Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (16 page)

“It’s only average,” said Tom meanly.

 

“What are these berries?” Tom rasped.

 

“This location looks kind of familiar,” Tom said warily.

 

“I’ve caught Moby Dick!” Tom wailed.

 

“I would never give that a grade of A,” Tom berated.

 

“That young insect is female,” said Tom gallantly.

 

“I love Granny Smiths,” said Tom applaudingly.

 

“Please don’t point that arrow at me,” said Tom, quivering.

 

“I flatly deny this,” said Tom under pressure.

 

“The optician probably doesn’t have my glasses ready yet,” Tom speculated.

 

“I shot the gun, but there’s no bullet hole,” Tom said blankly.

 

“I’m dying,” Tom croaked.

 

…movie soundtrack:
The Bodyguard
(1992), 17 million.

…live album:
Garth Brooks,
Double Live
(1998), 11 million.

…Beatles album:
The Beatles,
also known as “The White Album” (1968), 9.5 million.

…studio album:
Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
(1982), 28 million.

…album that never made the Top 10:
Meat Loaf’s
Bat Out of Hell
(1977) peaked at #14, but it went on to sell 14 million copies.

…debut album:
The first, self-titled LP by the rock band Boston (1976) has sold 17 million copies.

…double album:
Pink Floyd,
The Wall
(1979), 11.5 million.

…triple album:
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,
Live/1975–85,
four million.

…country album:
Shania Twain,
Come On Over
(1997), 20 million.

…hard rock album:
Led Zeppelin’s untitled, fourth album (1971), 23 million.

…hip-hop album:
MC Hammer,
Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em
(1990)
,
10 million.

…instrumental album:
Kenny G,
Breathless
(1992), 12 million.

…jazz album:
Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
(1959), four million.

…reggae album:
Bob Marley & the Wailers’ greatest-hits compilation,
Legend
(1984), 10 million.

…comedy album:
Impressionist Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy family parody,
The First Family
(1962), with seven million copies.

…solo debut album:
After leaving Wham!, George Michael recorded
Faith
(1987), which sold 10 million copies.

…greatest-hits collection:
Eagles,
Greatest Hits 1971–1975
(1976), 29 million. It’s America’s bestselling album of all time of any kind.

For our
Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader
, we wrote an article about
the history of photography, ending with the introduction of Kodak’s Instamatic
cameras of the 1960s, which we said “brought photography to the masses.”
We didn’t realize it at the time, but photography was about to undergo
a substantial—and revolutionary—change: the move to digital.

Throughout photography’s nearly 200-year history, camera makers have striven to make their products smaller, the images sharper, and the process faster and easier. Yet the advancements of the first century and a half took place at intervals of 5, 10, or even 20 years. Once the digital revolution got going in the 1990s, major advancements started taking place yearly. But it took a few decades of tinkering to get to that point.

The process of creating an electronic camera that could take pictures without film began in 1957 when Russell Kirsch, a computer engineer at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, created the first scanned image that could be viewed on a TV screen. The grainy black-and-white image—named by
Life
magazine “one of the 100 photographs that changed the world”—was simply a photo of his three-month-old son. Kirsch had invented the scanner but, more importantly, he’d also invented the
pixel
(short for “picture element,” and defined as “the smallest unit of an image displayed on a computer or television screen”). Kirsch’s baby picture—just 176 pixels wide—marked the beginnings of home computing, satellite imaging, and digital photography.

In the 1960s, NASA scientists experimented with the new digital technology in order to, among other things, send images from space probes orbiting the moon back to Earth. In 1961 Eugene Lally, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published the first description of what he called a
mosaic photosensor
,
a device that would translate light into bits of information. Although the technology for Lally’s idea didn’t yet exist, it got other scientists in the field excited about digital imaging. Willard Boyle and George Smith, two developers at Bell Labs, added the next big piece of the puzzle in 1969: the
charged coupling device
. In simple terms, the CCD is a type of semiconductor that generates an electrical charge when hit by light. This would be the basis for the “sensor” that would later replace the film in digital cameras.

This new technology caught the attention of electronics companies such as Texas Instruments (TI) and Eastman Kodak. TI applied for a patent for a digital camera in 1972, but never actually built one. Three years later, in 1975, Kodak bosses charged a 25-year-old engineer named Steven Sasson with a task: Build a camera that utilizes a CCD. “I’d never built a regular camera. What made me think I could build anything with this CCD device?” recalled Sasson. “I decided to take a digital approach because my background was digital and I could avoid the mechanical complexities.” He raided other departments for parts he needed, including an analog-to-digital converter adapted from Motorola components and a discarded movie camera lens. After a few months of experimenting, Sasson emerged with a contraption that resembled a big toaster with a lens on one side. It weighed eight pounds and took 23 seconds to produce its first picture: a 0.01 megapixel image of Sasson’s lab assistant. The dark, blurry image could be displayed only on a specially made television screen, but it was the first truly digital photograph.

Sasson’s superiors were impressed with the accomplishment (though less so with the poor image quality). They asked him how long he thought it would take for the digital camera market to take off. Sasson’s answer: “About 15 or 20 years.” Kodak patented the invention, but kept their focus on film cameras.

