Why do Clocks run clockwise? (25 page)

We asked Brown if the Beetle might be resurrected. After all, the death of convertibles was prematurely announced just a few years ago. Brown wasn’t optimistic. He estimates that there are twenty thousand hardcore addicts who would buy a new Beetle immediately, but after that, it would be a hard sell. Volkswagen would have to sell a Beetle with the old specifications for approximately eight to ten thousand dollars today, overpriced for an entry-level car.

Instead, for 1988 Volkswagen has chosen to offer the Fox, a new entry-level model with a list price of under six thousand dollars. Intended to compete with the new Korean cars, as well as Japanese subcompacts, the Fox won’t be the cheapest car on the block, the way the old Beetle used to be.

The race of so many full-line automobile companies to compete in the entry-level field indicates that there is still profit to WHY DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? / 193

be made in low-priced cars. Volkswagen probably would have clung to the Beetle indefinitely as long as it sold, but the Bug’s demise, ironically, forced Volkswagen to expand its thinking and planning.

A one-product company (the Karmann Ghia, VW’s sports car, was never a big seller in the U.S.) is always in jeopardy.

The success of the Beetle was dependent on the serendipitous confluence of several factors: a bulging demographic group of baby boomers coming into driving age; a clever marketing and advertising campaign; and a growing wave of antiestablishment thinking. But most of all, there was that charisma. When charisma wanes, it’s hard to regain that magic. Ask the makers of Flavor Straws. Or Screaming Yellow Zonkers.

Submitted by J. Spring, of Citrus Heights, California
.

194 / DAVID FELDMAN

Why Are the Flush Handles on Toilets on the Left
Side?

Have we finally found a product that was designed with the left-hander in mind? Of course not.

Most early flush toilets were operated by a chain above the tank that had to be pulled down by hand. Almost all of the chains were located on the left side of the toilet, for the user had more leverage when pulling with the right hand while seated.

When the smaller handles near the top of the tank were popularized in the 1940s and 1950s, many were fitted onto existing toilets then equipped with pull-chains. Therefore, it was cheaper and more convenient to place the new handles where they fitted standard plumbing and fixtures.

The handles offered the user a new dilemma: should one flush while seated or flush while standing? Although this subject is not often discussed in polite quarters, we are more that delighted to tread on delicate matters in order to stamp out Imponderability wherever we find it. Alexander Kira, in his wonderful book,
The
Bathroom
, notes that in the “Cornell Survey of Personal Hygiene Attitudes and Practices in 1000 Middle-Class Households,” 34 percent of respondents flushed the toilet while still seated and 66 percent flushed while standing up. Thus, it would seem that the majority of Americans flush either left-handed or else in an awkward right-handed crossover style. Would there be reason to switch handles over to the right side?

In
The Bathroom
, Kira argues that the current configuration discriminates not so much against right-handers as against flushing-while-seated types:

Most flushing mechanisms are poorly located…. convenient only if the user flushes the closet after rising and turning around. A sizable number of persons prefer, however, for one reason or another (odor, peace of mind, and so on), to flush the closet while seated and after each bowel movement and must engage in contortions to do so. Since the water closet is presently also used for

WHY DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? / 195

standing male urination, this might be regarded as a justification for its location.

Kira sees the flushometer as no solution to our left-right problem.

Generally used only in public bathrooms, flushometers are those levers that you never know whether you are supposed to operate with your foot or your hand. Evidently, people use both, making the flushometer unsanitary. The device’s position, about eighteen inches off the floor, is awkward for either extremity.

Europeans have fared little better in tackling this design problem.

Most European toilets have a pull-up knob located on top of the tank. The placement of the knob not only makes it most difficult to flush from a seated position, but it prevents using the top of the tank as a magazine rack or radio stand.

Alexander Kira’s solution to all of these problems is Solomonlike in its ecumenicalism. He recommends a spring-loaded flush button set into the floor that would allow users to flush from either a seated or standing position, “before, during, or after elimination.” These buttons can be operated electronically rather than mechanically, freeing them from the fate of the current flush handle, the placement of which is dictated by the demands of mechanics rather than the convenience of the user.

Submitted by Lisa R. Bell, of Atlanta, Georgia. Thanks also to:
Linda Kaminski, of Park Ridge, Illinois
.

196 / DAVID FELDMAN

Why Does the Price of Gas End in Nine-Tenths of
a Cent?

No one we contacted in the oil or service-station businesses could find any reason to believe that gas isn’t priced at $1.19.9 for the same reason that automobiles are priced at $9,999 or record albums at $8.98. As Ralph Bombardiere, the executive director of the New York State Association of Service Stations, Inc., put it, “There is and will always be a big difference between the price of 29.9 cents and 30.0 cents, and the same principle will follow through when the number reaches $1.29.9 and $1.30.0.”

It is doubtful that sophisticated marketing surveys were ever undertaken by service stations or oil companies to establish the effectiveness of ending prices in nine-tenths of a cent, but the use of fractional prices goes back at least seventy years. C. F. Helvie, customer relations manager for the Mobil Oil Corporation, sent us a fascinating letter, the result of combing through Mobil’s collection of photographs of old service stations and other reference materials.

