Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (31 page)

WHY NOT WOMEN?

One of the people who helped design the medical tests was Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II, a specialist in aviation medicine and chairman of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee. Lovelace wondered how well
women
might do if they were subjected to the same tests. He took an even greater interest in the idea in the summer of 1959, when he made a trip to the USSR to study the Soviet space program. There he learned that the Russians were already looking into sending a woman into space. There were even rumors that the very first Soviet cosmonaut might be a woman.

Apparently, the Soviets felt that women had a great deal to offer the space program and that in some ways, they were better suited for space travel than men were. A typical female needed less oxygen, ate less food, and weighed less than a typical male. That would make for a smaller payload; no minor consideration at the dawn of the Space Age, when rockets were smaller and less powerful. Every pound that could be shaved from the total weight was critical. But were women physically and mentally tough enough for spaceflight? The Russians thought so, and so did Dr. Lovelace. But he wanted to test them to find out for sure.

First sugar-sweetened cereal: Post’s Golden Crisp, introduced in 1949.

CRITICAL TESTING

The Mercury 7 astronauts had undergone three phases of testing to qualify for the space program. Phase one—medical testing—was conducted at Lovelace’s clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Testing women there wouldn’t be a problem, since it was a civilian facility, and he could run it as he pleased. But the second and third phases—psychological and spacecraft-simulator testing—were a different matter: For the Mercury 7, the tests had been done at Wright Air Development Center in Ohio. The female test subjects had no official ties to NASA, so the Air Force simply wasn’t interested in testing them.

Lovelace decided to conduct phase-one testing at his clinic anyway. Then, if those results were promising, he thought he might be able to convince the Air Force or some other branch of the military to make its facilities available for further tests.

GETTING STARTED

Lovelace established several basic criteria for his subjects: they had to be 35 years of age or younger (he later raised the limit to 40), had to be in good health, and had to have a four-year college degree. They also had to have a commercial pilot’s license with at least 1,000 hours of flying experience. That summer he met a 28-year-old pilot named Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb at an aviation conference in Florida. Cobb, who had more than 10,000 hours of flying experience and three world aviation records to her name, had just been named Pilot of the Year by the National Pilots Association. Lovelace invited her to be the first woman he tested.

Nothing in Cobb’s experience could have prepared her for the grueling week she spent at Lovelace’s clinic in February 1960. In one test, she had to swallow three feet of rubber hose so that doctors could study her gastric juices. In another, she had ice water squirted into her ears to knock her off balance and test her equilibrium. She also had colon exams, three barium enemas a day, and countless X-rays. Over a six-day period, she submitted to more than 80 different medical tests.

Q: Which U.S. state touches only one other U.S. state? A: Maine.

FLYING COLORS

Cobb tested so well against the Mercury 7 astronauts that Lovelace worried that if he went to NASA with her results alone, they’d dismiss her as a fluke. So he asked Cobb to come up with a list of 24 other female pilots he could test, to be sure that her results weren’t an anomaly. Eighteen of the women agreed to come to Albuquerque, and of these, 12 tested well enough to qualify for the next phase...if there was to be a next phase.

The other 12 women:

•
Bernice “B” Steadman, 35, commercial pilot and owner of a flight school in Flint, Michigan

•
Marion Dietrich, 34, pilot and reporter for the
Oakland Tribune
in California

•
Dietrich’s identical twin sister, Jan, 34, flight instructor and commercial pilot

•
Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, 21, flying instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma

•
Jean Hixson, 37, World War II engineering test pilot and flight instructor who’d become a school teacher in Akron, Ohio

•
Myrtle Cagle, 36, flight instructor in Macon, Georgia

•
Sarah Gorelick, 27, electrical engineer with AT&T in Kansas City, Kansas

•
Rhea Hurrle, 30, executive pilot for an aircraft company in Houston, Texas

•
Irene Leverton, 34, charter pilot and flight instructor in Santa Monica, California

•
Gene Nora Stumbough, 24, flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma

•
Geraldine “Jerrie” Sloan, 30, owner of an aviation business in Dallas, Texas

•
Jane “Janey” Hart, 40, airplane and helicopter pilot, wife of U.S. Senator Philip Hart, and mother of eight

THE MERCURY 13

Because Lovelace had to fit these tests into the clinic’s regular schedule, most of the women were invited to Albuquerque individually as openings became available. And because he insisted on secrecy—he wanted to keep the testing under wraps until he had the results—few of the female pilots even knew who the other members of the group were. In some cases the women did not meet each other until years later—they were a group in name only. The name? Originally called Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainees, (FLATS), they later became known as the “Mercury 13.”

The Great Pyramid of Giza is made of 2.3 million blocks, each weighing 2 1/2 tons.

Now that Lovelace had a pool of women who had tested well against the results of the men, he was ready to move on to phase two (psychological tests) and phase three (spacecraft-simulators). But where would he conduct these tests?

Cobb found a psychiatry professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine who was willing to conduct the phase-two testing on all 13 women. And the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine agreed to test Cobb in its simulators in Pensacola, Florida. If she tested well, the other 12 FLATs would be invited, too.

COLD WATER

Cobb went through phase-two testing in Oklahoma. Again, she passed. Then she went to Pensacola for phase-three testing...and scored as well as any experienced Navy pilot. That was all the Navy needed—it began making plans to test the rest of the FLAT team. Before it did, however, it contacted NASA to confirm that the space agency actually wanted the women tested.

