Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (80 page)

Columbus sailing off the edge of the world
. No one was actually worried about this. Pythagoras proposed a spherical world as early as the sixth century B.C. Then, in the second century A.D., the Roman astronomer Ptolemy proved the Earth was spherical, pointing out the round shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse, and the obvious fact that the masts of sailboats come into view on the horizon before the hull.

The Fifth Dimension
. A 1960s pop group. As far as spatial and temporal dimensions are concerned, we know of only four: length, breadth, height, and time. It was the last that finished off the singing group.

What steam looks like
. It looks like nothing. You can’t see steam, just as you can’t see any gas. What you think is steam is actually condensed water vapor. Look at the spout of a steaming kettle. There is a brief space, just outside the spout, where you cannot see anything. That’s steam.

FILLINGS,
why they hurt when you bite into aluminum foil

What you are feeling is the basic fact of nature that makes batteries possible. There are two kinds of substances that can conduct electricity. One kind is just dying to send its electrons off on imperialistic forays; the other is so willing to take in foreign electrons that it will accept even those with obviously faked passports.

But despite all the intentions, the electrons can’t go anywhere without a middle man to negotiate the passage. In your mouth, saliva serves this purpose admirably, creating a slick path from the aluminum foil to the metal alloy in your filling. There is a mass migration of electrons (an electric current), which, when it occurs in the area of your back molar, comes as something of a shock. In the typical car battery, the electron donor and recipient are carbon and zinc, and the conducting liquid is sulfuric acid.

G

GUILLOTINE,
consciousness after use of

Named after French physician J. I. Guillotin (1738-1814), who improved upon previous designs by angling the blade, making it more of a slicer than a chopper. Because of oxygen stored in the brain at any given moment, says Dade County Chief Medical Examiner Joe Davis, an executed person is probably conscious for up to 10 seconds after the beheading, and can probably see and hear. We checked it out with a few neurologists. They were sharply divided on the subject.

H

HEISENBERG’S

UNCERTAINTY

PRINCIPLE

You’re at a cocktail party. Clive, whom you hate, is acting superior. You make an innocuous comment to the effect that it must be 100 degrees outside. Clive says, “Of course, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that it is impossible to make a completely accurate measurement.” Here’s what you should say: “Fool! Dolt! Boob! Heisenberg said it is impossible to determine simultaneously and with unlimited accuracy the position and the momentum of a particle, but because Planck’s Constant is so small, the Uncertainty Principle is meaningless except when discussing the motion of atomic particles, like electrons. Idiot.” Hopefully this outburst will help quell future references to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

HELIUM
,
source of

It sends balloons, and your voice, high. It’s a naturally occurring element, but where does it occur? In the ground.

Helium is mined from gas wells in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The United States is the world’s leading helium producer, and relations with Germany were sorely strained before World War II when we refused to sell the stuff to Hitler. He wanted it for his zeppelins, but he had to make do with the highly volatile hydrogen instead. Which explains why the Hindenburg blew up over New Jersey in 1937.

HUMOR
,
sense of

A “sense of humor” is a measurement of the extent to which you notice that you’re trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel about this.

L

LIGHTBULB

You flip a switch, and, godlike, you create light. But don’t bask in the glow too long. Better to give credit where it’s due—the electron, a basic component of matter so filled with energy it can’t sit still for an instant.

Electrons usually can be found zipping around the nuclei of their atoms at unfathomable speeds, trapped by an attractive force. But given a little shove, the electrons of certain elements—notably metals—are only too happy to promiscuously bounce from nucleus to nucleus.

The shove comes from a flood of free electrons produced by a generator or a battery. The flood turns into a torrent, cascading through the metal pathway—the wire—at close to the speed of light. This little drill actually produces light because not all materials carry electrons as freely as, say, copper wire.

The tungsten element in the center of a 60-watt lightbulb is not nearly so casual about its electrical relations. This unwelcome intrusion of three billion billion electrons a second plowing through its personal space causes a fit of apoplexy. It gets hot. White hot, in fact. It would burn itself to ash in no time, which was the slight flaw in early light bulb designs, except that the interior of the modern glass bulb is an airless vacuum. The lack of surrounding oxygen allows the filament to burn and glow in impotent rage for weeks before it loses its cool completely.

M

MATCH

Most tools seem complex but are actually fairly simple. Matches are the opposite. The humility of their design belies a deeper engineering genius. Consider: The common match was invented in 1805, nearly 200 years after the first telescope.

For much of the 19th century, workers in match factories succumbed to a horrible disease called “phossy jaw.” We won’t describe it.

There are actually two types of matches, the “Safety Match” and the “Strike-Anywhere Match.” For simplicity’s sake we will refer to the latter as the “Dangerous Match.” The Dangerous Match can be lit with your fingernail, or, if you’re as tough as Clint Eastwood in those old spaghetti westerns, your beard. The tip is coated in a chemical called phosphorus. White phosphorus is so flammable it bursts into flame upon contact with the air. There is more than a pound of the stuff in a human body, in blood, muscles, bones and teeth. Why don’t teeth burst into flame when you talk? That’s for another volume of the Encyclopedia Bathroomica. Know now simply that the modern Dangerous Match uses red phosphorus, calmer than its white cousin. Rub the match on sandpaper or any rough surface and the friction heats the match to the ignition point. The flame then fires down into the match’s “tinder,” easy-to-burn chemicals like sulfur, potassium chlorate, and charcoal, melded together with glue and wax.

