Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (9 page)

Origin:
Invented by English mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus: =====, bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

Origin:
This symbol is a stylized
et,
Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and”, meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone:
ampersand.

In 1790 there were 66 slaves for every 100 Europeans in the state of Virginia.

Origin:
The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from
thorpe,
the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. The symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the
octothorp.

Origin:
One theory says that when the U.S. government began issuing its own money in 1794, it used a common world currency: the
peso.
The first American silver dollars were identical to Spanish pesos in weight and value, so they took the same written abbreviation: Ps. That evolved into a P with an s written right on top of it, and when people began to omit the circular part of the p, the sign simply became an S with a vertical line through it.

OLYMPIC RINGS

Origin:
Designed in 1913 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the five rings represent the five regions of the world that participated in the Olympics: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. While the individual rings do not symbolize any single continent, the five colors—red, blue, green, yellow, and black—were chosen because at least one of them is found on the flag of every nation. The plain white background is symbolic of peace.

“THE SYMBOL”

Origin:
Okay, so we’re running out of symbols, but this is a great pop culture story: In 1993, Prince’s dissatisfaction with his record label, Warner Bros., finally reached its peak. Despite his superstar status and his $100 million contract, the Purple One didn’t feel he had enough creative control over his music. So “in protest,” Prince announced that Prince would never perform for Warner Bros. again—this unpronounceable symbol would instead.

The symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as Prince combined three ancient symbols: the male symbol, the female symbol, and the alchemy symbol for soapstone, which was supposed to reflect his artistic genius. Prince retired the symbol when his contract with Warner Bros. ran out in 2000. Today, he is again Prince.

Clue originally meant “ball of twine.” That’s why you “unravel” clues to solve a mystery.

The BRI library is full of books on hoaxes. We love them. It’s amazing how many times people have pulled off clever scams…and gotten away with it. Here are a few of our favorites.

Background:
In a small village near Leeds, England, in 1806, a hen laid an egg that had the words “Christ is Coming,” inscribed in black on its surface. The hen’s owner, a woman named Mary Bateman, explained that God had come to her in a vision and told her that the hen would lay a total of 14 such eggs, at which point the world would be destroyed in the apocalypse. Only the holy would survive to live with Christ in heaven; everyone else was condemned to burn in hell.

But there was some good news: God had given Bateman special slips of paper sealed with the inscription “J.C.” Anyone possessing one of these slips would be automatically admitted into heaven…and Mary Bateman was willing to part with the papers for a shilling apiece.

“Great numbers visited the spot, and examined these wondrous eggs, convinced that the day of judgement was near at hand,” Charles Mackay writes in
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“The believers suddenly became religious, prayed violently, and flattered themselves that they repented them of their evil courses.” By the time the 14th and final egg was about to be laid, more than 1,000 people had coughed up a shilling to be admitted into heaven.

Exposed:
A doctor who was skeptical of the story traveled to Leeds to investigate the eggs in person. When he discovered that the messages had been written on them with corrosive ink, he informed the local authorities, who raided the tavern where the chicken was being kept…just as Mary Bateman was cruelly shoving an inscribed egg into the hen to “lay” later that day.

Batemen was sent to jail but was soon released. No longer able to make a living in the prophecy business, she became an abortionist, which was illegal, and for which she was later hanged.

Q: What was wrestler Bobo Brazil’s signature move? A: The “Coco Butt.”

Background:
In 1974 a man named Ronald DeFeo murdered his parents and four siblings as they slept in their home in Amityville, New York. He was convicted of the crimes and sentenced to six consecutive life sentences in prison.

The “murder house” was later sold for a song to a struggling couple named George and Kathy Lutz, who moved in a week before Christmas in 1975. Twenty-eight days later, they moved out, claiming the house was haunted—and that the evil spirits that had driven them away probably also caused DeFeo to murder his entire family. Their story inspired the 1977 bestselling book
The Amityville Horror,
and the hit film that premiered in 1979.

