Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (69 page)

MITSUBISHI LOGO.
Today Mitsubishi is best known for its cars, but in the 1930s and ’40s it was better known for its infamous Zero, the warplane that was used to launch the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the company no longer produces airplanes, it still uses the same logo—
mitsu bishi,
or “three diamonds,” arranged in the shape of an airplane propeller.

STATUE OF ST. MICHAEL.
Located at Norway’s Trondheim Cathedral, it is considered one of the greatest Gothic structures in all of Northern Europe. Sculptor Kristofer Leirdal, 85, created the statue for the 12th-century cathedral when it was being restored in 1969. He says he based the figure—that of a winged angel with a spear poised to slay a dragon—on singer Bob Dylan. “I saw him as a representative of American opposition to the Vietnam War,” he recounted in 2001. “I thought it was appropriate to have a great poet on top of the tower.”

SUBARU LOGO.
In 1953 six Japanese companies merged to form one automobile company. They modeled their six-star logo after the Pleiades constellation, which also has six stars. In Japan the star cluster is known as
Subaru.

Animal magnetism: Homing pigeons can’t find their way home if a magnet is tied to their necks.

Proof that truth really is stranger than fiction.

“High school student Brandi Blackbear has filed a federal lawsuit against the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, school district. The suit claims Blackbear was unfairly suspended because the assistant principal believed her Wiccan ‘curse’ actually caused a teacher to become ill. ‘I, for one,’ said the Oklahoma director of the American Civil Liberties Union, ‘would like to see the evidence that a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell.’ ”

—
Bizarre News

WALTHAM ABBEY, Essex—“A senior citizen was involved in a low speed chase after he decided to go for a cruise in his electric wheelchair along the M25, Britain’s busiest motorway. According to Police Inspector Keith Fitzjohn, the man, whose name was not disclosed, was intercepted and taken home after being ‘lectured on the folly of driving an electric wheelchair on the M25.’ ”

—
Funny Times

BANGKOK—“Two Buddhist monks are suspected of ignoring their vows by drinking in a bar 62 miles north of Bangkok. According to police, bar employees said the monks—disguised in wigs and hats—had been there several times, drinking and singing karaoke. Buddhist monks are supposed to shave their heads and live simple lives devoid of materialism, forswearing wordly pleasures such as alcohol, sex and, apparently, karaoke.”

—
Associated Press

PEREIRA, Colombia—“A Colombian hairdresser says he has found a way to lick baldness—literally. His offbeat scalp treatment involves a special tonic and massage—with a cow’s tongue. ‘I feel more manly, more attractive to women,’ says customer Henry Gomez. ‘My friends even say “What are you doing? You have more hair. You look younger.” ’ ”

—
CNN Fringe

Only 6% of land on Earth is suitable for growing crops.

“Home-invading robbers tied up a Westminster, California, family on Halloween night, 2000, and loaded up their valuables, diligently pausing several times to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters.”

—
News of the Weird

BANGKOK—“Kesaraporn Duangsawan captured the hearts of the judges and walked away with 6,000 baht (about $135) as first runner-up in a Thai beauty contest. When pageant organizers discovered the beauty queen was a man, the disgraced 22-year-old admitted his fraud and handed back the prize money, but asked to keep the Miss Media runner-up sash ‘as a memento.’ ”

—
Reuters

“Singing hymns and praying for peace and luck, thousands of Buddhists greeted a holy tooth, believed to have belonged to Buddha, when it arrived in Taiwan. Monks in saffron robes escorted the tooth, encased in a miniature golden pagoda, off a flight from India. Dozens of women prostrated themselves. Others knelt, clasping their hands in front to express their reverence. Buddhists say the tooth brings blessings and keeps them from disaster.”

—
Wacky News

“Police in Manchester, England, stunned Louis Makin, 27, when they went to his home and asked if they could throw away his arm. Makin had the arm amputated two years ago after being attacked by thugs. It had then been frozen to be used as evidence, and police needed permission to destroy it. ‘I didn’t know they still had it,’ said Makin.”

—
“The Edge,”
The Oregonian

Stop your wine-ing. You need four tons of grapes to make one ton of raisins.

Sending a letter through the mail seems so simple—put a stamp on it and drop it in a mailbox—that it’s difficult to imagine that it took centuries for postal service to evolve into the form we recognize today. Here’s a look at how it happened.

When the Roman republic was founded in 509 B.C., it was little more than a city-state. But after centuries of conquest, it grew into an empire that included large parts of North Africa, most of Western Europe, and the entire Mediterranean.

Maintaining control over such a large area required that the central government in Rome be in regular contact with its representatives in every corner of the empire. This required a good system of roads and, just as importantly, a reliable and speedy postal system. Rome had both.

The emperor Augustus (27 B.C.–14 A.D.) is credited with establishing the imperial postal service, the
cursus publicus,
which consisted of relays, or
posts,
of runners stationed at intervals of 5 to 12 miles apart along the empire’s military roads. Later, boats were employed to carry mail from port to port across the Mediterranean Sea, and the runners were replaced by horse-drawn carriages. At the system’s peak, a message could travel as far as 170 miles in 24 hours, a speed unsurpassed in Europe until the 19th century.

