Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (68 page)

The introduction of smaller, more sophisticated cameras and standardized, ready-made supplies simplified photography, but there were still a few hurdles that kept most people away.

For one thing, people still needed a darkroom or at least a
dark room,
because the gelatin plates had to be loaded into a camera in absolute darkness. The plates were so sensitive that exposing them to even a small amount of light caused them to fog over. And they were still made of glass, which was expensive, fragile, and heavy. Glass plates and plate holders added several pounds to the weight of a camera, which meant that no matter how small the cameras got, photography was still a costly and unwieldy affair.

But the most daunting problem of all was that most people still had to develop exposures themselves. If you wanted to
take
a picture, you had to
make
the picture. And if you weren’t willing to do that, you were out of luck.

Then in 1880, George Eastman, a bookkeeper at the Rochester Savings Bank in Rochester, New York, decided to go into the gelatin-plate business.

To capture the rest of the story, turn to
page 450
.

The Earth spins 1,000 mph faster at the equator than at the poles.

Some of the stories we recognize today as American myths were taught as history for many years. The truth might surprise you.

M
YTH:
Witches were burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials of 1692.

TRUTH:
No witches were ever burned in Salem. A hundred fifty men and women were arrested under suspicion of witchcraft. In all, 19 people and two dogs were put to death as “witches and warlocks,” all of them hanged except for one person, who was pressed to death by stones. Ten others were convicted, but not put to death. A few months later, the governor of Massachusetts dissolved the witch court. The judges didn’t mind; they were running out of people to accuse.

MYTH:
While writing
Walden,
Henry David Thoreau lived in isolation in the woods of Massachusetts.

TRUTH:
Thoreau’s two-year retreat to Walden Pond was like a little boy pretending that his backyard tree house is in the middle of the jungle. In truth, Thoreau built his famous cabin a scant two miles from his family’s home and spent very little time in isolation. “It was not a lonely spot,” wrote Walter Harding in
The Days of Henry Thoreau.
“Hardly a day went by that Thoreau did not visit the village or was visited at the pond.” Thoreau was even known to return home on the weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

MYTH:
The westward expansion of the 1800s offered American pioneers million of acres of fertile farmland.

TRUTH:
The American frontier was not an organized democracy in which every “sodbuster” could own a piece of land with the promise of prosperity. The money of big corporations even then dominated the West. Although the federal government did in fact permit pioneers to stake large claims in the Great Plains, the arid climate and dry infertile soil rendered this land almost impossible for individuals to raise crops or maintain livestock on. To escape starvation, most pioneers were forced to sell their land to the corporations. In return, the corporations often offered the pioneers jobs as low-paid miners and farmhands. By the 1890s, almost 90% of the farmland west of the Mississippi River was owned by corporations.

All in the family: President Grant appointed 13 of his relatives to federal posts.

MYTH:
The American bald eagle, symbol of the United States, is a noble creature.

TRUTH:
The American bald eagle, whom Benjamin Franklin referred to as “a bird of bad moral character,” is an aggressive species that, according to news reports, has recently begun to terrorize people. Since they were removed from the endangered species list in the late 1990s, the birds have been using their large talons and sharp beaks to attack fishermen and picnickers. Eagles have also been known to snatch puppies from suburban backyards, terrifying residents.

MYTH:
To escape Union capture, Confederate president Jefferson Davis fled Richmond disguised in his wife’s dress.

TRUTH:
Rather than admit defeat by surrendering to the Union army, Davis fled to Texas with the hope of reorganizing his troops. However, on May 10, 1865, he was apprehended in Georgia. Clad in a gray suit as he hastily greeted the Union troops, he accidentally grabbed his wife’s cloak to protect him from the cold. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton presented the false story of Davis disguising himself in a dress to the
New York Herald,
which published it on May 16, 1865.

MYTH:
“Jesse James was a man who killed many a man. / He robbed the Glendale train. / He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor. / He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.”

TRUTH:
Jesse Woodson James, who was born in Missouri in 1847, did indeed rob from the rich. Most of the money that he stole, however, he kept for himself. A child of slave-owning aristocrats, Jesse James made a name for himself as one of the Confederate marauders known as Quantrell’s Raiders during the Civil War. His move to robbing banks after the war was inspired by a deep hatred of the Northern industry that was becoming widespread in the pastoral South. It is true that he killed many a man—most of them innocent bystanders.

Comedian Stan Laurel was married 8 times, but had only 4 wives.

Not that we’re vain or anything, but we at the BR1 find mirrors endlessly fascinating. Here are some important facts about the second-most important object in the bathroom.

How do mirrors work? Generally speaking, by reflecting light. Most objects don’t give off any light of their own. They can only be seen because light from other sources—the sun, a candle, a lightbulb—hits them and bounces off, hitting their eyes. Not all of the light bounces, though. Some is absorbed by the object and some is transmitted through the object. The part that does bounce back is the reflection. Flat shiny surfaces like water, metal, and mirrors reflect light well because very little of the light is absorbed or transmitted—most of it is reflected.

When light hits a mirror, it bounces off in the opposite direction, but at the exact same angle it came from. It appears as if the image is coming from behind the mirror, but it’s not—what we see is a virtual image.

