Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (48 page)

About an hour later, Alex Malcomson’s business partner, a relatively unknown engineer named Henry Ford, pulled up in the test car, which he called the Model A. Bennett hopped in, they went for a drive, and by the time they were through, Bennett had given up his plans to buy an Oldsmobile. The Model A was a better car, he told Ford, and he was willing to wait until it came on the market.

But how long would that take? And how much would it cost? Ford said he wasn’t sure and that Alex Malcomson was a better person to ask. So he drove Bennett to Malcomson’s office, dropped him off, and then sped off to parts unknown. “He probably had someone else that he was taking for a ride,” Bennett reminisced many years later.

RISKY BUSINESS

Would the Model A ever come to market at all? The
car
may have been impressive, but the company behind it, if it could even be called a company, was a mess. Ford & Malcomson, soon to evolve into the Ford Motor Company, was having trouble coming up with the cash it needed to begin production. Henry Ford deserved a lot of the blame: in less than two years he’d wrecked one auto company and gotten himself thrown out of another. He had a bad habit of sneaking off to tinker on race cars when he should have been designing regular cars to sell to the public. And in the process he’d burned through nearly $90,000 of his investors’ money—about $1.8 million today—while managing to build only about a dozen cars.

When a person is dying, hearing is the last sense to go. Sight is the first.

Malcomson was hardly better. He was the largest coal dealer in the area, but he’d built up his business by borrowing huge sums of money from nearly every banker in Detroit. He was so overextended, in fact, that he had to hide his interest in the Ford company so that his bankers wouldn’t know what he was up to.

When Ford and Malcomson made the rounds of Detroit’s wealthiest investors to raise funds for yet another auto company, few took them seriously. The two men were reduced to cajoling money out of relatives, suppliers, Malcomson’s attorneys, his coal company employees, his landlord, and anyone else they could think of…including Charles Bennett.

DEAL OF A LIFETIME

When Bennett went into Malcomson’s office to talk about buying a car, Malcomson offered him a chance to buy a stake in the company. A
huge
stake in the company. Reports vary as to exactly how much he was offered, but it was at least 25% and may have been as much as 50%—for as little as $75,000.

A 50% stake would have made Bennett the largest individual shareholder, with Ford, Malcomson, and the others dividing up the other 50%. Bringing Bennett into Ford made a lot of business sense: Associating with such a successful businessman would make the Ford Motor Company seem viable, too, making it easier to attract other investors and to borrow money from bankers no longer willing to lend money to Malcomson alone.

Bennett knew a good product when he saw one, and he wanted in. There was only one thing stopping him—he didn’t have $75,000. But the Daisy Manufacturing Company did. So when he got back to Plymouth, Bennett told his business partner Ed Hough (Lewis Hough’s son) that he was going to invest some of Daisy’s money in a car company.

According to experts, dark chocolate is the candy most likely to cause tooth decay.

SLOW DOWN, PARDNER

That was when Daisy’s attorneys informed Bennett that the company charter forbade investing its funds in other companies. The reasoning was logical. What would happen if Ford & Malcomson went under like so many other auto companies had? Daisy would lose its investment. And if it merged with the automaker (another idea Bennett was toying with), it might even have to make good on that company’s losses. Besides—kids were always going to want BB guns for Christmas. Would anyone still be interested in automobiles five years from now? Maybe cars were just a fad.

“Bennett’s fellow directors at Daisy balked at the proposal, on the grounds that there was no reason to diversify from air rifles into something as whimsical as the automobile,” writes Douglas Brinkley in
Wheels for the World.

THANKS, BUT NO THANKS

Bennett tried everything he could think of to get Daisy’s directors to agree to invest in the auto company, but nothing worked—and Daisy never did buy in. Instead of getting half of the company, Bennett had to settle for buying a 3.3% stake for $5,000, which was all he could personally afford.