There was, however, one major difference between the Roman postal system and our modern one: the
cursus publicus
was for official government communications only. If private citizens wanted to send a message to another part of the empire, they had to hire a courier to deliver it in person.

The collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. marked the end of centralized authority in Europe and split the continent into numerous kingdoms who waged war not only against each other, but also against their own subjects as they strived to establish authority. Parts of the
cursus publicus
lasted for more than 400 years after the Roman Empire collapsed, but in the centuries that followed, travel and trade across Europe declined, and so did literacy, which became the almost exclusive preserve of clerks and the clergy. By the time the last vestiges of the Roman system disappeared in Western Europe in the 9th century, it didn’t even matter—there wasn’t much demand for a public postal system since few people could read or write.

The average mail carrier delivers 2,300 pieces of mail to more than 500 different addresses along their route each day.

But things began to change in the 11th century. With the founding of numerous universities, monasteries, and cathedrals across Europe, correspondence began to increase somewhat, prompting many institutions to set up their own private corps of foot-messengers. Few of these services carried private mail, though, because the level of literacy was still low.

It wasn’t until after Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in about 1450 that literacy rates began rising to the point where letter carrying could become a profitable business. Local messenger services began popping up in towns and cities all over Europe. Some of these expanded into regional and nationwide services—the largest founded in 1290 by an Italian named Amadeo Tasso.

Tasso introduced courier service to one Italian city after another. After he died, his descendants continued to add new routes…
lots
of new routes. His family married into another prominent courier family, the Della Torres, and as the years passed, their combined business continued to expand. By the late 1500s, the family business, now known by the Germanicized name Thurn and Taxis, employed more than 20,000 couriers and delivered mail quickly, reliably, and
very
profitably, all over Europe.

By now a number of the royal houses of Europe, not comfortable with the idea of entrusting government communications to private courier services, began setting up their own national postal systems. In 1477 King Louis XI of France established the French Royal Service with 230 mounted couriers; England’s Henry VIII followed in 1516.

Neither of these systems attempted to provide service to the entire country, and neither accepted private mail…at first. But by 1600 it had dawned on the French government that charging private citizens to carry their mail would help offset the cost of operating the system, so it began accepting private mail for the first time. In 1627 a schedule of regular fees and timetables was put in place; eight years later, the English set up a similar postal service for the general public, completely independent from the one used by the government.

As these and other government-run mail services expanded, they began to restrict the activities of privately owned enterprises like Thurn and Taxis, forbidding them to compete in areas served by the national post. Thurn and Taxis managed to hang on until 1867, when, after 577 years in business, it sold its last remaining postal lines to the Prussian government. The era of large-scale, privately owned postal systems was over: by 1875, virtually every postal service in the world was a government monopoly.

Initially, there were no post offices in the New World. When a ship pulled into port, it dropped bags of mail at a nearby tavern or coffeehouse, where the European colonists would go to pick it up. Most such places also had a bag for outgoing mail—for a penny you could drop a letter in the bag, which an outgoing ship would deliver to a similar tavern or coffeehouse on the other side of the Atlantic.

It took a while for regular mail service to get established in the colonies. This was due in large part to the fact that initially individual colonies didn’t trust one another…and the need for communication between residents in neighboring colonies was minimal. It was much more common for colonists to send letters home to Europe.

Then, in 1737, a struggling 31-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin became the postmaster of Philadelphia. Franklin distinguished himself in the position, and in 1753 was appointed one of two joint postmasters general for the colonies. In the two decades that followed, Franklin did much to improve and expand the colonial postal service. He reorganized virtually the entire system, personally inspecting post offices, conducting surveys, and laying out newer, shorter routes. During these years, postal riders traveling between New York and Philadelphia began carrying mail at night as well as during the day, cutting the delivery time in half.

A field bee flies 50,000 miles to collect enough nectar to produce a pound of honey.

By the time the British fired him for pro-Revolutionary sympathies in 1774, Franklin had established regular, scheduled mail service from Maine to Florida and into Canada, and had also significantly improved mail service to England. (Ironically, although Franklin is better known as the first U.S. Postmaster General, he served for little more than a year before leaving the job to become ambassador to France.)

One of the hardest things about running the postal service in the new republic was keeping up with the rapid growth of the country. If anything, the U.S. Post Office grew faster than the country it served. As late as 1789, there were only 75 post offices in the entire country. Over the next 40 years, the number grew to more than 8,000, and by 1901 there were 76,945.

As the U.S. Post Office grew, the industrial revolution was vastly increasing the speed at which mail could be transported across the country. Mail that had once been transported on foot and by horseback along narrow dirt trails came to be delivered first by stagecoach, then by canal boat and steamboat, and then beginning in the 1830s, by railroad.

Transporting mail quickly and broadening the range of services offered was one thing; figuring out how to sort mail more quickly proved to be a much greater challenge. At the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. mail was still sorted almost entirely by hand, just as it had been nearly 200 years before. Tentative steps toward automating the sorting process were made in the late 1920s, but the Great Depression and World War II put off real modernization for another 15–20 years.