Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (19 page)

In the mid-1970s, a team of Sony engineers headed by Mitsuro Ida created the Pressman—a portable tape recorder that could fit into a shirt pocket. As Sony expected, it quickly became standard equipment for journalists. But there was one small problem: the Pressman recorded in mono, and radio journalists preferred working in stereo. They requested a stereo version.

Sony’s engineers put their best into it, shrinking stereo components, trying to get them into a small, pocket-sized case. They almost made it—but could only fit in the playback parts and two tiny speakers. Since the whole point was to come up with a tape recorder, the attempt was an embarrassing and expensive failure. Still, the quality of the sound was surprisingly good. So Ida kept the prototype around the shop instead of dismantling it. Some of the engineers started playing cassettes on it while they worked.

THE MISSING LINK

One day Masaru Ibuka wandered by. Although he’d co-founded the company with Akio Morita, he was considered too quirky and creative to fit into day-to-day operations. So he was made “honorary chairman”—a title that gave him much respect, little authority, and lots of time to wander the halls of Sony.

Ibuka stopped to watch the Pressman engineers working on their design problem. He heard music coming from the unsuccessful prototype and asked, “Where did you get this great little tape player?” Ida explained that it was a failure because it couldn’t record.

Ibuka spent a lot of his time roaming around, so he knew what was going on all over the company. He suddenly remembered another project he’d seen that was being developed on the other side of the building—a set of lightweight portable headphones.

“What if you got rid of the speakers and added the headphones?” he asked Ida. “They’d use less power and increase the quality of the sound. Who knows, maybe we can sell this thing even if you can’t record on it.” The engineers listened politely and respectfully—while privately thinking the old man had finally lost it. Why make a tape recorder that can’t record?

LISTENING WELL

Ibuka took the gadget, with headphones attached, to Morita. He too was skeptical…until he heard the quality of the stereo music. To the shock of the engineering team, Morita gave it a green light. It was dubbed the Walkman, to go along with the Pressman.

The marketing department thought it was a terrible idea. They projected that the company would lose money on every unit sold. Even the name seemed wrong. According to American distributors, “Walkman” sounded “funny” to English ears. So Sony rolled the product out as the “Soundabout” in the U.S. and the “Stowaway” in England. Their 1979 publicity campaign—a low-budget, lukewarm affair aimed at teens—got virtually no results. It seemed as though the Walkman’s critics were right.

As it turned out, though, Sony had just targeted the wrong market. Teens had boom boxes…it was
adults
who wanted the Walkman. The little unit was perfect for listening to Mozart while jogging or the Stones while commuting, and was small enough to fit into a briefcase or the pocket of a business suit. To Sony’s surprise, white collar workers discovered the Walkman on their own. It became a sudden, raging success. Sony had prepared an initial run of 60,000 units; when the first wave hit, they sold out instantly.

The world still loves the Walkman and its offspring. By 1997, four million personal cassette players were sold a year.

You already know the names. Here’s who they belonged to.

G
odfry Keebler.
Opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1853. His family expanded it. Today, Keebler is second-largest producer of cookies and crackers in the U.S.

Linus Yale, Jr.
Invented the first combination locks and the first flat-key cylinder locks, in the 1860s. In 1868, the Yale Lock Company was formed to mass-produce his creations.

Joseph Campbell.
A fruit merchant, he opened a canning factory in 1869. His specialties included jellies, salad dressing, and mincemeat—but not soup. The company added condensed soup in 1897. (First variety: tomato.)

Pleasant and John Hanes.
Brothers who built a tobacco business in the late 1800s, then sold it in 1900. Each invested his profits in a textile company. John’s made socks and stockings; Pleasant’s made new-fangled two-piece men’s underwear. They were separate companies until 1962, when the families joined forces.

Carl Jantzen.
Part owner of the Portland Knitting Mill. In 1910, at the request of a member of the Portland Rowing Club, he developed the first elasticized swimsuits. They became popular around the country as “Jantzens.” In 1920, the company changed its name to Jantzen.

John M. Van Heusen.
Started the Van Heusen Shirt Company. In 1919 it became the first to sell dress shirts with collars attached. Developed a way to weave cloth on a curve in 1920, which made one-piece collars possible…and revolutionized the shirt industry.

Arthur Pitney and Walter Bowes.
In 1901 Pitney created a machine that could stick postage stamps on letters. In 1920 he joined forces with Bowes. Because of WWI, there was a letter-writing boom, and the post office needed a machine to keep up. In 1920 Congress passed a bill allowing the Pitney-Bowes machine to handle the mail.

Some facts about that big lightbulb in the sky, from astronomer (and BR1 member) Richard Moeschl.

It takes 8.3 minutes for the sun’s light—traveling at 186,282 miles a second—to reach Earth. (At that speed, light can travel around the Earth seven times in one second.)

The sun looks yellow-gold because we’re viewing it through the Earth’s atmosphere. Judging from its surface temperature, the sun’s color is probably closer to white.

The temperature of the sun at its core is around 73 million degrees F. It takes 50 years for this energy to reach the sun’s surface, where we can see it as light.

The English astronomer James Jeans once figured that if you placed a piece of the sun’s core the size of the head of a pin on Earth, its heat would kill a person 94 miles away.

The temperature of the sun’s photosphere, the part that sends us light, is about 10,000 degrees F.

