Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (19 page)

Needless to say, Balduin didn’t know much about chemistry (not many 17th-century alchemists did), because when he distilled the sludge, all he got was water. But he noticed that when he heated the dried-out crud that was left over, it glowed in the dark. He named this mysterious substance
phosphorus,
Greek for “bringer of light,” (today it’s called calcium nitrate).

What did this have to do with photography? Nothing… until a German anatomy professor named Johann Heinrich Schulze tried to repeat Balduin’s experiment in 1727. By chance he used nitric acid that contained traces of silver. He left the chalk-acid mixture out in the sun; by the time he came back to it, it had turned a deep purple.

Schulze wasn’t the first person to observe that substances containing silver salts turn dark when exposed to the sun. But it had always been assumed that it was the heat that caused the reaction. Schulze suspected that light was to blame and came up with an experiment to test his theory: He cut a stencil of some words on a piece of paper. He put the stencil on the side of a glass bottle and covered the rest of the glass with dark material. He filled the bottle with the chalk dissolved in nitric acid and left it out in the sun, to see if the sunlight would “write” the stenciled words onto the material.

Seeing is believing: Even a blind chameleon will change its color to match its surroundings.

“It was not long,” he wrote later, “before the sun’s rays, where they hit the glass through the cut-out parts of the paper, wrote each word on the chalk precipitate so exactly and distinctly that many who were curious about the experiment took occasion to attribute the thing to some sort of trick.” In a nod to Balduin, Schulze called the material
scotophorus,
or “bringer of darkness.”

Schulze didn’t understand why the substance turned dark, but today we do: When light strikes photosensitive silver crystals, some of the atoms of silver separate out from the compound. Exactly how many atoms separate depends on how much light strikes the material. With enough light, however, the silver will become visible to the naked eye, and the material becomes dark. This is the chemical principle upon which all film photography would be based.

Schulze couldn’t figure out how to control the reaction—the silver salts darkened every time they were exposed to light, obliterating whatever writing or image had been created. As far as he could tell, the material had no use, but it was still interesting, and as word of his discovery spread, scientists all over Europe repeated the experiment.

One man who learned of Schulze’s experiment was Thomas Wedgwood, son of the legendary English potter Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood thought he could use the process to make duplicates of artwork for his pottery.

He started out by soaking pieces of paper in a solution of silver nitrate to make them photosensitive (sensitive to light). He then laid his sketches on top of these materials and put them out in the sun. The sunlight would shine through the sketch where the paper was blank, but would be blocked where there was ink, creating a reverse, or “negative,” image of the original sketch. The experiment worked. Wedgwood became the first person in history to transfer an image onto photosensitive paper.

Wedgwood might have become the father of photography, but his health was so poor that he had to abandon his research before he could reach his next goal: recording the image created by a camera obscura. And like Schulze, he died without figuring out how to arrest the photosensitive reaction so that his images would be made permanent. Even when viewed by candlelight, it was just a matter of time before they disappeared into darkness forever.

Average caloric requirement for simply existing (breathing, eating, sleeping): 1000–1500 per day.

The next major contributor to the chemistry of photography was a 19th-century French physicist named Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce.

Niepce was looking for a way to copy artwork automatically, to avoid having to pay artists to do it. He repeated the experiments of Schulze and Wedgwood and searched for chemicals that would give him positive images, but finally, after years of failed experiments, gave up on chemicals that change color and started looking for chemicals that harden when exposed to light. That’s when his luck began to change.

Having worked as a printer, Niepce was familiar with “bitumen of Judea,” an asphalt compound dating back to the Egyptians and commonly used by lithographers. He knew that when bitumen of Judea was exposed to sunlight, it hardened to the point that solvents would no longer dissolve it. So he smeared a metal printing plate with the stuff, placed an ink drawing on top of the plate, and left them both out in the sun. Just as he expected, the sunlight passed through the blank paper, striking the bitumen of Judea underneath and causing it to harden.

But where the sunlight was blocked by the ink, the bitumen of Judea remained soft and could be washed away with solvents. The result was a perfect copy of the original drawing. Niepce named the process
heliography,
after
helios,
the Greek word for “sun,” and
graphos,
“writing.”

Taking his discovery to the next step, one sunny morning in 1827, Niepce smeared some bitumen of Judea onto a printing plate and put it inside a camera obscura. Then he pointed the camera obscura out of an upstairs window of his country home and left it there for most of the day. In the process, he took what historians consider to be the world’s first true photograph.

For part III of our history of photography, turn to page
180.

Distance that a silver-spotted skipper caterpillar can propel its own feces: 5 feet.

Every collector has a Holy Grail that they hope to find at a yard sale, or a flea market someday. Baseball card collectors dream of finding an original Honus Wagner; book collectors hope to spot a copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s
The Tamerlane
gathering dust on a bookstore shelf. Here’s the story of an amateur antique collector who found what he was looking for.

One winter in the early 1980s, a two-day snowstorm knocked out telephone service to much of the village of East Hampton, New York. One of the people sent out into the snow to restore service was cable repairman Morgan MacWhinnie.

MacWhinnie was just finishing repairing an underground cable when an old man wearing slippers and a bathrobe came out of a run-down clapboard house and asked him to check the phones inside. MacWhinnie wanted to move on to his next repair call, but he decided it would be quicker to humor the old man than it would be to argue with him. So he went into the house.

