Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (79 page)

No matter that Runge wasn’t even sure initially that all the allegations were true. “I really couldn’t see
The Lion King
one myself,” she admits, “until my teenagers traced it for me on the screen.” No matter that her source, Barry of Radix, now says he isn’t convinced himself about all the allegations. “I’m not sure about
The Little Mermaid,”
he says. Nor does it concern Mrs. Runge that
Movie Guide,
after spreading the
Aladdin
rumor, has since retracted its story.

“It may be Disney,” Runge explains. “But it still smells ‘pervert’ to me.”

A BRI member recently sent us this “encyclopedia,” which first appeared as “Encyclopedia Tropicana” in the
Miami Herald
in 1986. We think it makes entertaining bathroom reading and
it’s
the biggest piece we’ve ever included in a Bathroom Reader. It was written by Joel Achenbach, author of
Why Things Are.

I
NTRODUCTION

The TV is on the blink…You play with the dials, look behind the set, trace the wires and cables from the box to the wall, lips moving as you think. But you’re only pretending to discern the pattern. In your heart you know the truth: You live on the brink of the third millennium yet couldn’t teach a thing to a caveman.

No one expects you to be able to fix the TV set. That’s for repairmen. Experts. But the shameful fact is, you don’t really even know what a TV is. The basic principles elude you. You haven’t a clue as to what this thing is that you stare at every day. You are glad the circuitry is hidden. You are happy to be out of touch. You are a Modern Person.

We’ve been thinking about your problem. A recent survey by Northern Illinois University showed 85% of the public to be “technologically illiterate.” Only one person out of five knew how a telephone works. Four out of 10 thought rocket launchings caused major changes in the weather.

Almost without exception the great discoveries of human history have been acts of tremendous courage, rebellions against conventional wisdom, statements of heresy. The established powers killed Socrates, rebuked Copernicus, exiled Galileo, hounded Darwin. People died for knowledge that enriches us all. We repay the debt by abdicating all responsibility for the comprehension of ordinary things. If this stupefaction weren’t so general it would be an outrage.

That’s just how we feel.

So we had to ask ourselves: If we don’t explain to [BRI] readers the facts of modern life…who will? Do we want them to just hear about it on the street? In alleys or something? Do we want
to be responsible when our once-reputable readers wind up in the seedy back rooms of taverns, flipping through black-and-white diagrams of the insides of a Thermos? No, it would be too ugly. Read this, read it in public, with pride. Walk tall. Get with it. Do it for Socrates.

A

AIR

Air is made up of tiny particles, called molecules, which are of different makes and models, with the most common, the Ford Escort of molecules, being “nitrogen.” There also is a fair amount of “oxygen,” plus some “carbon dioxide,” and tiny traces of other gases, like “argon,” “xenon” and, “neon.” Scientists have recently become worried about the ingredients of the air. The burning of coal and oil causes an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a problem made worse by clear-cutting in the huge Amazon jungle, where vegetation cranks out a lot of oxygen. If the carbon dioxide gets too high, the atmosphere will begin to capture more of the sun’s heat, and warm up, and melt the polar ice caps, and ruin crops, and plummet the planet into a period of turmoil and decay. But probably not in your lifetime.

AIRPLANE

Ever notice how a fast runner seems to glide over the ground, barely touching it, while a big plodding jogger seems to make the ground shake? Air acts the same way. The faster it is moving, the less pressure it exerts. Remember that. It will be important later.

Now we’ve got a plane knifing through the air. Air molecules are just standing there, minding their own business, chatting with their neighbors, when suddenly they are sliced apart by this wing. Air molecules react in a strange way when this happens. They race desperately along the top and bottom of the wing, looking for each other.

The top of the wing is curved; the bottom is straight. So the air at the top has a longer distance to travel than the air on the bottom. But, driven by some primal atmospheric instinct (actually, by a nearly incomprehensible law of fluid dynamics) they arrive at the same time. How did they do this? The air on the top of the wing moved faster than the air at the bottom!

Faster air above the wing, slower air below the wing. That means there is more pressure under the wing than above it, and the wing rises, carrying the plane with it.

B

BATTERY

The battery works for the same reason that fillings hurt when you bite into aluminum foil. (See
Fillings, why they hurt.)

BLUE, WHY SKY IS

You must first understand what “blue” is. Blue is a color, one which, like pornography, defies easy definition, though we sure know it when we see it. Scientists can measure blue. It is what “light” looks like when it is coming at us in a particular wavelength (OK, you nerds, it’s 480 nanometers).

Wavelength, we rush to say, is not a word to be feared. It is not even in the same league as, for example, Stakhanovism
(see Names to Impress Your Date).
A wavelength is just what it sounds like. A wave. Of a certain length. Blue has shorter wavelengths, red longer. The sunlight, a mixture of lights of all sorts of wavelengths, comes bounding into the clear sky from deep space. It hits the air molecules and starts ricocheting all over the place. With every skip, every bounce, many of the longer light waves—red—get soaked up by the molecules. But the blue keeps bouncing around. (This is a function of the shape and shimmy of air molecules.) By the time the light zigzags into our eyes, it’s mostly blue.

This is when dust comes into the picture. Dust has a different shape from air molecules, a different shimmy. It soaks up the blue light. The less dust in the sky, the bluer it is. At dawn and dusk the sunlight comes in at a low angle, and must wade through gobs and gobs of dust hovering close to the Earth. So the sky turns orange, and then red.