But there’s also dirt bits and powdered glass down there, to keep things under control. To make things yet more comfy for all concerned, the entire stick of wood has been soaked in a chemical that prevents smoldering.

The Safety Match is a radical departure. The thinking behind the Safety Match is that although the phosphorus and the “tinder” are wild and unpredictable when stuck together, they are harmless and mediocre when solo, like Lennon and McCartney. So the phosphorus is not even on the match, it’s on the box, or the “pack,” what have you. You know, on that black scratchy strip. To light the Safety Match one simply has to press it against the strip, “close cover before striking,” and yank, unless the match in question is the last in the pack, in which case it will not light no matter how many billion times you try.

O

OVEN, MICROWAVE

No doubt it will not enlighten you to hear that microwaves are a type of high-frequency electromagnetic wave that penetrates food and causes atoms to violently agitate, creating “heat.”

Figure it like this. Right there in your kitchen is a radio station, KMWV. This station plays only one rock group, over and over, called Magnetron. Magnetron’s music is so stupid only food can hear it. The little food molecules react by doing a dance. First the molecules line up in rigid formation. Then they suddenly flip around, facing the opposite direction. Back and forth, back and forth, kind of like the Twist or maybe even the Time Warp. They do this a couple billion times every second. It’s what you call a fast dance.

An exterminator once told us that a microwave could not kill a roach. So we called an entomologist at the University of Florida to see if this was true. He did an experiment.

“There was never any reason to suspect that a microwave would not kill a cockroach. There is even less reason now,” he said “It blew up like a potato.”

P

PERPETUAL MOTION

DEVICES

Don’t work.

R

REFRIGERATOR

You put a package of bologna into your refrigerator, and it gets cold. The question is: Where does the cold come from? The answer is: The cold doesn’t come from anywhere. The heat leaves. It goes into the air around the refrigerator. Here’s how it gets there.

There are pipes in your refrigerator—you can sometimes see them in the freezer compartment. Flowing through these pipes is a liquid called a “refrigerant.” This is a special kind of liquid that evaporates—turns into gas—at a fairly low temperature, such as the temperature of your bologna. But to evaporate, a liquid must draw heat from somewhere. That’s why when you moisten your finger and wave it in the air, it feels cooler; the water is evaporating and drawing heat from your skin.

So the refrigerant draws heat from the pipe it’s in, which in turn draws heat from the air around it, which in turn draws it from your bologna.

The refrigerant now goes into a “compressor.” This is the thing you hear when your refrigerator’s running, and it sort of squeezes the refrigerant gas, which turns it back into a liquid. (Strange but true: If you compress a gas enough, it turns into a liquid.) The liquid, still under pressure, flows through pipes that are outside your refrigerator’s cold compartment—these are the pipes you can usually see behind the refrigerator. The liquid gives off heat—the heat it gets from inside your refrigerator—to these pipes, and they give it off into the room air. Your bologna is warming your house, just a little bit.

The refrigerant, now that it has given up its heat, is ready to go back and get some more. It goes through a valve—sort of a trapdoor—back into the cold part of the refrigerator. As soon as it’s through the valve, it’s no longer being squeezed, so it quickly evaporates again, thus sucking up more heat, and the whole cycle repeats: get squeezed from gas back into liquid, give off heat, leave pressurized area, turn back into gas, suck up heat.

The cycle continues. It would be a very boring occupation, refrigerant.

ROCKET LAUNCHERS,

effects on weather

Don’t be stupid.

T

TELEPHONE

The incredible thing about telephones is not that people can instantly talk to each other across the continents, but that you can recognize the other person’s voice. Incredible that, somewhere along the suboceanic cables, or in the empty space between microwave transmission towers, your voice doesn’t become that of a robot, or a total stranger, someone from Boston, for example.

The secret is inside the phone. It’s a metal plate called a diaphragm. This thing is a direct steal from nature’s design of the human eardrum. You hold the phone to your mouth and say something like, for example, “Honest, the check’s in the mail.” The sound of your voice ripples through the air in distinctive waves, molecules knocking each other along, a chain reaction of croquet balls. Your ripple pattern is different from everyone else’s; that’s what makes voiceprint I.D. an accurate tool.

The sound hits the diaphragm inside a phone, raining down like sheets of rain. The metal plate just vibrates.

But then comes the next trick: The metal plate is attached to a pack of carbon granules, like in certain cigarette filters. These granules have an electric current running through them. When the metal plate shakes, the granules jitter about, causing surges in the juice. The better the engineering of the phone, the more accurately your voice is translated into an electrical language. Like Morse code, this electrical message races along the phone lines at close to the speed of light, directed by switches and circuits that we here at the Encyclopedia Bathroomica do not understand and do not wish to learn about. The final miracle comes on the other end, where the whole process is reversed. The phone lines lead to a magnet inside your friend’s phone. As the electrical current hems and haws in the pattern of your voice, the magnet tugs at the metal diaphragm. The metal plate vibrates. Sound comes out of the phone. “Honest, the check’s in the mail.” Sounds like…you.