Exposed:
In 1979 Ronald DeFeo’s defense attorney William Weber filed a lawsuit against the Lutzes, accusing them of fraud and breach of contract, claiming that they reneged on an agreement to collaborate with Weber on the book. So where did the haunted house story come from? In an interview with the Associated Press, Weber admitted that he and the Lutzes had “concocted the horror story scam over many bottles of wine.”

Background:
One afternoon in 1908, the managers of Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater on Broadway marched a woman onstage during intermission and offered $1,000 to anyone in the audience who could make the woman—introduced as “Sober Sue”—laugh. When no one in the audience succeeded in getting Sober Sue to even crack a smile, the theater managers upped the ante by inviting New York’s top comedians to try.

Over the next several weeks, just about every headlining comedian in New York City performed their best material in front of Sober Sue, hoping to benefit from the publicity if they were first to get her to laugh. Everyone failed, but Sober Sue became one of Broadway’s top theater attractions.

Exposed:
It wasn’t until after she left town that Sober Sue’s secret finally leaked out: Her facial muscles were paralyzed—she couldn’t have laughed even if she had wanted to. The Victoria Theater had cooked up the “contest” to trick New York’s most famous—and most expensive—comedians into performing their routines for free.

Rod Stewart once worked as a gravedigger.

Some fascinating facts about the world around us.

If you could tap the energy released by an average-sized hurricane, it would be enough to satisfy all U.S. energy needs for six months.

In any given year, about 26,000 meteorites land on the Earth’s surface, the vast majority dropping into the oceans. Only seven people in recorded history have been hit by one.

When glass breaks, the cracks travel faster than 3,000 mph.

Gold is so rare that all of the pure gold produced in the last 500 years would fit inside a 50-foot cube.

At least 100,000 separate chemical reactions occur in the human brain every second.

About 70% of Earth is covered with water, yet just 1% of it is drinkable.

Sound travels through steel 15 times faster than it travels through air.

To escape the Earth’s gravitational pull, a spacecraft has to move faster than seven miles per second—a speed that would take you from New York to Philadelphia in under 20 seconds.

Rain contains vitamin B12.

According to a University of Michigan study, men are six times more likely to be struck by lightning than women are.

If you could capture a comet’s entire 10,000-mile vapor trail in a container, the condensed vapor would occupy less than one cubic inch of space.

Earth travels through space at 66,600 miles per hour—eight times faster than the speed of a bullet.

Goodyear once made a tire entirely out of corn.

We mentioned Josephine Cochrane briefly in our fourth
Bathroom Reader,
but we’ve wanted to tell the whole story for years. Thanks to her, most of us don’t have to suffer through “dishpan hands.”

What really is the mother of invention? When it comes to the invention of the dishwasher, necessity had nothing to do with it. It was chipped china.

Josephine Cochrane was a wealthy socialite from Shelbyville, Illinois. She gave a lot of dinner parties and was very proud of her china, which had been in the family since the 17
^th
century. But her servants weren’t particularly careful with the priceless dishes as they washed them after each party. Pieces were chipped; pieces were cracked; pieces were broken. Cochrane felt that the only way to protect her treasures was to wash them herself…but she hated the job.

Why should a rich 44-year-old woman be doing this menial job? Why wasn’t there a machine that would wash the dishes for her? Well, there was—sort of. The first dishwasher was patented in 1850 by Joel Houghton. It was a wooden machine that splashed water on dishes when a hand-turned wheel was rotated. It didn’t work very well, so Cochrane decided to invent a better one.

First, she set up a workshop in her woodshed. She measured her dishes, and designed wire racks to hold them. She placed the racks inside a wheel, then laid the wheel inside a tub. The wheel turned while hot soapy water squirted up from the bottom of the tub, falling down on the dishes. Then clean hot water squirted up to rinse them. And finally, the dishes air-dried. It worked.

But while she was busy working on the dishwasher, her ailing husband died. Mrs. Cochrane was left with little money and a lot of debt. Now she needed to follow through on this invention not for convenience, but out of necessity. She needed to earn a living.

Cochrane patented her design in 1886. A Chicago machine firm manufactured them for her while she managed the company and marketed the product.

In 1950, only 7% of American women dyed their hair. Today, 75% do.