BOMB, HYDROGEN,
how to build

We are going to tell you the secret of the hydrogen bomb. The secret is a substance as familiar as your morning cup of coffee. Now keep all this stuff to yourself. Inside a hydrogen bomb is an old-fashioned atom bomb that looks just like a soccer ball. It’s the trigger. That’s how mean hydrogen bombs are. They use atom bombs just to get them started. Below the atom bomb is a carrot-shaped container o nuclear fuel—various types of hydrogen atoms. The theory is this: Blow up the soccer ball, and the pressure will cause the carrot to compress, fusing the hydrogen atoms together. This simulates the events in the center of the sun. As two hydrogen atoms become one helium atom, they lose some of their weight. The lost weight, or mass, is converted to pure energy. KA-BLAMM!

The big problem is convincing the atomic bomb blast to squeeze the hydrogen evenly, the way you would crush a beer can, rather than just knock the whole contraption to kingdom come. The answer is to build the bomb
like a
Thermos (
see Thermos)
with “radiation reflectors” on the inside. A Thermos uses shiny glass, a hydrogen bomb uses super-thin sheets of Uranium-238, a metal. When the soccer ball explodes, there is a period of one-millionth of a second before the fireball can even begin to move, when invisible gamma rays and X-rays surge outward at the speed of light, bounce off the reflective casing, and pile-drive back into the carrot of hydrogen. The atoms fuse. And you get more bang for your buck.

Scientists needed something that would hold the carrot in place during the rocky ride from silo to target. But it had to be a special something: strong, yet totally unable to slow down or reflect the pressure from the atom bomb explosion. They looked and looked for the right material. Finally they got it: styrofoam.

A one-megaton bomb, big enough to thoroughly flatten Miami, would be the size of a suitcase. It would fit under your bed.

C

CAMERA, POLAROID

Light peeks through the shutter, hits the film. The film is like plywood. It has layers, each coated with silver bromide. The film is designed so that the top layer reacts to blue light. The next reacts to yellow. The next, red. As the sheet of film is ejected, the camera douses it with dyes. Red dye sticks to the part of the film that reacted to the red light. Same with the blue and yellow.

When the dyes soak through to the bottom layer—the layer that you will put in your photo album—blue, red and yellow dye are represented in approximately the same intensity and the same place within the picture frame as the light from the original image. We stress “approximately.”

CHIP, SILICON

The breakthrough that made small, efficient computers possible. Computers are basically machines that utilize the great speed of electricity to make millions of decisions in a matter of seconds. Computers see no grays: every problem is reduced to a series of yes-no decisions indicated by the turning on, or off, of a current. (Question: Is the number seven a prime number? Computer’s methodology: Is it evenly divisible by two? No. By three? No. By four? No. By five? No. By six? No. Answer: Yes, it is a prime number.)

This process, though fast, requires astoundingly elaborate circuitry, resembling a bafflingly complex street map, miles and miles of printed circuits forking off in all sorts of directions, wherever the options and alternatives take it. Original computers did this with wires and solder, and all of the circuitry required them to be the size of a 7-Eleven.

The silicon chip is a fingernail-sized slab which can be mass-produced and upon which tens of thousands of tiny, discrete circuits can be etched.

CLOCKS, DASHBOARD How they work: They don’t.

CORK,
how it gets into champagne bottles

The mushroom-shaped cork is steam-heated until it is very spongy, and then it is crammed into the bottle with a cramming tool. OK, so if it is so warm and mushy and slides in so easily, why doesn’t it pop right back out from the pressure of the gas? Because at the time it is corked, champagne is flatter than Alfalfa singing “Lady of Spain.” It earns its bubbles later, through fermentation in the bottle. By that time, the cork is dry and fat and holding fast.

D

DATE,
names to impress your

Bruno, Giordano.
In the 17th century he conceived of the universe as being infinite in time and space, filled with suns surrounded by planets. For this revelation he was accused of heresy and burned at the stake.

Condamine, Charles Marie dela
. Went to South America in 1735 to measure curvature of the Earth. Instead he discovered rubber.

Ham.
First American chimpanzee in space. Emerged from capsule snarling, tried to bite photographers.

Semmelweis, Ignaz
. A Hungarian physician in 1847, discovered concept of germs. Suggested doctors wash their hands once in a while. Infant mortality plummeted.

Stakhanov, Aleksei.
Miserable Russian coal miner who worked so hard and so efficiently he yanked out seven times as much coal as the average miserable coal miner. In 1935 the Soviet government announced the start of “Stakhanovism,” a system in which workers are encouraged to increase production, which no doubt sent a big thrill through the shafts.

Tull, Jethro.
English agriculturist, brought horseshoes to England from France in early 18th century.

F

FACTS, UNTRUE,
that
re
fuse to die

The Missing Link
. Supposedly an extinct creature halfway between apes and humans on the evolutionary chart. It’s not missing. Or if it is, no one’s looking for it. Darwin didn’t say humans evolved from apes. Both evolved from a common ancestor—an extinct apelike creature.

Double-jointed people
. No such thing. In some people, the ligaments that attach muscle to bone are more elastic.

Positive to negative flow of electricity
. Wiring diagrams always show current flowing from positive to negative. But it’s the other way around. The mistake was made by Benjamin Franklin after his famous experiment with the kite. Once the error was discovered there were too many books in print to change.