Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (70 page)

On average, babies born in May are 7 ounces heavier than those born in other months.

A FINE ROMANCE (OR TWO)

In 1991 Random House editor Joni Evans thought she could cash in on the fame of TV’s
Dynasty
star Joan Collins and offered her a $4 million contract—with a $1.3 million advance—to write two romance novels. (Collins’s sister, Jackie, is a bestselling novelist.) Collins turned in manuscripts for
The Ruling Passion
and
Hell Hath No Fury
, but Evans thought they were terrible and wouldn’t publish them. Random House sued Collins but couldn’t get the advance money back. As if giving a huge advance to an unproven writer wasn’t a big enough blunder, Evans missed a clause put in the contract stipulating that Collins would be paid whether or not her manuscripts were published. Result: Collins ended up with $2.6 million of Random House’s cash for two books that never went to press.

IT’S NOT OK

Before she joined Random House (see item above), Evans was a senior editor at the publishing house William Morrow, where she committed another blunder in an otherwise successful career. When Morrow was approached about the paperback rights of a certain new author, she advised her boss against it, sure that the book would never sell. The price for the rights at the time was $10,000…three months later, the rights went for $675,000. The book was the groundbreaking self-help title
I’m OK, You’re OK
. It went to #4 on the
New York Times
Best Seller list in 1970 and has sold over 15 million copies since…most of them paperbacks.

LISTEN CAREFULLY

In November 2001, the privately owned Japanese company Dentsu, the world’s fourth largest advertising agency, decided to go public. They had the Wall Street firm UBS Warburg handle their initial public offering, and instructed the brokers to sell 16 shares at 610,000 yen ($4,925) each. But the brokers mistakenly listed 610,000 shares at 16 yen (about 13¢) each. Before they discovered the error, 65,000 of the shares had been sold. Warburg had to buy them all back on the open market. The exact amount of Warburg’s loss was undisclosed, but it was estimated to be as high as $100 million.

Q: What do you call the dent in the bottom of a champagne bottle? A: A
kick
(or a
punt
).

WINGING IT

Anyone who’s ever boarded an airplane has probably wondered how a 400-ton hunk of metal could possibly cruise through the air. Is it magic? No, it’s physics! Here’s a simplified explanation for all you porcelain pilots
.

H
OW ABOUT A LIFT?

The force that makes it possible for airplanes to fly is called
lift
. Lift is provided by the wings of an airplane. But how do the wings generate lift? There are two characteristics that help them get the plane off the ground:

1. The “Angle of Attack”

• If you’ve ever stuck your hand out of the window of a moving car, you already understand how the “angle of attack” works. If you tilt your hand so that the front edge of your hand is pointing upward, the air strikes the bottom surface of your hand and pushes it higher in the air.

• Changing the tilt of your hand so that the front edge is pointing downward has the opposite effect: the air strikes the top of your hand and pushes it down. By tilting the front edge your hand up and down, you can “fly” your hand up and down however you want. If this is difficult to understand, try it the next time you’re in a car.

• If you look closely at the wings on an airplane, you’ll notice that they’re tilted. The front edge—known as the
leading edge
—is slightly higher than the
trailing edge
. Aircraft manufacturers do this so that when the airplane is moving through the air, more air strikes the bottom surface of the wing than the top, pushing the wing upward and helping the plane to fly.

2. The Shape

If you were to look at a cross-section of an airplane wing, it would look something like this:

There are 132 Hawaiian islands.

The wing is shaped this way in order to take advantage of something called
Bernoulli’s principle
. Understanding the “angle of attack” is pretty easy, but Bernoulli’s principle is a little trickier:

• In 1738 Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician, observed that when the velocity of a fluid increases, the pressure of that fluid decreases.

• You may not think of air as a fluid, but technically it is. So when air speed increases, air pressure decreases.

• Wings are shaped in such a way that the air that passes over the top surface of the wing moves faster than the air that passes underneath the bottom surface.

• That means that the air pressure underneath the wing is higher than the air pressure above it. This difference in pressure causes the air underneath the wing to literally
press
the wing upward in the air.

• Lift is measured the same way that weight is. If your airplane weighs 1,000 pounds, that means the wings have to generate more than 1,000 pounds of lift for the plane to leave the ground.

STRAIGHT TALK

So how does the shape of a wing make the air passing over it move faster than the air moving underneath it? Well, as we all know, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s the secret:

• The bottom surface of the wing is relatively flat and straight, but the top is curved. An air molecule passing underneath the wing travels a fairly straight path, which means it travels a shorter distance than an air molecule that passes over the top of the wing. But since it does it in the same amount of time, it’s actually moving at a slower rate than the molecule above the wing.

• This is where Bernoulli’s principle comes in: since the air passing over the top of the wing is traveling faster than the air traveling underneath the wing, the air pressure above the wing is lower than the air pressure underneath the wing. This difference in air pressure causes the wing to rise in the air, and the plane to be able to fly.

U.S. organization with the most members: AAA—the American Auto Association. (46 million.)

FREE WITH PURCHASE

These days almost every retailer has some kind of loyalty program—frequent flyer miles, grocery store club cards, even low-tech cardboard punchcards at the local sandwich shop. But 100 years ago it all started…with trading stamps
.