The first consumer electronic camera that required no film was the Sony Mavica (short for
Ma
gnetic
Vi
deo
Ca
mera). Released in 1981, it wasn’t a true digital camera, it was a video camera that
could freeze single frames and then transfer them onto a two-inch floppy disk. Just as with Sasson’s digital camera, the pictures could be viewed only on a TV screen. The Mavica generated some interest among technology buffs, but at the time few people outside the industry paid much attention to a camera that didn’t use film. As the 1980s unfolded, however, the desktop computer was starting to become a fixture in people’s homes, and with it came the first widespread interest in a truly digital camera that
anyone
could use.

Kodak played a big part in this. In 1986 they developed a powerful new CCD that worked in
megapixels
. Whereas Sasson’s digital toaster could display only 10,000 pixels, it was now possible to create a sensor that could display more than
a million
pixels of information, or one megapixel. (Today’s cameras go up to about 15 megapixels…and counting.) After that, the innovations kept coming and coming—from the first photo CDs in 1990 to the first digital camera designed for professional photojournalists in 1991, a Nikon F3 that utilized a 1.3 megapixel sensor built by Kodak. Retail price: $13,000.

But the high cost wasn’t the only reason that the digital camera was still considered a novelty in the early 1990s. It still couldn’t come close to matching the image quality attained by conventional film cameras, which were still much less expensive. So the big camera makers—Nikon, Kodak, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, and Minolta—kept pushing film while they worked on increasing the quality of their digital lines. And as the costs began to fall, digital sales started rising—at about the exact time that Sasson had predicted they would back in 1975. “In the late ’90s,” he recalled, “I was vacationing with my family and was waiting for the next eruption of Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. They have you sit around in a semicircle to watch, and I looked around and there were several digital cameras. I remember telling my wife, ‘It’s happening. It’s really here.’ ”

 

It was January 7, 1785, and two men were preparing for the first ever balloon crossing of the English Channel. The one who financed the adventure was John Jeffries, a well-to-do American doctor. The one with the aviation skills was Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard, one of the innovators of ballooning—which at that point had only been around for two years. A crowd gathered near the Dover cliffs to watch them lift off for France. At 1:00 p.m., Blanchard and Jeffries embarked on their 21-mile journey. But there was one problem: They were too heavy.

They were carrying 30 pounds of ballast weights (used to keep the balloon steady), plus steering gear, personal items, a bag of mail to be delivered in France, and scientific equipment. And then there were the four “wings.” Made out of silk and extending from the carriage, they served no real purpose except to make the balloon look like a bird.

Only a few miles into the crossing, it was apparent that the balloon was flying too low. The Channel loomed close, and neither man could swim. Their only option: lose some weight.

First went the ballast bags, but the balloon didn’t rise. As the carriage skimmed 20 or so feet above the surface, Blanchard unhooked the wings and let them drop into the water. The men argued over what to throw off next, finally deciding on the bag of mail. But the balloon was still flying too low. Then went the bottle of brandy they were saving for the landing. Still too low. Then, much to Jeffries’ dismay, went his thermometer, his barometer, and his telescope.
Still
too low. So Blanchard stripped off his clothes—his heavy overcoat, his pants and shirt, then everything else, and he urged Jeffries to do the same. But the doctor was too dignified to land in France
completely
naked, and only stripped down to his undergarments. And they were still dangerously close to the water.

Jeffries had an idea: They’d had a lot to drink with breakfast, and neither had gone to the bathroom before they left. “We were able to obtain, I verily believe, between five and six pounds of urine,” Jeffries later wrote, “which circumstance, however trivial or ludicrous it may seem, I have reason to believe, was of real utility to us.” Perhaps he was right—peeing into the Channel probably saved them from crashing into the Channel, but the fact remained that they were still flying too low. When the bottom of the carriage actually
touched
the water, Jeffries panicked and started climbing up the ropes. Blanchard yelled for him to come down; he was making it even more unstable. Jeffries climbed down; the two men put on their cork life jackets. They braced for impact.

Then, just as they saw the French coast ahead in the distance, a sudden updraft pushed the balloon up into the January sky. “From the height which we were now at,” recalled Jeffries, “and from the loss of our clothes, we were almost benumbed with cold.” But the cold was the least of their troubles—all of Blanchard’s steering equipment and anchors had been thrown overboard, leaving him no way to control the craft. They could only watch in horror as the balloon got caught in a downdraft and headed straight for Fel-mores Forest. Luckily, just above the canopy, they leveled out and Jeffries was somehow able to grab hold of the top of a tall tree and slow them down. The carriage unceremoniously flopped into a clearing, with the silk balloon still caught in the branches. Some farmers gave them clothes and a ride to the town of Calais, where another crowd had gathered to witness the historic landing.

• Jeffries had kept one letter—in his underwear—from the jettisoned mailbag. It was addressed to Benjamin Franklin (serving as American Ambassador to France) from Franklin’s son. That was the first airmail-delivered letter in history.

• Blanchard went on to become the first man to fly a balloon in several countries, including the U.S., where George Washington and two future presidents were in attendance. In 1809, at 56 years old, Blanchard was ballooning over the Netherlands when he suffered a heart attack and fell 50 feet to the ground. Though he never recovered, he’d met his end doing what he loved.

 

ALFONSO THE SLOBBERER:
King Alfonso IX ruled Leon (now part of France) from 1188 to 1230. He was prone to fits of rage, and anytime he got especially angry, especially while in battle, he drooled uncontrollably, sometimes to the point of foaming at the mouth.