Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (22 page)

EAT THE WORLD

Have you ever noticed that a lot of the food Americans eat comes from other countries? It’s almost like the entire supermarket is one big “ethnic food” aisle. Here are some examples
.

K
IELBASA:
These sausages come from several places in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland and the Ukraine. The word
kielbasa
is Polish, and simply means “sausage.” It entered the English language relatively recently—in the 1950s.

PESTO:
This thick basil-and-pine-nut sauce comes from the Liguria region of northwest Italy, where it’s been eaten since at least the 1600s. The earliest mention of pesto in the United States was a 1935 article about Italian food in the
Washington Post,
but the dish didn’t become popular with Americans until the 1980s.
Pesto
means “crushed.”

CASABA:
The first of these succulent melons came to the U.S. in the 1880s from Kasaba, Turkey, hence the name.

DATES:
Date palms are native to the Middle East, and were well established around the entire Mediterranean more than 5,000 years ago. The were brought to California by Spanish missionaries starting in 1769, and are still grown there, as well as in parts of Nevada and Arizona. The name “date” comes from the ancient Greek
daktylos
— which originally meant “finger” or “toe” because of the resemblance of the date fruit to human digits.

WATERMELONS:
The All-American fruit, right? Wrong. They’re native to southern Africa. Watermelons were eaten by Ancient Egyptians 3,000 years ago, and by the Middle Ages, had spread to Asia and Europe. There is some disagreement as to how they first made it to the U.S. Some historians believe early Spanish explorers gave seeds to Native Americans in the Southeast in the 1500s. Others say they were brought by African slaves in the 1600s.

SALSA:
Mixing tomatoes, chilis, and other ingredients has been done in Mexico since the time of the Aztecs. When the Spanish encountered the condiment in the 1500s, they called it
salsa
— Spanish for “sauce.” It made its way into English language in the 1840s, and today is the most popular condiment in the United States.

Too hard to make? 99% of all American households purchase pre-made soup.

TORTILLA:
Probably older than salsa, this cooked flat-bread made from crushed corn has been used by Native Mexicans for wrapping around meats, fish, and vegetables—even insects and snails—for thousands of years. In the native Nahuatl language they were called
tlaxcalli;
the Spanish changed that to
tortilla
.

QUICHE:
You may know that quiche came from France, but how many people know they got it from the Germans? It was first made many centuries ago in a German kingdom in what is now the northeastern French province of Lorraine. The name even comes from the German word for cake:
küchen
. It was first introduced to North America in the 1930s, and became popular after World War II.

BEETS:
They’re native to the Mediterranean region, where beet leaves were eaten and used medicinally for thousands of years. Who started eating the roots? The Romans. But beets only became popular in northern Europe in the 1700s, after German scientists discovered that sugar could be made from them. Beets were first exported to the U.S. in the 1830s, and were first grown here commercially at the farm of Ebenezer Herrick Dyer in Alvarado, California, in 1879.

MINESTRONE:
Italian immigrants brought this hearty vegetable soup to the United States in the 1800s. The name means “big soup.”

WALNUTS.
The trees, commonly known as English walnuts, are native to the Middle East and were cultivated at least 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylon. Spanish missionaries first planted them in California in the early 1800s. Also known as mission walnuts and Persian walnuts, almost all commercially-grown walnuts in the United States are this variety, as opposed to black walnuts, which are native to North America.

“Let us all be happy and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with.”

—Artemus Ward

Only primate species that regularly walk on two legs: humans and gibbons.

LAST WORDS

Everybody loves reading the last words of famous people—Pablo Picasso’s, for example, were “Drink to me.” Not everyone is as famous as Picasso, but their last words can tell quite a story
.

G
ILES COREY (1611-1692)

Corey was a British farmer in the town of Salem in Massachusetts Colony. In 1692 the 80-year-old man and his 72-year-old wife Martha were charged with being witches in the infamous Salem witch trials. Ordered to plead “guilty” or “not guilty,” Corey refused. A person who refused to enter a plea could not be tried—but could be induced to plea via the
peine forte et dure,
which is French for “hard and forceful punishment.” That meant that Corey was stripped naked and forced to lie on the ground. A board was then placed over him, and large stones were laid on it. When ordered to enter a plea, Corey would only say, “More weight,” daring officials to put more stones on the board. They did. After two days of this, with more and more stones crushing his body, Corey once more cried out “More weight!”—and died. (Martha was executed by hanging two days later.)

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR WILLIAM ERSKINE (1770–1813)

Erskine was a British Army officer who fought in the Napoleonic Wars that ravaged Europe in the early 1800s, as well as a member of the British Parliament. He was also mentally unstable. One night in 1813, after having served for several years in Portugal, he jumped from a high window in a building in Lisbon. Bystanders rushed to his side and heard Erskine mutter, “Now, why did I do that?” before he fell into unconsciousness. He died three days later.

MARY SURRATT (1823–1865)

Surratt was convicted of taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and that year became the first woman ever executed by the United States government. As she stood on the scaffold and the rope was being placed around her neck, she turned to the guard and said, “Please don’t let me fall.” But she did fall…through the trap door of the scaffold as she was being hanged.

