Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (32 page)

THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T TALK

The Book:
At the end of World War II, George DuPre, a Canadian,
returned from Europe and began telling neighbors of his exploits in the secret service. DuPre said he was part of the anti-Nazi French underground until he was captured by the Germans, who tortured him to get him to talk. At one point, DuPre said, they even gave him a sulphuric acid enema—but somehow he managed to keep silent, and later escaped.

As word of DuPre’s exploits spread, he became a Canadian national hero.
Reader’s Digest
printed an interview with him, which inspired Random House to publish
The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk
, the story of his experiences, in 1953.

What Happened:
Not long after his book was published, DuPre broke down during an interview with the Calgary Herald and admitted he’d made up the entire story. He’d actually spent the entire war in Canada and England. Random House realized it had been fooled and pulled
The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk
from its nonfiction list. But rather than destroy the books, the publisher changed the title to
The Man Who Talked Too Much
and began selling it as fiction. Sales went up 500%.

THE MEMOIRS OF LEE HUNG CHANG

The Book:
In 1913 Houghton Mifflin posthumously published
The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang
, the autobiography of one of the most famous Chinese statesmen of the era. The book was praised by many China experts—including John W. Foster, Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison, who had worked with Li Hung Chang during an 1897 peace conference. Chapters of the work were serialized in the
London Observer
and
The New York Sun
.

What Happened:
American Chinese experts praised the book. But
Chinese
experts immediately denounced it as a fake. They pointed out so many inaccuracies and discrepancies that Houghton Mifflin finally had to admit a problem and “look into the matter.” They discovered that the book’s “editor,” a man named William Mannix, was actually its author. Using books on China sent to him by friends, and a typewriter sent to him by the Governor of Hawaii, Mannix had written the book in 1912—while serving time for forgery in a Honolulu prison.

Strangely enough, the book can still be found in many university and public libraries today.

If you had to name just one person associated with an athletic shoe, it would be Michael Jordan, right? Here’s how he became Air Jordan, from the BRI’s long-time pop historian, Jack Mingo.

W
ALKING ON AIR

The air-filled shoe wasn’t Nike’s idea. The first air sole was patented in 1882, and over 70 more were registered with the U.S. Patent Office before 1969. They all failed because of technical problems.

In 1969, a designer named Frank Rudy gave it a shot. He left a job at Rockwell International during a downturn in the aerospace industry, and invested his time and money in an effort to develop a running shoe with air soles. After many attempts, he finally succeeded by using a thin polyurethane bag for an air cushion. Then he convinced the Bata shoe company to try it out.

The first prototypes worked great. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the oil embargo of 1974, and Bata’s supplier quietly changed its polyurethane formula to use less oil. The new formula wasn’t as strong as the old one; when the soles warmed up and air pressure increased, they would explode like a rifle shot. Bata suddenly lost interest.

LAST ATTEMPT

Nearly broke and desperate, Rudy flew to France to show Adidas what he had. He didn’t get anywhere with them, but while he was hanging around the Adidas offices, he heard an employee mention a little U.S. company named Nike that was selling running shoes on the West Coast. Rudy made some calls, found out there was a running shoe trade show that weekend in Anaheim, and caught the next flight to Southern California.

He stopped by the Nike booth in Anaheim just as it was closing and got the name of the company’s president, Phil Knight. Rudy immediately found a pay phone and called Knight at Nike’s head-quarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Knight listened to Rudy’s story, then invited him for a visit.

NIKE JUMPS IN

Knight, an amateur runner, personally took Rudy’s air-filled shoes for a run. They slowly deflated as he ran, but he saw their potential. “It was a great ride while it lasted,” he told Rudy. Then he put Rudy on retainer for six months, to see if he could make the idea work.

After much trial and error, Nike finally came up with something they liked—an inflated midsole that went between the regular sole of a shoe and the runner’s foot. Nike called their new creation the
Tailiwind
and rushed it into production at $50 retail—the highest price anyone had ever charged for a mass-produced running shoe. But runners bought them anyway. Unfortunately, a last-minute fabric switch resulted in a shoe that fell apart after a short time, infuriating customers. About half of the shoes were returned as defective.

Nike eventually got the bugs out. This time they decided not to release the shoe directly into the marketplace. They were going to wait and try something special.

LUCKY CHOICE

Meanwhile, Nike was reevaluating its marketing strategy. The company had been paying professional athletes anywhere from $8,000 to $100,000 apiece to wear and endorse their shoes. One day in 1983, Nike execs did an analysis and found they “owned” about half of the players in the NBA—at a cost of millions of dollars a year. In fact, they had 2,000 athletes on their endorsement roster. It was getting more expensive all the time and it wasn’t necessarily winning them any any more business.

So they decided to switch tactics and find one promising rookie…then sign him to a long-term contract before he got too expensive. They considered Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing, but finally settled on 20-year-old college junior Michael Jordan. Their plan was to design a brand-new shoe for him, push it hard, and tie the product to the man (and vice versa), so when consumers saw the player, they’d think “shoes!”

LAUNCHING AIR JORDAN

They had just the right product—the air-cushioned shoe. Nike offered Jordan $2.5 million for a five-year contract, plus royalties on every Air Jordan shoe sold. But Jordan turned them down. He didn’t particularly like Nike shoes. In fact, he loved Adidas and was willing to make concessions to sign with them. He told their representatives, “You don’t even have to match Nike’s deal—just come close.” But Adidas wasn’t interested. They offered only $100,000 a year, with no special shoe and no royalties. So, in August 1984, Jordan signed with Nike.