It didn’t. “NASA,” the space agency explained, “does not at this time have a requirement for such a program.” With that, the Navy backed out. Just six days before the testing was scheduled to begin, each of the Mercury 13 received a telegram from Dr. Lovelace. “Regret to advise that arrangements at Pensacola cancelled,” it read. “Probably will not be possible to carry out this part of the program.”

For Part II of the story, fly over to
page 403
.

GOING UP?
Elevators are the safest form of transportation: they have the record of only one fatality per every 100 million miles traveled. Stairs, on the other hand, are five times more dangerous. (It’s harder to trip in an elevator than on the stairs, and you don’t fall as far.)

It takes about 63,000 trees to print an average Sunday edition of the
New York Times
.

No one says that science has to make sense in comic books—no one except Uncle John, that is. He wanted to know whether his favorite comic book heroes were using science fact... or science fiction. Here’s what we found out
.

T
HE INCREDIBLE HULK

Comic Book Science:
In
The Incredible Hulk
#1 (May 1962), Dr. Bruce Banner invents a “gamma bomb.” It accidentally goes off. To save his friend, Rick Jones, Banner leaps in front of Jones and takes the full assault of the gamma ray blast. And he pays a terrible price: Whenever he gets angry, he unleashes the monster inside, which is called The Hulk.

Could It Happen?
No. Gamma rays are an extremely powerful form of electromagnetic radiation. Given the dosage to which he was exposed, Banner wouldn’t have turned into anything except The Incredible Corpse—he would have suffered a painful death from incurable radiation sickness within two days of his exposure.

BATMAN

Comic Book Science:
In
Detective Comics #
27 (May 1939), young Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his parents by a cheap thug, sparking a quest for vengeance and leading him into a life of crime-fighting as Batman. Since he has no special powers, Batman relies on his intellect, strength, and, later, a battery of mini-gadgets contained in his utility belt to help him wage war on crime. Some of the contents of the utility belt: explosives, fingerprint equipment, oxyacetylene torch, smoke capsule, infrared flashlight, and camera.

Could It Happen?
Yes. In a world before computer chips and microcircuitry, most of the items would have seemed very futuristic, but each is scientifically and technologically sound. In fact, many of them are in use today. The Batplane, the Batmobile, and the Bat Cave’s crime lab are all feasible as well.

SUPERMAN

Comic Book Science:
In
Action Comics
#1 (June 1938), Superman started life as a baby named Kal-El on the planet Krypton. Shortly before Krypton is destroyed, his father places the infant in a rocket ship and sends him to Earth, where the difference between Earth’s gravity and Krypton’s give the child super strength and the ability to jump enormous distances (X-ray vision and flying came later).

Q: What percentage of the world has type O blood? A: More than 46%.

Could It Happen?
No. To account for Superman’s amazing strength—easily 1,000 times the average earthling’s—the gravity on Krypton would have to be approximately 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s. To produce gravity of that magnitude, Krypton would have to be 3,000 times as massive as our sun. And that, according to the basic laws of physics, is impossible.

THE FLASH

Comic Book Science:
In
Showcase
#4 (September 1956), a bolt of lighting strikes the laboratory of police scientist Barry Allen, thoroughly drenching him with a wild mixture of electrified chemicals and giving him the power of super speed.

Could It Happen?
No. The Flash travels amazing distances in record time: on at least one occasion, he circumnavigated the globe without stopping for lunch. An active 160-pound man normally consumes about 3,000 calories per day. If the Flash were to run 3,000 miles—say, from Los Angeles to New York—it might take him only a few minutes, but he’d burn roughly 375,000 calories doing it. Unless he stopped to eat a meal every second, he’d probably starve to death somewhere around Bakersfield.

DONALD DUCK

Comic Book Science:
In Walt Disney Comics #104-02
“The Sunken Yacht”
(May 1949), Donald and his three nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewey raise a sunken ship by filling the hold with Ping-Pong balls, something the boys (okay, they’re ducks) read in their Junior Woodchuck handbook.

Could It Happen?
Yes. In fact, a group of Swedish oceanographers used the technique to salvage a ship in 1964. Nearly all of Donald’s comic book adventures were written and drawn by Carl Barks, who never underestimated the intelligence of his audience. Barks was careful to include elements of science in his stories (possibly to compensate for the fact that his main character was a talking duck).

Fish have no salivary glands.

Here are a few fascinating bits of bathroom trivia that we’ve flushed out from around the world
.

R
ELIEF PLAYER

In April 2004, a minor league baseball player named Jeff Liefer made history when he got locked in the bathroom during a game between the Indianapolis Indians and the Louisville Bats. “The handle didn’t work,” says Liefer, who plays first base for the Indians and spent five seasons in the big leagues. Maintenance workers passed a wrench through a vent in the wall, but all Liefer managed to do was remove the door handle without unlocking the door. Then they handed him a hammer and chisel, and he finally freed himself by prying the hinges off the door. The game resumed after a 20-minute delay (the Indians lost, 9–0). “I don’t want to be remembered as the guy who got stuck in the bathroom,” said Liefer. “Hopefully, it’ll happen to someone else so it won’t be such a big deal.”