Price of gold in 1969: $41 an ounce. In 2009: $972 an ounce.

HECTOR HUGH MUNRO (1870–1916)

H. H. Munro was a British journalist, satirist, and author better known by his pen name, Saki. When World War I began in 1914, Munro, 43 and officially too old to join, nonetheless enlisted in the British Army as a regular soldier, refusing several officer’s commissions. On the morning of November 13, 1916, he was with his regiment on the front lines in France when a soldier in his group lit a cigarette. According to witnesses, Munro shouted, “Put out that bloody cigarette!” which gave his location away…and he was shot by a German sniper.

CAPTAIN LAWRENCE OATES (1880–1912)

Oates was an English explorer of Antarctica. In early 1910, he was one of four men selected to accompany Robert Falcon Scott on his Terra Nova Expedition to be the first to make it to the South Pole. They made it—but found a tent and a note from Roald Amundsen saying he’d beaten them there by 35 days. On the return trip weather conditions rapidly deteriorated and food supplies ran low. One of the four other men died on February 17. On March 16, in terrible health and fearing that he was holding the team back, Oates said to the other men, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” and walked out of their tent. There was a raging blizzard outside, the temperature was about -40°F, and Oates hadn’t even put on his boots. He was never seen again and was likely dead within minutes. Unfortunately, Oates’s sacrifice did not save the three other men, all of whom died nine days later. This story is only known from Scott’s diary, which was found by a rescue team several months later.

ROBERT FALCON SCOTT (1868–1912)

From a diary entry entitled “Message to the Public,” the last thing that Robert Falcon Scott is believed to have written, which was meant to explain and defend the South Pole trip to the British people: “We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint.”

Settlers first brought fireworks to America in the 1600s.

THE DATAR FLOP

History is full of inventions that were just a little too far ahead of their time. Here’s one of them
.

G
OING UNDER

In 1948 Canadian navy engineer Jim Belyea was assigned to worry full-time about the new Russian submarines. There was reason to worry: These new subs were faster and able to stay underwater for longer periods than the German U-boats the Allies had battled just a few years earlier, and Canada’s top brass were concerned that the Russian subs could converge on a convoy of ships for a coordinated underwater ambush. They ordered Belyea to develop a countermeasure that would keep a lid on the Russians. And he did.

Belyea’s big idea was the “Digital Automated Tracking And Resolving” system, or DATAR for short. It would be able to create a visual display of the positions and movements of all attackers and defenders in a sea battle, but it required stretching the limited capabilities of 1940s computers. Not just that, he wanted to link together every Canadian navy ship and submarine so they could share battle information instantaneously. If one ship saw a new attacker coming, the operators could instantly give its location, speed, and direction to the others. Every ship’s sonar and radar information would go into the mix, too, so that all ships would constantly be on the same page. Instead of the chaotic system of radio operators shouting over each other to report ship information, Canadian officers could instantly see every bit of known information about their battle zone on a glowing cathode ray screen. The brass loved it.

GETTING THE BALL ROLLING

Belyea got the okay to make a prototype, with the hope that it might someday be used on the 100 new ships the navy had just ordered. He began working with the Canadian subsidiary of Ferranti, a U.K. electronics firm, and by 1953, they had a prototype ready for testing. It was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. For one thing, it could store data for 500 ships on its magnetic drum, an early form of the modern hard drive. And there was another advancement: DATAR had a brand-new tool for entering data: the very first trackball, invented by engineers Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff. (The trackball’s main moving part was a small bowling ball from Canadian five-pin bowling.)

The average American skips 50 breakfasts per year. 17% never eat breakfast at all.

WAR GAMES

That fall Belyea’s team tried out the system with a three-ship convoy on a simulated Lake Ontario battle zone. It worked exactly as planned. That success put Canada way ahead of American and British engineers, and there was more on the line than just the cost of the system—there was prestige. Canada’s nascent electronics industry had a chance to lead the world in technology and sell the system to the well-financed navies of the U.S. and England, not to mention all of their NATO allies.

Canada promptly (and eagerly) demonstrated DATAR to American and British military officials, and they were duly impressed. It’s been reported that one American officer was so convinced it was a fake, he crawled under the table to see if there was somebody under there manipulating the dots on the screen. But when invited to partner with Canada in financing further implementation, both countries declined. While there might have been a reluctance to admit being bested by Canada, they had other, more practical reasons as well.

BUGS IN THE MACHINE

For one, DATAR was going to be very expensive to build and debug. Worse, it was huge and heavy, making it cumbersome even on full battleships, much less on submarines. Finally, DATAR used vacuum tubes—almost 20,000 of them. That many tubes in one place require a lot of electricity, a refrigerated room to neutralize the copious heat they generate, and continuous vacuum tube replacement. The tubes burned out relatively quickly; the DATAR prototype was frequently nonoperational, sometimes for days at a time.

The Canadian navy couldn’t afford to do it alone, and the Americans and British wouldn’t budge. So the Canadians offered to rebuild the system using a new American invention that was proving to be much smaller, lighter, cooler, longer-lived, and less of an energy hog: the transistor. No dice. The Americans and British came, saw, and decided to build their own systems…and DATAR was shelved for good.