Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (8 page)

Scientists at Australian National University prefer a more lowtech approach: They’ve introduced the Rolling Rabbit Run, the world’s first lawnmower powered entirely by rabbits. Constructed from bicycle wheels, chicken wire, and buckets, the device is basically a cylindrical rabbit cage that rolls around on the lawn as the rabbits eat the grass and fertilize it “naturally.” Perfecting the mower took a little longer than expected because scientists couldn’t get the rabbits to roll the cage on their own. They finally solved the problem by replacing the original pair of rabbits—one male, one female—with two males, after discovering that the male and the female kept stopping to mate.

In 1997, 12-year-old Ryan Tripp of Beaver, Utah, hopped onto his dad’s riding lawnmower and set out for Washington, D.C., more than 3,000 miles away. He made the trip (with his parents’ permission) to raise money for a four-month-old girl in his town who needed a liver transplant. Ryan arrived in Washington 42 days later, shattering the record for the world’s longest trip on a lawnmower. Still, not everything went according to plan: Tripp had hoped to mow the White House lawn upon his arrival, but he couldn’t get permission and had to settle for mowing a patch of grass at the U.S. Capitol. Bonus: He got to skip five weeks of school.

Why isn’t iron added to milk? Iron-fortified milk turns coffee green.

• In 1992 author Stephen King sued to have his name removed from
Stephen King’s Lawnmower
Man, a film based on his short story by the same name. King’s suit alleged that the movie bore no resemblance to his original story—the tale of a man who “cuts his lawn by eating it, and is ultimately swallowed by a lawnmower.”

• In December 1999 Sacramento, California, police were called to the residence of one Francis Karnes, 39, after neighbors reported hearing shots fired. They arrived several minutes later. Sure enough, Karnes had indeed fired off a few shots—at his lawnmower, after it refused to start. He was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment; no word on whether the mower survived the assault.

• In March 1995, an unidentified 54-year-old Norwegian man was convicted of drunken driving—on a lawnmower—near the town of Haugesund. According to newspaper reports, police did not notice anything erratic about the man’s driving, they just administered an alcohol test as part of a random spot-check of “motorists.” The test revealed that the man had consumed the equivalent of three beers, well over the legal limit in Norway. He was convicted of driving under the influence, fined $795, and sentenced to 24 days in jail. But a court later suspended the sentence after concluding that “the lawnmower’s top speed of 6 mph was too slow to be dangerous.”

• On a Saturday morning in July 1996, Rickey Worthley of Belton, Missouri, woke up his 17-year-old son Michael at 6 a.m. and told him to mow the lawn. When Michael told his father that 6 a.m. was too early to mow the lawn and that he wanted to sleep a few hours longer, Worthley dragged the mower into Michael’s room, fired it up, and started mowing the carpet. Michael called the cops on pop; they arrested Worthley and charged him with assault. Injured party: the carpet.

Armadillos can walk underwater in order to cross rivers.

Ever wonder where the first movie theater opened? Or when the lawn mower was invented? Here are the stories of when and how several things we take for granted came were created, from
The Book of Firsts,
by Patrick Robertson.

Date:
June 26, 1896

Background:
The first permanent movie theater was the 400-seat Vitascope Hall in New Orleans. Admission was 10 cents. Patrons were allowed to look in the projection room and see the Edison Vitascope projector for another 10 cents. Most of the films shown there were short scenic items, including the first English film to be released in America, Robert Paul’s
Waves Off Dover. A
major attraction was the film
The Kiss,
which introduced sex to the American screen.

Date:
December 1882

Background:
The first electrically illuminated Christmas tree was installed in the New York City home of Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps were manufactured in nine-socket sets by the Edison General Electric Co. in 1901. Each socket took a miniature 2-candlepower carbon-filament lamp operating on 32 volts.

Date:
1848

Background:
Alexander Turney Stewart opened the Marble Dry Goods Palace on Broadway in New York City. Stewart had been a schoolmaster in Ireland before he emigrated in 1823 and set up his own business. At the time of its erection the Marble Dry Goods Palace was the largest shop in the world, extending the whole length of a city block. By 1876, the year of his death, Stewart’s company had annual sales of $70 million, and his personal fortune was estimated at $80 million. He was never known to have given away any of his vast wealth.

In 1960 Joyce Haber, Hollywood gossip columnist, coined the phrase “A-list party.”

Uncle John has an interesting chicken-and-egg question for you: What came first, the camera or the film? If you think they were invented at about the same time, this story will surprise you.

The ancient principle of the camera is child’s play. Hard to believe? Here’s a simple experiment you can try at home: Cover the windows of a room with black construction paper or aluminum foil until absolutely no light is let in. Turn out the lights. Then poke a tiny hole in the paper or foil, so that a single pinprick of light enters the room and strikes the wall opposite the windows. What do you see?

