Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (52 page)

It was only after World War I that Meitner’s value began to be recognized: She became the first woman professor ever in Germany and was finally paid a living wage (though still less than Hahn). In 1926 she was appointed full professor of physics at the University of Berlin. There, she continued to study beta and gamma rays, isotopes, atomic theory, radioactivity, and quantum physics.

By 1937 Meitner and Hahn had identified at least nine different radioactive elements. A scientist named Fritz Strassmann joined them, and together the three of them began working to find out what happens when the nucleus of an atom splits. But at this time, the Nazis were rising to power. Meitner was forced to fill out papers admitting that her grandparents were Jewish. It didn’t matter that she was raised a Protestant—she was fired from her job.

Jews made up less than 1% of the German population, yet they accounted for 20% of the scientists. Researchers all over Germany began to follow Albert Einstein’s lead, and fled the country. Meitner announced that she was taking a “holiday,” but instead escaped to safety in Sweden. At the age of 59, after living and working in Germany for 31 years, she was forced to leave her money, possessions, research papers, friends, and career. Starting over from scratch, she went to work at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm, where she spent the next 22 years. It was there that she made the discovery that literally rocked the world.

No wonder it’s called the Depression: In 1930 U.S.

Scientists already knew that radiation is released when the nucleus of an atom decays. Nuclear decay occurs when atoms of unstable elements, such as uranium, lose atomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons). When an atom loses some of those particles it transforms into a new kind of atom. This new atom, or “daughter atom,” splits and spirals away with an enormous amount of force. (Radium releases a million times more energy during radioactive decay than when it is burned.)

In 1934 French scientists Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie became the first people to create artificial radiation. How? They bombarded stable elements with radiation from unstable ones, getting them to emit their own particles. That same year, Italian scientist Enrico Fermi took the idea farther, bombarding uranium with neutrons, hoping to create a new, man-made, heavier element. He thought he did it—and even got the Nobel Prize in 1938. But Meitner didn’t buy it. She repeated the experiments and realized that Fermi hadn’t made a heavier element, he had done the unthinkable—he had split the uranium atoms apart—and made them into the atoms of lighter elements. And that, she would soon prove, meant much more.

In Sweden, Meitner discovered that when a nucleus splits, (the mass of the two new atoms added together is less than that of the original atom, because some of the mass is released as energy. That energy is what causes the two pieces of the split atom to repel from each other. She calculated, using Einstein’s formula of E=MC
²
, exactly how much energy would be given off every time a single atom split and predicted that this could happen in a chain reaction, releasing an enormous amount of energy in a very short period of time. If millions of atoms could be split at once, the power would be unimaginable: splitting the nucleus of a uranium atom, for example, releases 20 million times more energy than exploding an equal amount of TNT.

When she shared this news with Hahn, he did experiments to prove her theory. Then he published a paper (leaving her name off, for fear he would get in trouble if the Nazis found he was still in contact with her). Meitner also published a report in a British journal in 1939. Suddenly the world was in a race to see who would be first to harness atomic energy in the form of a bomb.

unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 7 million.

Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning him about what would happen if Germany got the bomb first. Roosevelt set American scientists to work on the project—called the Manhattan Project—and invited Meitner to help. She turned the job down, repulsed by the idea that her discovery might be used to kill people. She told them she hoped they failed.

The Nazis, in the meantime, had been removing all traces of the Jews, and Meitner’s name was erased from all the research she had done. Perhaps because of this, Otto Hahn managed to convince himself—and the world—that the discovery of nuclear fission (Meitner coined the term) had been his. Hahn received the Nobel Prize in 1944. (Meitner never did.) For years, Hahn was listed as the inventor, with Lise Meitner occasionally mentioned as his assistant.

When the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, Meitner was upset, not only by the devastation but also by the sudden publicity: reporters on her doorstep; cameras in her face; phone messages and telegrams waiting for her reply. She had little to say. The bomb had killed 100,000 people, and suddenly she was being portrayed in the media as the person who had come up with the blueprint for it.

Lise Meitner finally did receive her share of attention for her discoveries. She was named “Woman of the Year” by the Women’s National Press Club; received the Max Planck Medal from the German Chemical Society; received honorary doctorates; published 135 scientific papers; won the Enrico Fermi Award; and was elected to the Swedish Academy of Science—only the third woman in history to achieve that honor. She was even offered a movie deal by MGM. (She turned it down, horrified that the script called for her to flee from Germany with an atom bomb hidden in her purse!) Meitner continued her research into her mid-70s and helped Sweden design its first nuclear reactor, which was the way she wanted her discovery to be used. Despite continual exposure to massive amounts of radiation, she lived to be nearly 90 years old, dying in 1968, just three months after Otto Hahn. In 1992 physicists named the newly discovered 109th element in her honor: meitnerium.

Items most likely to be shoplifted from a supermarket: cigarettes, beauty aids, and batteries.

Next
time you see the hype for some amazing, “can’tmiss” phenomenon, hold on to a healthy sense of skepticism by remembering these duds.

If people were willing to pay to watch professional football, baseball, and basketball teams, they’d pay to watch teams like the New York Gladiators and the Detroit Thunderbirds compete against each other, right? That was the thinking behind the 10-team National Bowling League, founded in 1961. The owner of the Dallas Broncos poured millions of dollars into his franchise, building a special 2,500-seat “Bronco Bowl” with six lanes surrounded by 18 rows of seats arranged in a semicircle; space was also set aside for a seven-piece jazz band to provide entertainment between games. But he couldn’t even fill the arena on opening night, and things went downhill after that. The league folded in less than a year.