For centuries, mankind’s only mirrors were pools of water or polished metal. The first glass mirrors were made by Venetian craftsmen in the 1300s. Their method: They covered the back of a piece of glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury, rubbed flat and smooth. A piece of wool cloth would then be laid on top of the mercury and pressed with iron weights for more than a week. Then the excess mercury would be drained off. This method remained a carefully guarded secret, and for centuries Venice had a monopoly on mirrors.

In 1665 the chief minister to Louis XIV of France went to Italy and—at the risk of death—bribed 18 Venetian mirrorsmiths to move to France. Soon after their defection, the French passed a law making it illegal to import Venetian mirrors.

Three years later, a Frenchman named Louis Lucas beat the Venetians at their own game—he invented plate glass. Venetians only knew how to make blown glass, so each mirror started out as a bottle or cylinder which was slit open and flattened while still hot. The size of mirrors was therefore very limited.

The pouch on a pelican’s beak can hold up to 2 gal. of water.

But Lucas discovered how to pour molten glass onto an iron table where it could be flattened with an iron roller. Now mirrors could be made that were much larger. Soon France became famous for its mirrors. A very pleased Louis XIV purchased 700 mirrors and lined an entire hallway at the Palace of Versailles with them in a stunning display.

In 1835 German chemist Justus von Liebig discovered a way to make a better mirror. He invented a process for using silver as a backing instead of tin and mercury. He flushed the glass with silver salts and then covered it with a solution of silver nitrate. After being heated and left undisturbed for an hour, a chemical reaction caused the metallic silver to separate and adhere to the glass. Then it was coated with shellac and painted with a black backing. And that’s how mirrors were made for the next 150 years.

In mirror making today, silver or aluminum is vaporized, then sprayed onto glass. For finer mirrors—such as those used in telescopes—aluminum, chromium, or gold are heated in a vacuum tank. When they reach the critical temperature, they “flash” into vapor, filling the tank with metallic gas. A film is then deposited on whatever material is inside the tank.

• In the 1600s, the Dutch used to cover their mirrors with curtains when not in use, lest the reflectiveness be used up!

• In ancient China, reflective pieces of polished brass were placed over doorknobs so that evil spirits would scare themselves away.

• Ben Franklin mounted mirrors outside his second-story window so he could secretly see who was knocking at his door.

• The vanity license plate “3M TA3” was banned after someone looked at it in the mirror.

• A middle school in Oregon was faced with a unique problem: A number of girls were beginning to use lipstick and would apply it in the bathroom. That was fine, but for some reason, they would also press their lips to the mirrors, leaving dozens of little lip prints. Finally the principal called all the girls to the bathroom. She explained that the lip prints were a major problem for the custodian and asked the custodian to demonstrate how difficult it was to clean one of the mirrors. He proceeded to take out a long-handled brush, dip it into the nearest toilet, and scrub the mirror. After that, there were no lip prints on the mirrors.

• The word
mirror
comes from the Latin
mirari,
meaning “to wonder at.” It’s also the root word for
miracle
and
admire
.

• The world’s largest mirrors (to date) sit inside the twin Keck Telescopes—the world’s largest telescopes—at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Each mirror is made of 36 hexagonal segments which work together as a single piece. Diameter: ten meters (32 feet) across.

• In olden days some thought that the reflection of the body in a shiny surface or mirror was an expression of the spiritual self, and therefore if anything happened to disturb that reflection, injury would follow. This was the origin of the superstition that breaking a mirror would bring seven years of bad luck.

• Trade secret: Building managers install mirrors in lobbies because people complain less about waiting for slow elevators when they’re occupied looking at themselves.

• In 1994 Russian astronauts orbiting in the Mir spacecraft tried using mirrors to reflect sunlight into northern areas of their country in an attempt to lengthen the short growing season. It didn’t work.

• Ever wonder if the mirror in the dressing room is a real mirror or a two-way mirror? Here’s as simple test: Place the tip of your fingernail against the reflective surface. If there’s a gap between your fingernail and the image, it’s a
genuine
mirror. But, if your fingernail
directly touches
the image, watch out—it very well could be a two-way mirror. Remember, though, that mirror technology is always changing, so no test is 100% foolproof.

Close but no cigar. The thinnest man-made thread is a gold filament 4 microns (millionths of a meter) thick. Spiders webs are as thin as 1 micron.

Word Origin:
Clock comes from the Latin
clocca
meaning “bell,” since clock tower bells were rung on the hour. The same root gives us
cloak
which is shaped like a bell.

It’s always fun to find out what—or who—inspired cultural (and pop cultural) milestones like these.

Y
ELLOW JOURNALISM.
In 1895 publisher William Randolph Hearst broke into the New York newspaper world by buying the
New York Journal
and copying feature-by-feature Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World,
then the nation’s most popular paper. Hearst even hired away
World
cartoonist R. F. Outcault, who drew “The Yellow Kid” comic strip for the color comics section. Pulitzer retaliated by hiring another cartoonist to create a second “yellow” kid; the dueling strips attracted so much attention that the sensationalist style of journalism practiced by both papers became known as “yellow journalism.”