To be fair, there’s a good chance that even if Daisy had been willing to buy half of what would soon become the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford might not have allowed it. Ford was determined to be his own boss, and when the investors in his earlier auto companies tried to assert themselves, he just walked away, leaving them holding the bag. That as much as anything had caused him to fail. It’s questionable whether he would have allowed anyone other than himself to own such a huge stake in the new company.

Plus, there was talk that if Daisy got involved with the new company, Bennett might want to give a BB gun away with each car sold, or even worse, that he would insist the new car be called a Daisy. According to Brinkley, Henry Ford “was not about to see his latest creation named after a flower or a gun.”

DUMB DECISION #2

Bennett owned 3.3% of Ford, so when the company introduced the Model T in 1908 and grew into the largest auto manufacturer on Earth, Bennett became stinking rich, right? Wrong. After he and Malcomson took sides against Henry Ford in a power struggle (never a good idea) and lost, Bennett sold his Ford shares. That was in 1907—the year
before
the Model T changed the world. Bennett got $35,000 for his shares.

Benjamin Franklin invented crop insurance.

GO AHEAD AND CRY

Had Bennett held onto his 3.3% stake in the Ford Motor Company until 1919—for 12 more years—when Henry Ford bought out the last of the other shareholders and assumed full ownership, he would have earned $4,750,000 ($47 million today) in dividends. His stock would have been worth $12.5 million ($123 million today). Not a bad return on a $5,000 investment.

Had Daisy bought 50% of the company in 1903 (and had Henry Ford not run the company into the ground, as he had done with earlier ventures when he wasn’t allowed to call the shots), their half of the Ford Motor Company would have been worth at least $125 million ($1.24
billion
today), and possibly as much as $500 million ($4.95
billion
today).

“The original investors in the Ford Motor Company had received the largest return on risk capital in recorded business history,” Robert Lacey writes in
Ford: The Men and the Machine.
Thanks to one bad decision, Daisy’s investors didn’t get a penny of it.

*        *        *

SMART CROOKS (for a change)

How do you make sure the police won’t interrupt your burglary? Fix it so they can’t even leave their headquarters. That’s what happened in 2001 in the Dutch town of Stadskanaal. Thieves simply padlocked the front gates of the high fence that surrounds the police compound, then robbed a nearby electronics store. That set off a burglar alarm in the police station, but there was nothing police could do about it—they were all locked in. As the crooks made off with TVs and camcorders, Stadskanaal cops had to sit and wait for reinforcements to arrive from the next town. A police spokesman said, “It’s a pity all our officers were at that moment in the police station. Normally most of them are on patrol.” They’ve since taken precautions to make certain it never happens again.

There are 71 known moons in our solar system (so far).

URBAN LEGENDS

Hey—did you hear about the girl who needed to get a tan in just three days? Urban legends
seem
to be true…but are they really? Here are a few we’ve looked into.

L
EGEND:
McDonald’s purchases cow eyeballs from a company called “100% Beef,” and adds them as filler to Big Mac patties, claiming they are “100% beef patties.”

HOW IT SPREAD:
By word of mouth, probably for as long as McDonald’s has dominated the American fast food industry. In the very first
Bathroom Reader
, we wrote about a similar claim (false) that McDonald’s uses worms as ground-beef filler.

THE TRUTH:
McDonald’s
doesn’t
add cow eyeballs to hamburgers or use them as a thickener in its milkshakes (another legend). For one thing, the U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates the usage of the term “100% beef.” Theoretically, companies can’t use it unless their patties really are what they claim to be. Plus, if you think about it, every cow that ends up as beef consists of hundreds of pounds of meat, while two eyeballs weigh less than a Quarter Pounder. Even if McDonald’s had wanted to add cow eyeballs to its beef patties (it doesn’t) and such a thing were legal (it isn’t), there simply aren’t enough of them to taint that much meat.

LEGEND:
A sorority girl wants a dark tan for a formal dance that’s just a few days away. She goes to a tanning salon, and they tell her she can’t stay under the lamps for more than 30 minutes because any more would be unsafe. You can’t get a dark tan in 30 minutes, so she spends the next two days traveling to every tanning salon in town, spending 30 minutes in each.