If you do it just right, when the light enters the “dark room”
(camera obscura
in Latin) and hits the wall, it will form a faint upside-down image of the view outside the window. This simple phenomenon is the basis upon which the science of photography is built.

One of the first people to make note of such an image was a Chinese scholar Mo Ti, who lived in the fifth century B.C. In the 10th century A.D., Arab physicist Alhazen discovered that the smaller he made the hole, the sharper the image came into focus. If the hole was tiny enough, the image became very clear.

Reproducing the image created by a camera obscura was easy: you simply held a piece of paper up against the wall, so that the image landed on the paper, then traced it. The camera obscura became a useful scientific tool. Scientists built special “dark rooms” for the sole purpose of studying the sky, eclipses, changes in the seasons, and other natural events. The tracings made with the aid of the camera obscuras were so detailed and accurate that by the 1500s, people were using them to paint portraits, landscapes, and other scenes.

In 1568 a professor at the University of Padua named Daniello Barbaro discovered that replacing the primitive pinhole with a glass lens brought the camera obscura image into a brighter and sharper focus.

Ice covers about 15% of the Earth’s land mass.

In the 17th century, scientists and artists developed portable camera obscuras that allowed them to study objects in the field. Early versions were essentially lightproof tents with lenses sewn into the walls. Later versions were two-foot-long wooden boxes that projected an image onto a piece of frosted glass built into the lid. The user could then trace the image by placing a piece of paper over the glass.

The images created by these early single-lens camera obscuras were circular in shape, with distortion along the edges. In the 1700s, a complex multilens system was introduced that corrected the distortion, and the camera obscura became as common a part of the painter’s art as brushes and paint.

Artists weren’t the only ones putting the camera to use—explorers took them on expeditions all over the world so that they could record the wonders they encountered. In the process, the boxes literally changed the way people saw the world.

For all of these improvements, there was still no way to
capture
the camera obscura’s image other than by manually tracing it. There it was, tantalizingly projected onto a wall or a pane of frosted glass. You could look at it, you could reach out and touch it. But capturing the actual image was as impossible as capturing one’s own shadow. It would remain so for another 75 years…until the invention of film.

So which came first, the camera or the film? The camera—by centuries.

For part II of the “History of Photography,” turn to
page 107
.

The state of Arizona does not follow Daylight Saving Time, with the exception of the Navajo Reservation, which does—except for the Hopi Partitioned Land which lies inside the Navajo Reservation, which doesn’t.

Tuesday Weld was born on a Friday.

Professor Howard Richler, etymologist and BRI member, sent us this explanation of why we say what we say every time the phone rings… Hello?

The common English word of greeting dates back to the 14th century. Some sources say
hello
descends from the Old German
hala,
a form of “to fetch.” Others believe the word to be a derivative of the Middle French
hola,
meaning “hey there.” Still another theory claims
hello
is a derivative of the cry
au loup
used by Norman English hunters when they spotted a wolf.

Today,
“Hello”
is the most common telephone greeting in the United States. But Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, actually preferred the term
“Ahoy.”
In fact, the first telephone operators in New Haven, Connecticut, greeted callers with “Ahoy! Ahoy!” The problem was that although
“Ahoy”
was seaworthy, it didn’t resonate with landlubbers in Peoria.

Expressions such as “Are you there?”—one of the first telephone salutations—were too long, and “Good day” and “Good morning” could be confusing in a continent with so many time zones. American phone companies hunted for a new word to politely and neutrally initiate telephone conversations. Enter “Hello.”

By the late 1890s, only 10 years after Bell’s invention went into commercial use, “Hello” was a clear victor over “Ahoy.” It was in such common use that telephone operators were called “hello girls.” But Bell didn’t like it. On January 12, 1914, he wrote in a letter that he had “never used the exclamation hello in connection with the telephone. My call is, and always has been “hoy, hoy.” He spent the rest of his life lobbying for the adoption of “Hoy” or “Ahoy.”

Why did Bell disdain the use of “Hello”? Because he didn’t think of it. Who did? Bell’s rival, Thomas Edison. Edison thought “Hoy, hoy” was silly and is generally credited with introducing “Hello” as an alternative telephone greeting.

America’s most popular candy bar? Snickers.

Here are the origins of several symbols we use in everyday life.

?
QUESTION MARK
Origin:
When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word
questio
—meaning “question”—at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to
qo,
which caused another problem—readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So, they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercase
q
on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the
q
to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Origin:
Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word
io,
meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the i above the o, it forms the exclamation point we use today.