The old man turned out to be a pack rat: he had old aluminum TV dinner trays stacked to the ceiling in the kitchen, and mountains of trash in other parts of the dark, dusty house. MacWhinnie checked the extension in the kitchen; it had a dial tone. Then the old man insisted that he check the extension in the bedroom, too. MacWhinnie wanted to leave, but the old man was insistent, so he let the man show him the way to the upstairs room.

As MacWhinnie made his way through the cluttered dining room, he was surprised to see what appeared to be an antique tea table and a matching bonnet-top highboy chest of drawers poking out of the dust and debris. Then, after he checked the extension in the bedroom (it was fine) and prepared to leave, he saw a matching drop-leaf dining table next to the front door.

Two basketballs can fit side by side through a basketball hoop.

As it turns out, MacWhinnie’s hobby was collecting antiques. He knew a lot about 18th-century American furniture and he was almost certain the pieces were valuable. In fact, he suspected they were made in Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1780s, the period considered the golden age of the Newport style. If he was right, the furniture was worth a lot of money, but he had no way of knowing for sure.

The old man told MacWhinnie that the furniture belonged to his landlady, a woman named Caroline Tillinghast. MacWhinnie called her and told her he thought the pieces were valuable and asked if she’d consider selling them. She said no—the house was a rental property and she needed the furniture for the tenants. MacWhinnie let the matter drop, but he never forgot what he saw that day.

Ten years later, MacWhinnie happened to tell his story to an antiques dealer named Leigh Keno. (Does the name sound familiar? He and his twin brother Leslie appear regularly on the PBS TV series
Antiques Roadshow.)
When he heard MacWhinnie’s story, Keno thought the pieces must be reproductions but agreed that they were worth a look just in case, so they called Tillinghast to see if she would let them come over and examine the furniture. Yes, she told them, and now was a good time, because the old man had recently passed away and she was having the house cleaned for new tenants.

MacWhinnie was right—the pieces were genuine. They turned out to be the work of John Goddard, considered the most talented cabinetmaker of the period. Finally, nearly a decade after MacWhinnie had asked her the first time, Tillinghast agreed to put the antiques up for sale. She believed they were worth “in excess of $25,000”—and she was right. A few weeks, later Keno brokered the sale to a collector for $1 million. As for MacWhinnie, he and Keno split the hefty commission 50–50.

Most common first name in the world: Muhammad. Most common last name: Chang.

There’s nothing funny about Hitler, but he is endlessly fascinating. Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, almost 3 million classified files have been opened to the public
—
including a 1942 secret profile of Adolf Hitler compiled by the OSS. Here are some excerpts.

• “Hitler never allows anyone to see him while he is naked or bathing. He refuses to use colognes or scents of any sort on his body.

• “No matter how warm he feels, Hitler will never take off his coat in public.

• “In 1923, Nazi press secretary Dr. Sedgwick tried to convince Hitler to get rid of his trademark mustache or grow it normally. Hitler answered: ‘Do not worry about my mustache. If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it!’”

• “While dining with others, Hitler will allow the conversation to linger on general topics, but after a couple of hours he will inevitably begin one of his many monologues. These speeches are flawless from start to finish because he rehearses them any time he gets a moment.

• “His favorite topics include: ‘When I was a soldier,’ ‘When I was in Vienna,’ ‘When I was in prison,’ and ‘When I was the leader in the early days of the party.’

• “If Hitler begins speaking about Wagner and the opera, no one dares interrupt him. He will often sermonize on this topic until his audience falls asleep.

• “Hitler has no interest in sports or games of any kind and never exercised, except for an occasional walk.

• “He paces frequently inside rooms, always to the same tune that he whistles to himself and always diagonally across the room, from corner to corner.

• “He always rides in an open car for parades regardless of the weather, and expects the same of his entire staff, telling them: ‘We are not bourgeois, but soldiers.’

• “Hitler’s handwriting is impeccable. When famous psychologist Carl Jung saw Hitler’s handwriting in 1937, he remarked: ‘Behind this handwriting I recognize the typical characteristics of a man with essentially feminine instincts.’”

Mr. Ed’s real name was Bamboo Harvester.

• “Hitler loves the circus. He takes real pleasure in the idea that underpaid performers are risking their lives to please him.

• “He went to the circus on several occasions in 1933 and sent extremely expensive chocolates and flowers to the female performers. Hitler even remembered their names and would worry about them and their families in the event of an accident.

• “He isn’t interested in wild animal acts, unless there is a woman in danger.

• “Nearly every night Hitler will see a movie in his private theatre, mainly foreign films that are banned to the German public. He loves comedies and will often laugh merrily at Jewish comedians. Hitler even liked a few Jewish singers, but after hearing them he would remark that it was too bad he or she wasn’t an Aryan.

• “Hitler’s staff secretly made films for him of the torture and execution of political prisoners, which he very much enjoyed viewing. His executive assistants also secure pornographic pictures and movies for him.

• “He loves newsreels—especially when he is in them.

• “He adores gypsy music, Wagner’s operas, and especially American college football marches and alma maters.

• “To excite the masses, he also uses American College football-style music during his speeches.” His rallying cry—‘Sieg Heil!’—was even modeled after the cheering techniques used by American football cheerleaders.