
A 19th-century French physicist. His work on electricity and magnetism “laid the groundwork for modern electrodynamics.” The standard unit of electrical current—the
ampere
, or
amp
—was named after him.

Fitzherbert Batty.
A Jamaican lawyer. “In 1839,” writes an English etymologist, “he was certified as insane, which attracted considerable interest in London.” His surname became “an affectionate euphemism to describe someone who is harmlessly insane.”

William Beukel.
A 14th-century Dutchman. Invented the process “by which we shrink and sour cucumbers.” The result was originally called a
beckel
or
pekel
, after him. It eventually became known as a
pickle
.

Mr. Doily (or Doyley).
A 17th-century London merchant whose first name has been forgotten. “He became prosperous,” says
Webster’s Dictionary
, “by selling various summer fabrics trimmed with embroidery or crochet work, and, being a good businessman, used up the remnants by making ornamental mats for the table called
doilies
.”

Hans Geiger.
German physicist. In 1920 he perfected a device for measuring radioactivity—the
Geiger counter
.

John Mcintosh.
A Canadian farmer. In 1796 he found a wild apple tree on his Ontario property and cultivated it. The
Mcintosh apple
is now America’s favorite variety.

Col. E. G. Booz (or Booze).
An 18th-century Philadelphia distiller who sold his Booz Whiskey in log cabin-shaped bottles. His product helped make the Old English term
booze
(from
bouse
, “to drink”) slang for alcohol.

Sotheby’s auction house sold a 200-year-old piece of Tibetan cheese for $1,513 in 1993.

Archibald Campbell, the third Duke of Argyll.
Powerful Scottish noble in the early 1700s. Had the Campbell clan tartan woven into his
argyle
socks.

Enoch Bartlett.
A 19th-century businessman. Distributed a new kind of pear developed by a Massachusetts farmer. Eventually bought the farm and named the pear after himself.

Brandley, Voorhis, and Day.
Owners of an underwear manufacturing company. Known by their initials: BVD’s.

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen.
German chemist in the mid-1800s. Invented the gas burner used in chemistry labs.

Lambert de Begue.
A monk whose 12th-century followers were wandering mendicants. His name—pronounced
beg
—became synonymous with his followers’ activities.

Rudolph Boysen.
California botanist. In 1923, he successfully crossed blackberries and raspberries to create
boysenberries
.

Charles F. Richter.
A 20th-century American seismologist. In 1935 he came up with a scale for measuring the “amplitude of the seismic waves radiating from the epicenter of an earthquake.” The
Richer scale
is now used worldwide to understand the magnitude of shock waves.

Thomas “Jim Crow” Rice.
A white “blackface” comedian. In 1835 he came up with a typically racist song-and-dance routine that went: “Wheel about, turn about / Do just so / Every time I wheel about / I jump ‘Jim Crow.” For some reason, this phrase came to refer to all discrimination by whites against blacks.

TOTALLY IRRELEVANT FACT

The faces on today’s U.S. banknotes have been unchanged since 1929. No one knows for sure why each coin or banknote ended up with the face it did: according to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, “Records do not reveal the reasons that portraits of certain statesmen were chosen in preference to those of other persons of equal importance and prominence.”

Don’t call me: 66% of Las Vegas phone numbers are unlisted—the most of any U.S. city.

No major sporting event is complete without it. In fact, it’s probably the best-known lighter-than-air ship ever (except maybe the Hindenburg, which is famous for blowing up). Here’s the story of the Goodyear blimp
.

I
n 1809 Charles Goodyear, a hardware merchant from Connecticut, saw that rubber had tremendous commercial potential—but only if it could be made less sticky and would hold a shape better than it already did.

So he obtained a large quantity of latex, and tried mixing it with everything in his desk, cellar, and pantry—including witch hazel, ink, and cream cheese—with no luck. One day he tried mixing rubber with sulfur. Then, while working on something else, he accidentally knocked the sulfurized rubber mixture onto a hot stove. He found that the rubber had changed form: it was no longer sticky and it snapped back to its original shape when stretched. He named the process
Vulcanizing
after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

THE GOODYEAR COMPANY

Goodyear didn’t get rich from his discovery—he died penniless in 1860. But when Frank A. Seiberling started a rubber company in Akron, Ohio, in 1898, he decided to name it after the inventor. It’s likely he hoped to profit from the confusion created by having a name similar to another Akron rubber company, B.F. Goodrich.