A
REDEEMING IDEA

Back in 1896, a silverware salesman named Thomas Sperry was making his regular rounds of the stores in Milwaukee when he noticed that one store was having success with a unique program. They were rewarding purchases with coupons, redeemable for store goods. That gave Sperry an idea: why not give out coupons that weren’t tied to merchandise from a particular store, but were redeemable anywhere in the country?

With backing from local businessman Shelly Hutchinson, he started the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, and began selling trading stamps. Here’s how it worked:

• S&H sold stamps (they looked like small postage stamps, each with a red S&H insignia on a green background) to retailers.

• Retailers gave them to customers as a bonus for purchases, 10 stamps for each dollar spent.

• Customers collected the stamps in special S&H books until they had enough to trade back to Sperry and Hutchinson in exchange for merchandise like tea sets or cookware.

• Retailers who participated in the program hoped that customers would feel like they were getting something for free, which would entice them to continue to shop loyally at their stores.

• At first only a few stores across the country offered the stamps, but over the next 50 years, through economic recessions, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and two world wars, S&H’s popularity grew steadily.

POSTWAR FAD

Interest in trading stamps peaked in the 1950s. Why? More people lived in urban areas with more grocery stores to choose from. Bread, milk, and corn flakes are the same in every supermarket, so rival stores started looking for a way to set themselves apart from the competition. One way was by offering trading stamps.

Call a cab: According to statistics, yellow cars and bright blue cars are the safest to drive.

Collecting trading stamps seemed like a fun way to get great stuff without raiding the household budget. So, with their books full of stamps, postwar consumers got televisions, blenders, transistor radios, and the most popular item, toasters.

Trading stamps became so popular that gas stations, drugstores, and dry cleaners got in on the act, too. By 1964 S&H was printing three times as many stamps as the U.S. Post Office. At the industry’s peak in 1969, more than 80% of U.S. households were collecting stamps, and more than 100,000 stores were offering the most popular kind, Green Stamps. The S&H redemption catalog had the largest print run of any publication in the United States.

A WORLD OF STAMPS

Green Stamps were the best known, but there were many other brands of trading stamps in the 1960s. If you shopped at Piggly Wiggly’s, for instance, you’d get Greenbax, at A&P you’d get Plaid Stamps, at Kroger you’d get Top Value Stamps, and so on.

Stamps came in a rainbow of colors, too: Orange, Yellow, Red, Pink, Blue Chip, K&S Red, Triple-S Blue, Plaid, Gold Bond, Merchant Green, and World Green, to name a few. And they appeared under a dizzying variety of names: Top Value, Mor-Valu, Shur-Valu, King Korn, Regal, Big Bonus, Double Thrift, Buckeye, Buccaneer, Two Guys, Eagle, Gift House, Double “M”, Frontier, Quality, Big “W,” and many more.

The stamps had an actual cash value—if you brought in 1,000 stamps, S&H would cheerfully hand you $1.67. But no one cared about the stamps’ cash value when catalogs offered tempting merchandise like clock radios and Corningware. What else could you get for your stamps? Fur coats, purebred pets, European vacations, even life insurance policies. King Korn got a lot of publicity in 1969 by offering a work by classic 20th-century American painter Thomas Hart Benton for 1,975 books.

In fact, publicity-hungry trading-stamp companies—always looking for a way to get a leg up over their many competitors—were willing to negotiate with collectors to provide just about anything equal to the cash value of the collected stamps. Some of the more unusual items:

Mr. Mom: Male Malaysian fruit bats can produce milk.

• An eight-passenger Cessna airplane (paid for with Gold Bond stamps by a church congregation)

• A pair of gorillas (paid for with 5.4 million Green Stamps by an Erie, Pennsylvania, school who wanted to supply their local zoo)

• A donkey for an overseas church missionary

• An elephant (also intended for a local zoo)

• School buses, ambulances, and fire trucks

TAKING A LICKING

Eventually, trading stamps became victims of their own popularity. So many stores were giving them away that there was no longer any reason to shop loyally at one store.

The rampant inflation of the 1970s didn’t help, either. Businesses that gave trading stamps were perceived as charging higher prices. The 1973 oil embargo and gas shortage killed the program at gas stations, too, since consumers would shop at the gas station with the lowest price, not the station that gave Green Stamps.

But trading stamps didn’t die out completely. S&H had $1 billion in annual revenue in 1981 when the company was sold and continued limping along for the next 18 years. By 1999 fewer than 100 stores offered Green Stamps. That’s when Walter Beinecke, the great-grandson of founder Thomas Sperry, bought back S&H.

IF YOU CAN’T LICK ’EM…

Under Beinecke’s influence, S&H Green Stamps have been recast for the digital age—they’re now Greenpoints, with bar-coded cards customers swipe at the registers of participating stores. (Don’t worry, the company still redeems the old gummed stickers.)

Greenpoints offers 10 points for every dollar spent, just like it did in the 1960s. But goods are now valued accordingly. The leather wallet that cost one book of Green Stamps (1,200) now costs 9,600 Greenpoints. Four towels that could be bought with 1,200 Green Stamps cost 14,400 Greenpoints today. Camcorders go for 200,000.

The prizes consumers want have changed, too. People no longer want to redeem their points for towels or hair dryers—they’re more interested in digital cameras, movie tickets, gift certificates (for Burger King, Blockbuster, and Pizza Hut), and Greenpoints’ most popular redemption item, the George Foreman Grill (40,800). And if you have 13,800 Greenpoints, you can still get a toaster.

How does this make you feel? There are 10 inkblots on the standard Rorschach test.