The sun contains 99.9% of the matter in the solar system.

The sun produces more energy in one second than human beings have produced in all of our history. In less than a week, the sun sends out more energy than we could make by burning all the natural gas, oil, coal, and wood on Earth.

The total energy output of the sun is 1.92 calories per minute per square centimeter, or 3.83 x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000000,000 watts.

The Earth receives 2 one-billionths of the sun’s power.

The amount of power that falls on each square foot of the Earth’s surface per minute is about 126 watts, enough to light two standard 60-watt lightbulbs.

The surface gravity on the sun is 28 times that of Earth. If you weigh 120 pounds on Earth, on the sun you would weigh 3,360 pounds.

The sun rotates once every 26.8 days.

With every passing day, the sun is losing energy—but it still has about 5 billion years of life left in it.

Here’s the BRI’s cheesy tabloid section—a bunch of gossip about famous people.

A
LBERT EINSTEIN

• He applied to the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, but flunked the entrance exam. When his father asked his headmaster what profession Albert should adopt, he got the answer, “It doesn’t matter, he’ll never amount to anything.”

• For many years, Einstein thought of his work in physics as something of a hobby. He regarded himself as a failure because what he really wanted to do was play concert violin. Einstein was uncharacteristically intense when he played his violin, cussing a blue streak whenever he made a mistake. One evening, while playing violin duets with Queen Elizabeth, Einstein suddenly stopped in the middle of the piece and unceremoniously told her she was playing too loudly.

MUHAMMAD ALI

• For some reason, as a child, he always walked on his tiptoes. When he got older, he played touch football, but wouldn’t play tackle because he thought it was too rough.

• Because he was afraid to fly, Ali (then going by his original name, Cassius Clay) almost didn’t make it to the 1960 Rome Olympics, where he won the gold medal that launched his career.

JANIS JOPLIN

• In 1965, when she was on the verge of becoming a blues star, strung out on heavy drugs, hanging out with Hells Angels, Joplin wrote to her parents and asked them to send her one present for Christmas: “a
Betty Crocker
or
Better Homes and Gardens
cookbook.”

• She once went on a blind date with William Bennett. He was apparently so traumatized that he eventually became drug czar under Ronald Reagan, and a conservative “family values” advocate.

GENERAL GEORGE PATTON

• On the way through Europe during World War II with his troops, Patton was continuously in danger from shelling, strafing, and bombing. In the middle of one scorched, scarred, and burning landscape, with the sound of explosions around him, he threw out his arms and looked to the skies as if bathing in a warm spring rain. “Could anything be more magnificent?” he shouted to the soldiers all around him. “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it!”

MICHAEL JACKSON

• Jackson’s favorite song? He told a group of reporters that it was “My Favorite Things,” performed by Julie Andrews.

• His opinion of other singers: Paul McCartney? Okay writer, not much of an entertainer. “I do better box office than he does.” Frank Sinatra? “I don’t know what people see in the guy. He’s a legend, but he isn’t much of a singer. He doesn’t even have hits anymore.” Mick Jagger? “He sings flat. How did
he
ever get to be a star? I just don’t get it. He doesn’t sell as many records as I do.” Madonna? “She just isn’t that good…. She can’t sing. She’s just an OK dancer…. She knows how to market herself. That’s about it.”

FIDEL CASTRO

• For Castro’s first revolutionary attack on a military post, he forgot his glasses. As a result, he could barely drive to the post, much less aim his gun accurately.

• Castro fancies himself quite a lady’s man. In fact, there are dozens of children in Cuba who claim him as father. His technique? One purported lover, a dancer at the Tropicana Hotel, said he read while making love. A French actress complained that he “smoked his damned cigar.” An American woman said he never took his boots off. Other women said he took them to romantic spots and then talked for hours on end about things like agricultural reform.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

• When he sat on a public toilet and another man entered the room, he’d quickly raise his legs in the stall “so that no one could tell anyone was there.”

In our last
Bathroom Reader,
we included a section about valuable things people have found. Since then we’ve found many more stories. Hey—maybe it’s not such a rare occurrence. It
could
happen to
you!

G
ARAGE SALE TREASURE

The Find:
Two Shaker “gift” paintings

Where They Were Found:
Inside a picture frame

The Story:
In 1994, a retired couple from New England bought an old picture frame for a few dollars at a garage sale. When they took the frame apart to restore it, two watercolor drawings—dated 1845 and 1854—fell out.

A few months later, the couple was traveling in Massachusetts and noticed a watercolor on a poster advertising the Hancock Shaker Village Museum. It was similar to the two they’d found. Curious, they did some research and found out the works were called “gift paintings.”

It turns out that the Shakers, a New England religious sect of the 1800s, did not allow decorations on their walls; Shaker sisters, however, were permitted to paint “trees, flowers, fruits and birds…to depict the glory of heaven.” The paintings were then “gifted” to other sisters and put away as holy relics. And one of the couple’s paintings was signed by the most famous of all “gift” artists, Hannah Cohoon.

They called a curator of the Hancock Museum with the news, but he didn’t believe them. Only 200 Shaker “gift” paintings still exist…and very few are of the quality they described. Moreover, all known paintings were in museums—none in private hands. Nonetheless, in January 1996, the couple brought the paintings to the museum, where they were examined and declared authentic. A year later, in January 1997, Sotheby’s sold them for $473,000.