Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (31 page)

Starring:
Howard Stern

Making the Movie:
Fartman,
from a simple comedy sketch that Stern invented for his radio and TV shows, was supposed to serve as the film “vehicle” that would give Stern his big-screen debut. Screenwriter Jonathan Lawton (Pretty
Woman)
fleshed out the concept, developing
Fartman
into the story of a New York editor who gains astonishing “colonic powers” when bad guys stuff him full of mysterious goo.

Kiss of Doom:
Ironically,
Fartman
was done in by a group of cartoon characters—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. New Line Pictures, which made the Ninja Turtle movies without obtaining the licensing rights to the characters, had missed out on millions of dollars in merchandising profits and wasn’t about to make the same mistake with
Fartman.
The company insisted on controlling the licensing rights, offering Stern only a 5% share in the profits. “The deal fell through over Fartman coffee mugs,” Stern said.

In 1994 the U.S. Postal Service announced that it was issuing a set of ten commemorative stamps to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. One of the stamps was going to show an atomic mushroom cloud with the caption, “Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945”…but the insensitive message infuriated the Japanese, prompting the Japanese government to launch a formal protest with the Clinton Administration. On December 7, 1994—the 53rd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor—The Postal Service announced that it was dumping the stamp in favor of one showing President Truman announcing the end of the war.

Jaybirds hide their food underground. They can find it even under 1½ feet of snow.

Thoughts and observations from one of America’s best actors, Katharine Hepburn.

“If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.”

“Life can be wildly tragic at times, but whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.”

“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.”

“To keep your character intact, you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.”

“It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.”

“I never realized, until lately, that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.”

“Never complain. Never explain.”

“If you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.”

“Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.”

“Someone asked someone who was about my age: ‘How are you?’ The answer was, ‘Fine. If you don’t ask for details.’ ”

“If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.”

“Without discipline, there’s no life at all.”

“I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.”

“Enemies are so stimulating.”

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

Galileo called Saturn “the planet with ears.”

Here’s
the story of how photography pioneer Joseph Niepce’s partner, a theater owner named Louis Daguerre, turned his name into a household word and began a worldwide obsession with photography. (For the previous part of the story, turn to
page 107
.)

The world’s first photograph, the one that Joseph Niepce took in 1827, survives to this day. There’s a picture of it in just about every book on the history of photography, but it’s almost impossible to make out anything that’s in it. If there wasn’t a caption next to it identifying the objects in the scene (a courtyard, a pigeon loft, and the roofs of some buildings), you would never be able to guess what they are.

Clearly, Niepce’s heliographic process was flawed. For one thing, the light-sensitive medium he used, bitumen of Judea, was very slow to react, which meant that long exposure times were required to take pictures.
Very
long exposure times: That first picture required an exposure of more than eight hours, during which time the sun moved most of the way across the sky. So did the shadows, obscuring much of the picture’s detail.

And the sloppy way Niepce smeared bitumen of Judea on his metal plates made the resulting image even blotchier and harder to make out than it would have been otherwise.

Niepce couldn’t solve these problems himself, so he joined forces with a Parisian theater owner named Louis Daguerre, who was also experimenting with photography. Daguerre’s motivation: he thought that photography, if it were perfected, could be used to create better scenery for the theater.

In 1829 the two men signed an agreement to work together for 10 years, but unfortunately Niepce died from a stroke 4 years into the partnership. Daguerre tried to continue the work with Niepce’s son Isidore, but Isidore was convinced that if he contributed anything, Daguerre would take credit for it, so he refused to do any research on his own.

But don’t drink it: Lemon Pledge has more lemons than Country Time Lemonade.

Daguerre soldiered on by himself, and in 1835 made an amazing—and accidental—discovery. One sunny morning, the story goes, Daguerre polished a silvered copper plate and placed it in a box containing iodine. The iodine combined with the silver in the plate to form photosensitive silver iodide, which was a significant improvement over Niepce’s bitumen of Judea. Then he loaded the plate into a camera.

That morning he set everything up and started his exposure, which he expected to take several hours… but a half hour later the sun disappeared behind some clouds, ruining everything. So Daguerre took the plate out of the camera and tossed it into his chemical cabinet so it would be out of the way.

