Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (48 page)

In 1951 the Swedish Film Industry was on strike and Ingmar Bergman—already an established director—needed work. So he signed on to direct nine commercials for a new Swedish deodorant soap called Bris (Breeze). The words were the ad company’s: “Bris kills bacteria!” How to get that message across was entirely up to Bergman. So how did the director of such somber classics as
Smiles of a Summer Night
and
Wild Strawberries
do it? He used his cinematic talents to create little movies in which actors dressed as microbes were defeated by Bris Man, Sweden’s first antibacterial superhero.

The world’s largest zipper: The one that zips the turf together in the Houston Astrodome.

Here are some more stories of when and how things we take for granted came to be created, from
The Book of Firsts,
by Patrick Robertson.

Date:
1892

Background:
The first collapsible metal toothpaste tube was devised by Dr. Washington Sheffield, a dentist of New London, Connecticut, and manufactured by his Sheffield Tube Corp.

Date:
1830

Background:
The first mower was invented by Edwin Budding of Stroud, Gloucestershire, England. He signed a contract for the manufacture of machinery for the purpose of cropping or shearing the vegetable surface of lawns. Previously Budding had been employed at a textile factory, and is said to have been inspired with the idea of the lawn mower from using a machine designed to shear the nap off cloth.

The first recorded customer for the new contraption was Mr. Curtis, head gardener of Regent’s Park Zoo, who bought a large model in 1831. A smaller mower was available for the use of country gentlemen, who, said Budding, “will find in my machine an amusing, useful, and healthful exercise.” Just how “amusing” anyone found the heavy and inefficiently geared machine is open to doubt, but it was clearly an improvement on cutting the lawn with scythes. The growth of the new industry was slow, until the advent of lawn tennis in the 1870s, which brought an influx of mowers into backyards all over games-loving Victorian England.

Date:
March 4, 1880

Background:
The first daily newspaper photograph was actually a halftone illustration by Stephen H. Horgan, from Henry J. Newton’s photograph of New York’s Shantytown, which appeared in the
New York Daily Graphic.

In the Old West, more cowboys died crossing swollen rivers than during gunfights.

These days, it seems that people will sue each other over practically anything. Here are a few more real-life examples of unusual legal battles.

T
HE PLAINTIFF:
Janette Weiss

THE DEFENDANT:
Kmart Corporation.

THE LAWSUIT:
Weiss was shopping for a blender. But the blenders were stacked on a high shelf, just out of her reach. Ignoring the laws of gravity, Weiss jumped up and grabbed the bottom box. Predictably, when she yanked it out, the three blenders on top came crashing down on her head. Claiming to be suffering from “bilateral carpal-tunnel syndrome,” Weiss sued Kmart for “negligently stacking the boxes so high on the upper shelf.”

THE VERDICT:
Not guilty. After Weiss admitted on the stand that she knew the boxes would fall, it took the jury half an hour to find in favor of Kmart.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Dr. Ira Gore

THE DEFENDANT:
BMW America

THE LAWSUIT:
In 1990, Gore purchased a $40,000 BMW. After he got it home, he discovered that the dealer had touched up a scratch in the paint on a door and never bothered to tell him he was buying damaged goods. Outraged, Gore sued.

THE VERDICT:
The jury awarded Gore $4,000 compensation, even though the actual repair cost only $600. And then they slapped BMW with an unbelievable $2 million in punitive damages.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Jeffrey Stambovsky

THE DEFENDANT:
Helen V. Ackley

THE LAWSUIT:
Stambovsky purchased Ackley’s house in Nyack, New York, for $650,000. When he later discovered that the house was “haunted,” he sued Ackley for failing to disclose the presence of poltergeists.

THE VERDICT:
Guilty. Unfortunately for her, Ackley had bragged to friends for years that the place was spooked. She was
even interviewed by
Reader’s Digest
for an article on haunted houses. The judge found that Ackley should have told Stambovsky everything about the house, noting that the existence of ghosts meant that she had actually broken the law by not leaving the house vacant.

Porcupines are good swimmers…their quills are full of air.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Chad Gabriel DeKoven

THE DEFENDANT:
Michigan Prison System

THE LAWSUIT:
DeKoven, a convicted armed robber who goes by the name “Messiah-God,” sued the prison system, demanding damages that included thousands of trees, tons of precious metals, peace in the Middle East, and “return of all U.S. military personnel to the United States within 90 days.”

THE VERDICT:
Case dismissed. While noting that all claims must be taken seriously, the judge ultimately dismissed the suit as frivolous. DeKoven, the judge said, “has no Constitutional right to be treated as the ‘Messiah-God’ or any other holy, extra-worldly or supernatural being.”

THE PLAINTIFF:
Louis Berrios

THE DEFENDANT:
Our Lady of Mercy Hospital

THE LAWSUIT:
Berrios, a 32-year-old quadriplegic, entered the hospital complaining of stomach pains. Doctors took X-rays to determine the cause of his pain and then called the police when the film revealed what they thought were bags of heroin in Berrios’s stomach. The police interrogated Berrios and kept him handcuffed to a gurney for 24 hours, only to discover that the “bags of heroin” were actually bladder stones. Berrios, “shamed, embarrassed and extremely humiliated,” sued the hospital for $14 million.
THE VERDICT:
Unknown.

THE PLAINTIFF:
Judith Richardson Haimes

THE DEFENDANT:
Temple University Hospital

THE LAWSUIT:
Haimes claimed to have had psychic abilities… until a CAT scan at the Philadelphia hospital “destroyed her powers.” The hospital’s negligence left her unable to ply her trade as a clairvoyant, she said.

