Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (64 page)

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“Whoever said, ‘It’s not whether you win or lose that counts,’ probably lost.”

—Martina Navritilova

There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants.

EVERYDAY OBJECTS

They once were miracle inventions—now they’re so common we throw them in a junk drawer. Here are the stories behind three items that make life just a little bit easier
.

S
AFETY PIN

In 1849 a New York inventor named Walter Hunt had a problem: he was too broke to pay an employee the $15 he owed him. But the employee gave him an out—he’d forgive the $15 debt if he could have the rights to whatever Hunt could invent from a single piece of wire.

Hunt was a prolific inventor—he’d designed a fire engine warning gong, a stove that burned hard coal, and even an early sewing machine (which he decided not to market because he didn’t want to put seamstresses out of work). But for all his skill, he seemed unable to profit from any of his inventions.

Hunt had no money, so he had no choice—he accepted the employee’s challenge. After three hours of twisting an eight-inch piece of brass wire, Hunt had created the world’s first safety pin. It had a clasp at one end, a point on the other, and a coil in the middle to act as a spring and keep the point tucked into the clasp.

So did Hunt hand over his “dress pin,” as he called it, to the employee? No—he reneged on the deal and patented the safety pin himself. Then he sold the rights to his new invention for $400 (about $5,000 today), from which he paid his draftsman the $15, keeping the rest. Millions of safety pins have been made and sold since then, but Hunt never made another cent on his invention.

CAN OPENER

Strange but true: the metal can was invented a full 50 years before the first practical can opener.

Peter Durand, the English merchant who developed the “tin cannister” in 1810, had figured out a way to preserve foods
in
cans, but he neglected to come up with a way to get the food
out
. Early cans carried instructions advising users to cut around the top with a chisel and hammer. British soldiers didn’t carry chisels—they had to open their canned rations with bayonets or pocket knives, and, in desperation, sometimes shot them open with their rifles.

Penguins have an organ on their foreheads that desalinizes water.

In 1858 a man named Ezra Warner came up with a can opener that looked like a bent bayonet, with a large, curved blade that could be driven into the rim of a can and forced around the perimeter to cut off the top. It was unwieldy and dangerous; but grocery stores that sold canned food had to buy them so they could open cans as a service to customers. The customers would then leave the store carrying the opened cans. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t a big hit.

Then in 1861 the Civil War broke out, creating a sudden and urgent need for food that could accompany soldiers into battle without spoiling. Union soldiers were issued canned rations…and Warner’s bayonet-style can openers. Canned food became so popular with soldiers that after the war, more and more canned goods appeared on market shelves. But people still needed an easier way to open the cans.

Connecticut inventor William Lyman had the answer, and in 1870 patented his “cutting wheel” can opener, a crank-operated gadget that held a circular metal wheel that could cut through can tops. And since then not much has changed. In 1925 the Star Can Company of San Francisco added a serrated wheel to hold the can and rotate it against the cutting wheel. The electric can opener was introduced in 1931. But amazingly, even the most modern versions of the can opener still look and work pretty much like the one Lyman invented…more than 130 years ago.

DRINKING STRAW

Marvin Stone liked mint juleps. Back in the 1880s, every day after putting in his time manufacturing paper cigarette holders in his Washington, D.C., factory, Stone would stop by the same tavern and order a mint julep—a concoction of bourbon, mint, sugar, and water, served over ice. Keeping the drink chilled was important (warm mint juleps tend to lose some of their minty tang), so mint julep fans would avoid touching the glass with their warm hands. Instead, they sipped the drink through a natural hollow piece of wheat straw.

Stone didn’t like the grassy taste the wheat straw imparted to his favorite drink. He also didn’t like the way the straw would get dusty and start to crack as it was used repeatedly. There had to be a better way. One day, as he watched his cigarette holders being wound out of paper, he had an inspiration. Why not make an artificial straw by winding thin strips of paper around a cylinder?

Stephen King was 19 years old when his first story was published.

He made a prototype in 1888, winding a continuous strip of paper around a pencil and fastening it with dabs of glue. It worked. Stone made several drinking straws for his own use and asked his favorite bartender to stash them behind the counter. When other customers noticed Stone’s invention, they wanted their own, so Stone decided to mass-produce it.

Lemonade was a popular drink in the late 19th century, and Stone reasoned that people might like using straws for lemonade as well as for mint juleps. He fashioned an eight-and-a-half-inch paper straw out of wax-coated manila paper (to resist sogginess) and set the diameter just wide enough to allow lemon seeds to pass through without clogging the straws. By 1890 the Stone Cigarette Holder Factory was producing more drinking straws than cigarette holders.

Most straws today are made of plastic, not paper. But the winding technique Stone invented lives on: most cardboard tubes (like the one at the center of a toilet paper roll) are still made in the same way that Stone wound his first straw. Straws themselves have undergone an evolution: there are straws of colored plastic, with flexible shapes, loop-the-loops, and even flavored straws. But they still do the same basic job: getting liquid into your mouth, fast and cold.

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INSPECTOR GADGET?

Have you ever been snooping with your binoculars, only to have your arms get tired just when you’re sure something really important is about to happen? If so, U.S. Patent #5,131,093—the
Bino Cap
—may be just the invention for you. It’s a foldable, lightweight combination binoculars/baseball cap. Just put it on and snoop away; your arms are free to take notes, stir your coffee, or record observations into your voice-activated digital recorder. (Despite the fact that it’s been patented, no word on whether the device is actually available yet.)

Radar was used for the first time in the battle of Britain in 1940.