This was Gerber Baby Food’s attempt to sell food to adults. Launched in the 1970s, the line of gourmet entrees like sweet-and-sour pork and beef burgundy had two major problems: the food came in baby food–style jars, and the name “Singles” was a turnoff to customers who were lonely to begin with.

Milton Hershey didn’t like to let anything go to waste. There were times in the chocolate business when he found himself with millions of pounds of cocoa butter that he didn’t know what to do with, and he spent years trying to find a product that would put it to use. In the early 1930s, he finally settled on cocoa butter soap.

Three months later, the factory that he built behind the Cocoa Inn in Hershey, Pennsylvania, began producing 120 bars of chocolate-scented soap a minute. Finding 120 customers a minute to buy the stuff proved to be much more daunting: people were used to eating their chocolate, not bathing in it, and were put off by the strong chocolate smell of the soap. (Some even tried to eat the bars, thinking it was candy.)

Why swat, when you can wait? A housefly born today will be dead within 2 months.

More than a million bars of the stuff piled up in the basement of the Hershey Sports Arena waiting to be sold; nevertheless, Hershey kept the assembly line running at full speed. “Don’t worry about my money,” he told his executives, “You just sell all you can.” Seven years and several million dollars later, he finally pulled the plug. Ironically, cocoa butter—unscented—is a popular ingredient in soap today.

City officials in Nottingham, England, spent more than £1 million (about $1.5 million) installing solar-powered parking meters on city streets after reading reports that the meters saved a fortune in maintenance costs in Mediterranean countries. The only problem: Mediterranean countries get a lot of sun…and England doesn’t, not even in summer. As of August 2001, more than 25% of the parking meters were out of commission, allowing hundreds of motorists to park for free.

One of the few products whose demise can be blamed solely on the packaging. When lined up end-to-end on store shelves, the packages read: “HITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITS.”

See if you can figure out why these products bombed:

• Buffalo Chip chocolate cookies

• Mouth-So-Fresh Tongue Cleaner

• Incredibagels—microwave bagels “stuffed with egg, cheese, and bacon”

• Gillette’s For Oily Hair Shampoo

• Hagar the Horrible Cola

• Burns & Rickers freeze-dried vegetable chips

• Jell-O for Salads (available in celery, tomato, mixed-vegetable)

• Tunies (hot dogs made from tuna fish)

Germans eat more potatoes per capita than any other people, averaging 370 lbs. per year.

Still waiting for your 15 minutes of fame? Don’t worry—as these folks would attest (if they could), you don’t have to be alive to get your name in the paper.

In January 1995, a small-claims court commissioner in Mill Valley, California, ruled that the landlord of a man who died in his apartment could keep the $825 security deposit. Tenant James Pflugradt passed away from a heart attack in 1994; his son Rick cleaned out the apartment five days later and then asked for the security deposit back…but landlord Fred Padula refused to hand it over, arguing that the deposit was needed to cover rent during the time it would take to find a new tenant.

Court Commissioner Randolph Heubach sided with landlord Padula. “I am not unsympathetic, but it is really a straightforward financial situation,” he said after making his decision. His reason: The deceased “failed to give the 30-day notice required before vacating his apartment.” Rick Pflugradt didn’t see it that way. “This sends my faith in the human race to an all-time low,” he said.

In 2001 the city of Columbia, South Carolina, began building a driving range on what they thought was an open field; but it wasn’t long after construction got underway that they discovered the plot was actually the unmarked graveyard of a 19th-century insane asylum. At last count there were at least 1,985 graves of mental patients at the site, some dating as far back as 1848. Rather than abandon its plans, city officials simply redesigned the driving range “to ensure that no golf balls land on graves.”

In August 2001, a two-bedroom apartment in London was put up for sale after the previous owner, described in newspapers as an “unnamed pensioner,” passed away. Asking price: $728,000, not a bad amount for apartments in the area. Added “bonus”: The apartment comes complete with the dead man’s ashes, in a stone urn on the mantlepiece. In his will, the man stipulated that he wanted the apartment to serve as his final resting place. “I have to tell people before they go to view the flat,” realtor James Bailey told
The Sun
newspaper. “Luckily most just laugh.”

Number please: Dustin Hoffman used to type entries for the yellow pages.

When 70-year-old James Ross asked girlfriend Maryo Griffin to marry him in 1993, there was just one thing keeping her from saying yes: more than 12 years after the death of his first wife, Judy, Ross still had her ashes, which he kept in his home. Ross and Griffin decided to solve the problem by getting married in Las Vegas and then scattering Judy’s ashes in the Grand Canyon.

Everything was going according to plan…until a thief broke into Ross’s car in the Las Vegas World Casino parking lot and stole the box containing Judy’s ashes. At last report the wedding was postponed, perhaps indefinitely, until the ashes are returned. “They got Judy,” said Griffin. “I don’t see how we can be married until we get Judy taken care of.”

When Rodney Williams, 21, appeared in Washington State’s Cowlitz County District Court in April 1994 to explain why he’d missed an earlier court date on an assault charge, he brought an unusual witness to substantiate his claims—the cremated remains of his mother, which he carried in a plastic box. Williams explained that he had missed the earlier court appearance because he was caring for his mother during her final illness.