Goodyear’s first products were bicycle and horse carriage tires, rubber pads for horseshoes, rubber bands, and poker chips. The company produced its first auto tires in 1901, airplane tires in 1909, and, using a Scottish process for rubberized fabric, the skins for airplanes in 1910. (This was back when airplanes were based on kite designs and made mostly of wood and cloth.)

The same rubberized fabric turned out to be useful for lighter-than-air craft, and Goodyear flew its first dirigible in 1922.

THE MILITARY CONNECTION

The military used Goodyear blimps for observation and reconnaissance during World War I and World War II. After World War II, Goodyear bought five of its blimps back from the armed forces. It painted them and began using them for promotional purposes. But the company’s executives didn’t see the value of having blimps. In 1958 they tried to ground the airships permanently, to save the operating and maintenance expenses.

The distance between a Boeing 747’s wingtips is longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight.

The plan was stalled at the last minute by a plea from Good-year’s publicity director, Robert Lane. To demonstrate the blimps’ worth to the company, he scheduled a six-month marathon tour that sent the airship
Mayflower
barnstorming the Eastern Seaboard. It generated so much favorable press that the executives were convinced to keep it.

The blimps’ first TV coverage was an Orange Bowl game in the mid-1960s. Now they’re used in about 90 televised events a year. Goodyear doesn’t charge TV networks; the publicity generated makes the free service worthwhile.

BLIMP FACTS

• Each blimp is equipped with a crew of 23, consisting of 5 pilots, 17 support members who work on rotating schedules, and 1 public relations representative. The blimps cruise at a speed of 45 to 50 mph (maximum 65 mph unless there’s a really good wind).

• Each blimp can carry 9 passengers along with the crew. The seats have no seatbelts.

• The camera operator shoots from the passenger compartment through an open window from about 1,200 feet up, from which you can see everything, read a scoreboard, and hear the roar of a crowd. The hardest sport to film is golf, because the pilots have to be careful not to disturb a golfer’s shot with engine noise or by casting a sudden shadow over the green.

• If punctured, the worst that will happen is that the blimp will slowly lose altitude. Good thing, too, since the company reports that a blimp is shot at about 20 times a year.

• Each blimp is 192 feet long, 59 feet high, and holds 202,700 cubic feet of helium. The helium does leak out, like a balloon’s air, and has to be “topped off” every four months or so.

• The word
blimp
is credited to Lt. A. D. Cunningham of Britain’s Royal Navy Air Service. In 1915 he whimsically flicked his thumb against the inflated wall of an airship and imitated the sound it made: “Blimp!”

Creative naming: “Booker” T. Washington got the nickname Booker because he loved books.

Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
aren’t just for kids. They’re great reading for grown-ups, too. Especially in the bathroom. Here are some sample quotes
.

“D
ear, dear! How queer everything is today! I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next questions is, ‘Who
am
I?’ Ah, that’s the puzzle!”

—Alice,
Alice in Wonderland

“Cheshire Puss,” began Alice, “would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get
somewhere
,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if only you walk long enough.”

—
Alice in Wonderland

Alice laughed. “There’s no use in trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

—Through the Looking Glass

“You should say what you mean,” said the March Hare.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’!”

Before he was nicknamed “Stonewall,” Thomas Jackson was known as “Fool Tom.’

“You might as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!” “It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter.

—Alice in Wonderland

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

—Alice,
Alice in Wonderland

“Be what you would seem to be—or, if you would like it put more simply—Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

—The Duchess,
Alice in Wonderland

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone: “So I can’t take more.”

“You mean you can’t take less,” said the hatter: “It’s very easy to take
more
than nothing.”

—
Alice in Wonderland

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would not be an advantage,” said Alice. “Just think what work it would make with the day and night! You see, the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis—”

“Talking of axes,” said the Duchess, “chop off her head!”

—
Alice in Wonderland

Believe it or not: The U.S. Congress was so unpopular during the American Revolution that its

If this book was
Modern Bride,
we’d probably call these “wedding traditions” rather than superstitions. But think about it—most of them were started by people who believed in evil spirits and witches and talismans
.

B
RIDAL VEIL.
The veil has served a number of purposes throughout history, including: 1) protecting the bride from the “evil eye;” 2) protecting her from jealous spinsters (who might also be witches); and 3) protecting the groom, his family, and other wedding guests from the bride’s psychic powers—just in case she has any.

WEDDING KISS.
A toned-down but direct throwback to the days when the couple was required to consummate their marriage in the presence of several witnesses, to insure that the consummation actually took place.