Helvie found a photograph of a 1914 Texaco gas station that displayed a sign advertising gasoline for 14½ cents per gallon. The Mobil material suggests, but does not conclusively prove, that the practice of ending unit pricing of gas with nine-tenths started no earlier than the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The Great Depression decimated the demand for gasoline. More than 2.6 million cars and trucks were taken off the road, and the consumption of gasoline was down a billion gallons per year in both 1932 and 1933. Gas stations fought to survive. Helvie writes: Production at the time was running far above demand and the market quickly went into a serious oversupply situation. It was at that time that premiums such as candy, cigarettes, ash trays, dolls, and countless other giveaway items made their appearance at service stations. In such a competitive climate, it seems reasonable to assume that the gasoline marketers of the day would have been

WHY DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? / 197

attracted to the concept of fractional pricing. In addition, mechanical gasoline pumps, with computers that could be set to fractional prices, began to make their appearance at service stations at about the same time.

When prices zoomed at the gas pumps during the oil crisis of the 1970s and federal price and supply controls were imposed, individual stations lost the autonomy to set prices. The government issued mandated formulas for pricing, which resulted in unusual fractional amounts. Further compounding the problem was that, during this period, the price of gasoline went above one dollar per gallon, and most computers were incapable of handling prices of more than two digits. Until their computers could be modified, many service stations simply set their pumps to calculate half-gallon prices, which led to more strange fractions. Some stations chose to sell at a price per liter and maintained the usual nine-tenths fraction.

Consumers are accustomed to most retail establishments charging a cent or two less than a round number. Helvie indicated that his experience as a customer-relations expert was that “most motorists accept and understand gasoline prices ending in nine-tenths of a cent per gallon, but they react negatively to prices ending in other fractions.”

Submitted by John D. Wright, of Hazelwood, Missouri. Thanks
also to: Charles F. Myers, of Los Altos, California
.

198 / DAVID FELDMAN

When I Open the Hot-Water Tap, Why Does the
Sound of the Running Water Change As It Gets
Hot?

The whistling sound you hear occurs with cold water as well, but is more common with hot water. Whistling occurs when there is a restriction of water flow in the pipes. According to Tom Higham, executive director of the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials, the source of the noise depends on the construction of the plumbing: “If the piping is copper, the cause is usually attributed to undersized piping. If the pipe is galvanized steel, noise is usually caused by a buildup of lime which reduces the area for the flow of the water.” Water flow is restricted more often with hot water, as Richard W. Church, president of the Plumbing Manufacturers Institute, ex

WHY DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? / 199

plains it, because “of additional air in the hot water formed when the molecules expand during the heating process.”

The crackling noise you hear in the water heater is caused by lime accumulations in its tank. As the water heater expands and contracts, depending on the temperature, the lime breaks off and falls to the bottom of the tank. The water pipes simply transmit and amplify the glorious sound.

Submitted by Glenn Worthman, of Palo Alto, California
.

The Measurement of “One Foot” Was Meant to
Approximate the Length of a Man’s Foot. How
Did They Decide How Long a Meter Should Be?

The U.S. Constitution gives the Congress the power to fix uniform standards for weights and measures. Previously, little uniformity existed among different colonies or even among different countries in Europe or Asia. For example, King Henry I personally provided the nose and thumb that set the standard for the length of a yard, while other nations didn’t even use the yard as a measure. Asian nations must have wondered if our “feet” really measured the length of a human foot.

200 / DAVID FELDMAN

Much of the clamor for a uniform system of measurement came from France. In 1790, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly of France asked the French Academy of Sciences to provide an invariable standard for all weights and measures. One committee responded quickly, urging that the Academy accept a decimal system as the simplest and most elegant solution. A subsequent committee recommended that the basic measure of length of such a system should represent a portion of the earth’s circumference: a unit equal to one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant of the earth’s meridian (in other words, one ten-milionth of an arc representing the distance between the Equator and the North Pole).

This unit was later given the name
mètre
, from the Greek word
metron
, meaning “a measure.” The meter was the foundation for all of the other measures, as Valerie Antoine, executive director of the U.S. Metric Association, Inc., explains:

The unit of mass was to be derived by cubing some part of this length unit and filling it with water [thus, the “gram” became the mass of one cubic centimeter of water at its temperature of maximum density]. The same technique would also provide the capacity measure. In this way, the standards of length, mass, and capacity were all to be derived from a single measurement, infinitely reproducible because of natural origins, precisely interrelated, and decimally based for convenience.

The “metric system” did not catch on beyond France, at first, but its rigidity and standardization made it appealing to scientists and engineers throughout the world. Few people realize that as early as 1866, by Act of Congress, it was made “lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealing or court procedures.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the supremacy of the metric system was assured among developed nations.

The advances in precision instruments made the original definition of the meter too fuzzy. The “Treaty of the Meter,” an WHY DO CLOCKS RUN CLOCKWISE? / 201

1875 agreement, established a mechanism to refine and amend the metric system, and seventeen nations, including the United States, joined the “Metric Convention.” Since 1893, the meter has been defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299, 792, 458 of a second (in other words, the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second). As the speed of light is unlikely to change in the near future, scientists are confident that the meter will have a long life as a standard measurement.

Valerie Antoine mildly reprimanded us for using the spelling