EATIN’ THE TIN SANDWICH

The history of the harmonica will take you to China, Africa, Europe, the Mississippi Delta, and beyond…

B
LOWING IN THE WIND

When musicians like Bob Dylan and John Lennon became famous in the 1960s, they did it with a little help from the harmonica. And they gave the harmonica a boost, too. Sales of the tiny instrument skyrocketed when folksingers and rock musicians brought it back into the limelight. But it wasn’t the first time the “harp” became a sensation.

From the 1920s until the 1940s, the harmonica was one of the most popular instruments in the country. The biggest blues, jazz, country, and hillbilly bands—and even theater companies—had harmonica players as part of their acts. Harmonica classes became a regular part of curriculums in many public schools. By the 1930s, the German company M. Hohner, the biggest maker of harmonicas worldwide, was selling over 25 million a year.

Where did the easy-to-carry instrument originate? That’s a very old story.

THE SOUND OF OLD SHENG-HAI

Most musicologists agree that the earliest predecessor to the harmonica was developed in China between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. It was a three-foot-long instrument made of bamboo pipes called the
sheng
, which means “sublime voice.” Although neither the sheng nor its ancient sisters, the
naw
, the
yu
, and the
ho
, looked anything like a harmonica, they all had one important feature in common: free reeds.

A reed is a thin strip of cane, wood, plastic, or metal that vibrates when air passes over it. A “free reed” instrument, like the accordion or harmonica, produces sound from a reed vibrating inside a chamber—the vibrating reed produces a single note and doesn’t touch anything else.

“Fixed reed” instruments, like the clarinet and the saxophone, use a reed that vibrates against some other part of the instrument. On the clarinet or sax, it’s the mouthpiece, which is attached to a tube with holes in it. Cover the holes and you change the pitch.

In colonial America, tobacco was legal tender in several Southern colonies.

The
sheng
had multiple free reeds set inside bamboo tubes, which allowed chords (multiple notes that sound good together) to be played. For thousands of years,
sheng
and similar instruments were played all over China and Southeast Asia.

FREEING THE PITCH

Fixed-reed instruments had been played in Europe for centuries (and some say that even those were introduced from Asia), but free-reeds had not. In 1776 French Jesuit missionary Pierre Amiot sent several
shengs
from China to Paris—and people who heard them loved them. Within a few years European instrument makers were building their own free reed devices, making instruments such as the harmonium and the reed organ.

In 1821, a 16-year-old named Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann was experimenting with different ways to combine pitch pipes in order to create a new instrument. He soldered together 15 pipes of different pitches, similar to the
sheng
and, without knowing it, made the next big step toward the modern harmonica.

THE INS AND OUTS

Buschmann’s harmonica, known as the
aura
, was an immediate hit, and soon other instrument makers began experimenting with the design. In 1825 a man named Richter (his first name is unknown) came up with the idea of a 10-hole, 20-note configuration, one row of reeds activated by inhaling, the other by exhaling.

Richter arranged the notes with the common person in mind: no matter where the mouth is placed, it would always play notes that were in harmony—that sounded good—together, whether inhaling or exhaling. That’s why the instrument is called a “harmony-ca”—it’s always in harmony. Richter’s three-octave model has been changed little since. (Pretty impressive when you consider that a grand piano has an eight-octave range, but weighs about 1,000 pounds—4,000 times as much as a harmonica.)

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HARMONIC CONVERGENCE

In 1857 Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker from Trössingen, Germany, visited a harmonica maker in Vienna, Austria, and decided to make his own instruments. He started making them in his kitchen with the help of his family and sold 650 harmonicas the first year. In 1862 relatives in the United States urged him to export some of the instruments. He did, and by 1887 was producing more than a million harmonicas a year, with sales across Europe and the United States.

BLEND IT LIKE HOHNER

One of the things that helped make the harmonica so successful was its musical flexibility. It could play romping
Biergarten
music, plaintive European folk songs, and even complex classical music. And it was small and inexpensive, so even poor people could afford one. By the late 1800s, African Americans in the southeast, who had their own musical traditions developed over thousands of years, were inventing a new kind of music: the blues. And the “harp” would be part of it. The trademark “bending” of the notes—using air direction and pressure to slide between notes—would become the trademark sound of the blues. The popularity of the music would soon influence other new styles of American music—jug band, Dixieland, jazz, and swing—and would help carry the harmonica to even greater popularity.

THE GOLDEN YEARS

The 1920s began the first golden age for the harmonica. Two new technologies were sweeping the country: radio and recording. That meant that people could become national stars relatively quickly—and so could the instruments they played: Vernon Dalhart’s 1925 recording “Wreck of the Old 97,” with Dalhart singing and playing harmonica, became country music’s first million-seller.

By the end of the 1920s, hundreds of artists were making recordings and many of them featured the harmonica. And it wasn’t just for accompaniment: all-harmonica bands became hot tickets. Then, in the late 1930s, a musical virtuoso named Larry Adler gave it another boost: Adler played classical and jazz—as a harmonica soloist. How popular was he? From the 1940s until he died in 2001, he regularly played with the biggest stars of the day: Jack Benny, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday and later, Sting and Elton John.

There are as many molecules in 1 teaspoon of water as there are teaspoons of water in the Atlantic.

ELECTRIFIED

The harmonica went into decline in the 1950s, but bluesmen like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson kept it alive, creating a modern blues-harp sound that would be carried on by James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite. By the 1960s, the harmonica was back, thanks first to the folk music craze and then to Beatlemania.

Since then, harmonica players like Stevie Wonder, John Mayall, Huey Lewis, Delbert McClinton, Magic Dick (J. Geils Band), Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie McCoy, Mickey Rafael (Willie Nelson’s band), and John Popper (Blues Traveler) continue to show the world what one little instrument can do.