She gets a beautiful tan and looks great at the formal…but the next morning her sorority sisters find her dead in her room with smoke billowing out of her eyes, ears, and mouth. An autopsy reveals that the tanning rays had cooked her body from the inside out, like a burrito in a microwave oven.

HOW IT SPREAD:
Like wildfire—the tale first appeared in 1987 and was repeated all over the country. Sometimes the victim is a bride-to-be, sometimes she’s a high-school girl getting ready for her prom. And she doesn’t always die—sometimes she is permanently blinded or has to have a “fried” arm or leg amputated. It was one of the most popular—and most widely believed—urban legends of the 1980s.

Percentage of Americans who say a “unibrow” is a turnoff: 35%.

THE TRUTH:
The story is not only false, it’s also scientifically impossible. Yes, tanning rays are dangerous—overexposure can cause sunburns, skin cancer, cataracts, and other problems. But tanning beds don’t cook the human body from the inside out. This story features two traditional urban legend themes: fear of new technology and excessive vanity that is punished by fate.

LIFE IMITATES URBAN LEGEND!
In May 1989, two years after the first broiled-girl rumors started, a woman named Patsy Campbell actually did die from burns received after spending just 25 minutes in a tanning bed. Campbell, who had been taking medication that made her skin very sensitive to light, was the first and so far only person ever to receive fatal burns in a tanning bed.

LEGEND:
A young couple gets married. The reception is held at the bride’s grandmother’s house, and they continue a family tradition of playing a game of hide-and-seek. When it’s the bride’s turn to hide, she disappears. After hours of searching, they still can’t find her. They finally call the police to assist in the search…but she is never found.

Years later the bride’s sister gets married and despite the tragedy, hide-and-seek is played again. The sister decides to hide in a large steamer trunk in the attic and when she pops it open, she finds the dead body of her long-lost sister—who suffocated when the trunk lid slammed shut and locked her in—still in her wedding gown.

HOW IT SPREAD:
Word of mouth…for almost 300 years. In the 1830s, Thomas Haynes Bayly wrote
The Ballad of The Mistletoe Bride
:

At length an oak chest, that had long lain hid,

Was found in the castle—they raised the lid,

A skeleton form lay mouldering there

In the bridal wreath of that lady fair!

O, sad was her fate! in sportive jest

She hid from her lord in the old oak chest.

It closed with a spring! and, dreadful doom,

The bride lay clasped in her living tomb!

THE TRUTH:
It never happened.

There are freshwater springs in the ocean.

SIMPLE SOLUTIONS

How often have you seen a clever solution to a difficult problem and said, “That’s so obvious—I wish I’d thought of that!” Here are some simple, but brilliant, inventions that could change the world.

M
ONEYMAKER-PLUS

Problem:
How can people irrigate crops in impoverished parts of the world? With electric pumps? Nope—electricity is often nonexistent, and where it is available it’s too expensive for poor farmers.

Simple Solution:
A foot-powered irrigation pump

Explanation:
Approtec, a nonprofit company in Nairobi, Kenya, calls it the MoneyMaker-Plus. Working the pedals like a stair-climbing exercise machine, one person can pull water from a stream, a pond, or a well 20 feet deep, send it to sprinklers, and irrigate up to one and a half acres a day. In underdeveloped countries, such a device can be life-changing. As of 2002, Approtec estimates that 24,000 MoneyMaker-Plus pumps were in use, bringing an average of $1,400 a year more to people who previously earned less than $100 a year. The pumps helped create 16,000 new jobs and generate $30 million a year total in profits and wages. They’re made from local materials (creating more jobs), they’re easily repaired without special tools, they’re lightweight for easy transport (25 pounds), and most importantly, they’re affordable—they cost only $38.

ANTI–CELL PHONE SANDWICH