THE VERDICT:
Amazingly, the jury awarded Haimes $986,465. The judge disagreed and threw out the verdict.

11% of the planet—5.8 million square miles—is covered by glaciers.

There’s so much going on in the bathroom. Take that bar of soap next to the sink, for example. For a dollar you can buy three bars. But in every bar is a thousand years of science and history. Think about it
—
it’s amazing.

Oil and water don’t mix; they repel each other like opposite ends of a magnet. When you wash your skin with water alone, the oil or “sebum” in your skin repels the water and keeps it from cleaning the skin effectively. That’s where soap comes in.

Primitively speaking, soap is oil plus alkali. For centuries, that meant fat plus lye. American colonists and pioneers saved fat scraps from cooking. They also saved the ashes from their fireplaces, which they placed in a barrel with a spigot at the bottom. Water poured over the ashes and left to soak would form lye, which was then drained off from the bottom. The cooking fat would be rendered in a vat over a fire, then the lye would be added. After much stirring and cooking, a chemical reaction would take place and soap was the result. Too much lye, and the soap would be harsh on the skin. Too much fat, and the soap would be greasy. The newly formed soap would then be poured into boxes to harden and cure for several months.

But how does a combination of fat and ash take away dirt? Let’s get out the microscope.

Water is a molecule composed of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen end of the molecule has a positive charge, and the oxygen end has a negative charge. Oil has neither a positive nor a negative charge—it carries a uniform electrical distribution. That’s why water and oil repel each other. Soap is actually a compound called sodium stearate and has the properties of both oil and water: partly polar, partly nonpolar. That’s how it brings oil and water together.

A molecule of soap is shaped like a snake, with the head being
the water-loving sodium compound, and the tail being the water-hating stearates. Add soap to water, and the tail end tries to get away from the water. Now add something oily to the water. The stearate tail of the soap molecules will rush to cling to the oil molecules. The oil molecule bonds with the tail and floats away, led by the water-loving sodium head.

Israel is one-fourth the size of Maine.

So how did humans discover soap? The legend is that some time around 1000 B.C., Romans performed many animal sacrifices to the gods on Mount Sapo. The fat from the animals mixed with the ashes of the sacrificial fires. Over time, this mixture of fat and alkali flowed down to the Tiber River and accumulated in the clay soils. Women washing clothing there found that the clay seemed to help get things cleaner. Whether or not this story is true, experts say Mount Sapo is the origin of our word “soap.”

The manufacture of soap actually predates this legend by a number of centuries. A recipe for soapmaking was discovered on Sumerian clay tablets dating back to 2500 B.C. And during excavations of ancient Babylon, archaeologists uncovered clay cylinders containing a soaplike substance that were around 5,000 years old. The Phoenicians were making soap around 600 B.C., and Roman historian Pliny the Elder recorded a soap recipe of goat tallow and wood ashes in the first century. A soap factory complete with finished bars was found in the ruins of Pompeii.

In Spain and Italy, soapmaking did not become an established business until about the 7th century. France followed in the 13th century and England a century after that. Southern Europeans made soap using olive oil. Northern Europeans used the fat from animals, including fish oils.

In most places, soap was a luxury item because it was so difficult to manufacture correctly. And it was often so heavily taxed that it was beyond the budgets of most people. Furthermore, bathing was out of fashion for many centuries, being considered sinful, even unhealthy. But when Louis Pasteur proved that cleanliness cuts down on disease in the mid-1800s, bathing and the use of soap for personal hygiene began to become an accepted practice.

Q: Where won’t you find the letter ‘Q’? A: In any of the 50 U.S. state names.

You’ve probably hummed some of these songs to yourself at one time or another. Here are the stories behind them.

M
ammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys (1978).
After nearly 20 years of writing songs without producing a hit, 35-year-old songwriter Ed Bruce was ready to give up. He set out to write a song called “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Guitar Players,” as a warning to others…but his wife suggested that a song about cowboys might sell more records. (She was right.)

Folsom Prison Blues (1956).
Johnny Cash didn’t get the idea for this song while doing time. He got it while watching a documentary titled
Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison.
It struck him that most people live in a prison of one kind or another, and that they would relate to a song about prison as much as they would to a song about drinking, trains, or broken hearts.

If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time (1950).
In 1950 a friend of Lefty Frizzell drove all the way from Oklahoma to West Texas to hear him sing in a nightclub. He’d come so far that when Frizzell was finished singing, the friend asked him to play a little longer. “Well,” Frizzell joked, “if you’ve got the money, I got the time!” Frizzell knew right then he had the makings of a hit song.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1934).
In the mid-1930s, a Los Angeles songwriter named Bob Nolan wrote “Tumbling Leaves,” a song inspired by the blowing autumn leaves he’d seen in Arizona. His group, Sons of the Pioneers, performed the song on the radio, and it became a hit—of sorts: listeners requested “Tumbling
Tumbleweeds,”
not “Tumbling Leaves.” Nolan got so tired of correcting people that he rewrote the song. (It was Gene Autry’s first big hit.)

Your Cheatin’ Heart (1953).
Hank Williams came up with the idea while he and his fiancée Billie Jean Eshlimar were driving to Louisiana to visit her family. After rambling on about how his ex-wife Audrey had mistreated him, Williams concluded with, “Her cheatin’ heart will pay!” He thought for a moment and then said, “That would make a good song!”