Nike came up with the distinctive black and red design for the Jordan shoe. In fact, it was so distinctive that the NBA commissioner threatened to fine him $1,000 if he wore Air Jordan shoes during games, because they violated the NBA “uniformity of uniform” clause. Jordan wore them anyway, creating an uproar in the stands and in the press…and Nike gladly paid the fine.

FLYING SOLO

It was the beginning of a brilliant advertising campaign. Air Jordans went on to become the most successful athletic endorsement in history, selling over $100 million worth of merchandise in the first year alone. The dark side: Air Jordans became so popular that it became dangerous to wear them in some cities, as teenagers began killing other teenagers for their $110 sneakers. And the company was embarrassed—or should have been—by the revelation that a worker in its Far East sweatshops would have to work for several weeks to make enough money to buy a pair.

Despite occasional bad publicity and considerable competition over the years, however, Air Jordans became so successful that in 1997, Michael Jordan and Nike announced that after his retirement from professional basketball, Jordan would be heading his own division of Nike.

There have always been women inventors—even if they’ve been over-looked in history books. Here are a few you may not have heard of.

M
ELITTA BENTZ
,
a housewife in Dresden, Germany

Invention:
Drip coffeemakers

Background:
At the beginning of the 20th century, people made coffee by dumping a cloth bag full of coffee grounds into boiling water. It was an ugly process—the grounds inevitably leaked into the water, leaving it gritty and bitter.

One morning in 1908, Frau Bentz decided to try something different: she tore a piece of blotting paper (used to mop up after runny fountain pens) from her son’s schoolbook and put it in the bottom of a brass pot she’d poked with holes. She put coffee on top of the paper and poured boiling water over it. It was the birth of “drip” coffeemakers—and the Melitta company. Today, Melitta sells its coffeemakers in 150 countries around the world.

LADY ADA LOVELACE,
daughter of British poet Lord Byron

Invention:
Computer programming

Background:
The forerunner of modern computers—called the “analytical engine”—was the brainchild of a mathematical engineer named George Babbage. In 1834 Babbage met Lady Lovelace, and the two formed a partnership, working together on the engine’s prototype. In the process, Lovelace created the first programming method, which used punch cards. Unfortunately, tools available to Babbage and Lovelace in the mid-1800s weren’t sophisticated enough to complete the machine (though it worked in theory). Lovelace spent the rest of her life studying cybernetics.

LADY MARY MONTAGU,
a British noblewoman

Invention:
Smallpox vaccine

Background:
In 1717, while traveling in Turkey, she observed a curious custom known as
ingrafting.
Families would call for the services of old women, who would bring nutshells full of “virulent”—live smallpox—to a home. Then it would be “ingrafted” into a patient’s open vein. The patient would spend a few days in bed with a slight illness but was rendered immune to smallpox. This technique was unknown in England, where 30% of smallpox victims died. Montagu convinced Caroline, Princess of Wales, to try it on her own daughters. When it worked, she anonymously published
The Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small-pox by a Turkish Merchant
. Despite vehement opposition from the church and medical establishments, the idea took hold. Lady Montagu lived to see England’s smallpox death rate drop to 2%.

MARGARET KNIGHT,
an employee of the Columbia Paper Bag Company in the late 1800s

Invention:
The modern paper bag

Background:
Knight grew so tired of making paper bags by hand that she began experimenting with machines that could make them automatically. She came up with one that made square-bottomed, folding paper bags (until then, paper sacks all had V-shaped bottoms). But her idea was stolen by a man who’d seen her building her prototype. A court battle followed in which the main argument used against Knight was her “womanhood.” But she proved beyond a doubt that the invention was hers and received her patent in 1870. Knight was awarded 27 patents in her lifetime, but was no businesswoman—she died in 1914 leaving an estate of only $275.05.

BETTE NESMITH GRAHAM,
a secretary at the Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas in the early 1950s

Invention:
Liquid Paper

Background:
Graham was a terrible typist…but when she tried to erase her mistakes, the ink on her IBM typewriter just smeared. One afternoon in 1951, while watching sign painters letter the bank’s windows, she got a brilliant idea: “With lettering, an artist never corrects by erasing but always paints over the error. So I decided to use what artists use. I put some waterbase paint in a bottle and took my watercolor brush to the office. And I used that to correct my typing mistakes.” So many other secretaries asked for bottles of “Mistake Out” that in 1956 she started a small business selling it. A year later, she changed the formula and founded Liquid Paper, Inc. In 1966 her son, Michael Nesmith, made more money as a member of the Monkees than she did with Liquid Paper. But in 1979, she sold her company to Gillette for $47 million.

Often success and disaster are a lot closer than we’d like to think. Here are some classic “near misses.”

A
N ASSASSINATION

Theodore Roosevelt:
On October 14,1912, the former president was on his way to a speech in Milwaukee when a man named John Schrank drew a revolver, pointed it at Roosevelt, and pulled the trigger. Roosevelt staggered but didn’t fall. No blood could be detected, but Roosevelt’s handlers begged him to go to the hospital. He refused and delivered a 50-minute speech to a cheering throng. However, when he pulled the 100-page speech out of his vest, he noticed a bullet hole in it. It turned out that the bullet had ripped through the paper and penetrated four inches into Roosevelt’s body, right below his right nipple. If the written speech hadn’t slowed the bullet down, he would have been killed. After speaking, Roosevelt was treated for shock and loss of blood.