The following morning, when he took the plate out of the cabinet to polish it for reuse, he saw that it contained a very sharp, detailed image of the picture he had tried to take the day before.

How did the picture get there? Thirty minutes of exposure was nowhere near enough time to create an image. Daguerre guessed that the short exposure had been enough to create a hidden or “latent” image on the plate, and that one of the chemicals in the cabinet must have “developed” it to the point that it was visible to the naked eye. He tested his theory by taking another 30-minute exposure and leaving it in the chemical cabinet overnight, as well.

Sure enough, the following morning there was an image on the plate. By process of elimination, Daguerre discovered that vapors from mercury, stored in the cabinet, had developed his exposures.

Daguerre made another important discovery: Like Wedgwood and Schulze, he wanted to arrest the photosensitive reaction to stop photographic images from being obliterated from further exposure to light. He solved the problem by soaking his developed
daguerreotypes,
as he called them, in a saltwater bath to create the first permanent photographic images. (Well, almost permanent: the saltwater didn’t arrest the photosensitive reaction completely, but it did slow it down enough that daguerreotypes could be viewed in daylight and could even be preserved for many years.)

Sorry, Fido: Animal acts are banned from the Miss America Pageant.

The discovery of “mercurializing,” as it came to be called, was Daguerre’s and Daguerre’s alone—and understandably, he wanted full credit for it. In 1837 he drew up a new contract with Isidore Niepce in which he took credit for the new process, but gave Joseph Niepce credit for the old process. Isidore Niepce objected to the terms, but had little choice in the matter—he had not participated in Daguerre’s research, did not know how the new process worked, and could not claim credit for it. So he signed.

They made plans to sell both steps of the photographic process to private investors, but when the French Academy of Sciences caught wind of the idea, it persuaded the French government to purchase the rights and give them away free to the entire world… except their traditional rival, England. Daguerre’s process was now free of charge for anyone in the world—except the Brits, who had to pay him a royalty.

On January 7, 1839, Daguerre went before the Academy of Sciences to show his daguerreotypes and give a description of his process. The assembled scientists were amazed. Images that detailed did not exist anywhere on Earth and were virtually inconceivable to the 19th-century mind. They were so finely detailed that people called them “mirrors with a memory.”

The American inventor Samuel Morse was in Paris when the Academy of Sciences published the news of Daguerre’s process; Daguerre invited him to view the pictures. Morse described what he saw in a letter home to his brother:

The exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: in a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified fifty times…every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and so also were the minutist breaks and lines of the walls of the buildings; and the pavements of the streets.

Downtown: The city of New Orleans is five feet below sea level.

The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of the telescope in nature.…[It is] one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.

On July 7, 1839, six of Daguerre’s daguerreotypes were put on public display in Paris; then on August 19, the full details of the photographic process were released to the world. The world’s first photography fad started within days, as Parisians descended on the city’s lens makers by the thousands to order the equipment that would allow them to make their own daguerreotype images. Eyewitness Marc Antoine Gaudin described the scene:

Opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and [soon] everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of rooftops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks, was astonished to see the very mortar between the bricks—in a word, the technique was so new that even the poorest plate gave him indescribable joy.

Perhaps the most impressive but underappreciated early contributor to photography was Sir John F. W. Herschel, an Englishman. When Herschel learned of Daguerre’s discovery, he set out to see if he could duplicate the results without knowing anything about the process, which was still a closely guarded secret.

In several weeks Herschel accomplished what had taken Daguerre several years to do; he even improved on the process by remembering an 1819 experiment in which he had observed that hyposulfate of soda dissolved silver salts. He tried the experiment again, hoping he could use the chemical to “fix” his images permanently, something Daguerre had been unable to do. It worked—and hyposulfate of soda, now known as sodium thiosulfate, is used to fix photographic images to this day.

Advance to the next frame of our story, on
page 273
.

BRI’s favorite Barbie accessory: A pink toilet with real flushing action (but no toilet paper).

Sophisticated products for your finicky feline needs.

B
OW TIE COLLAR
($15, Classy Cat):
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