Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (72 page)

Dubious achievement: New Jersey is #1 in the nation for hazardous waste sites, with 96.

Taking a lesson from Barnum (see
page 23
), Nissen taught a kangaroo to jump on a trampoline. He trained it using dried apricots as treats and quickly learned that the best way to avoid getting kicked was to “hold hands” with the kangaroo’s front paws. A photograph of man and beast high in the air was printed in newspapers all over the country—exactly the publicity Nissen wanted. It brought the crowds out, and sure enough, sales improved.

Then when World War II started, Nissen convinced the Army that trampolines could train pilots not only to achieve better balance, but also to be less fearful of being upside down. And jumping on a trampoline was great for physical conditioning. The military agreed; thousands of cadets learned to jump on trampolines.

IT’S A FAD!

Still, even after the war, trampolines were mostly found at gymnasiums, primarily used by athletes. Then, in the late 1950s, a new fad emerged: trampoline centers. Here’s what
Life
magazine said about it in May 1960:

All across the nation the jumping business is jumping, and a device called the trampoline, once a tool of tumblers, has overnight become a popular plaything. Matrons trying to reduce, executives trying to relax and kids trying to outdo each other are plunking down 40¢ for a half hour of public bouncing at trampoline centers which are spreading the way miniature golf courses spread several decades ago.

And trampolining wasn’t just for the average person. Nissen boasted that “Vice President Richard Nixon, Yul Brynner, the Rockefellers, and King Farouk” were all avid jumpers as well.

But while Nissen must have been happy that his invention was finally catching on, he was very critical of the trampoline centers. Profiteers, he said, were just buying the trampolines and allowing patrons to jump unsupervised. Many of the jumpers were either inept or intoxicated. After a few high-profile injuries (a beauty queen lost her teeth and a high school football star was paralyzed), the centers started folding. Nissen tried opening his own properly supervised centers, called Jumpin’ Jiminy. But it was too late—the injuries had given trampolines a bad name.

Kangaroos can cover a distance of 30 feet with one jump.

IT’S A SPORT!

When Nissen saw the interest in trampolines start to dwindle, he understood why. “You have to have programs,” he said. “I bounce too, but if I didn’t have something new to do on a trampoline, I would lose interest.”

So he set his sights on turning trampolining into a sport. First he tried “Spaceball,” a combination of jumping and volleyball, but that turned out to be too dangerous. He also tried combining trampolining and running by putting little bounce pads at either end of a track, but that didn’t catch on, either.

Then Nissen met a Swiss economist in California named Kurt Baechler, who also happened to be a gymnast. Together they combined trampolining with gymnastics, creating the sport Nissen was looking for. They organized the Nissen Cup trampoline competition, formed the International Trampoline Federation, and financed the first trampolining World Championships in the Royal Albert Hall in London. As the trampoline center fad gave way to hula hoops and pinball arcades, the sport of trampolining started taking off.

Today, trampolines can be found in backyards worldwide. And the Nissen company is still a major manufacturer of gymnastics equipment and trampolines. George Nissen holds 35 patents on sports and fitness equipment (including the seat cushion that protects your bottom from rock-hard bleacher seats). At 83 years old Nissen won California’s Senior Fitness Award. And he finally achieved his goal of having competitive trampolining—the idea he came up with when he was 19 years old—recognized as a real sport. It became an Olympic event in 2000.

TRAMPOLINE FACTS

• Jeff Schwartz of Illinois bounced on a trampoline for 266 hours, 9 minutes in 1981, setting a world record. He was allowed breaks for eating, sleeping, and going to the bathroom.

• Another world record was set on July 24, 1999, when a team of 20 people in West York, United Kingdom, did 29,503 somersaults in exactly five hours using two standard trampolines. That averages out to 1,500 somersaults per person.

• The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that there were 83,212 trampoline-related injuries in 1996, up from only 19,000 in 1976.

Egg shells are 90% calcium carbonate…the same thing your teeth are made of.

THE GLASS ARMONICA

Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, the lightning rod, an odometer, the Franklin stove, swim fins, and street lights. He also invented the glass armonica. (Doesn’t everybody know that?
)

S
INGING WINEGLASSES

It’s a classic party trick: Wet your finger and rub it around the rim of a wineglass. What you’ll hear is a very pure musical note. Add some wine, and the pitch gets lower; remove some, and the pitch gets higher.

The singing wineglass trick has been around for hundreds of years. It’s mentioned in Persian documents from the 1300s. There’s a European reference to tuned water glasses dating from 1492. And Galileo wrote about the phenomenon in his book
Two New Sciences
, published in 1638. But it was Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s who turned the trick into a musical instrument.

Between the years 1757 and 1766, Franklin spent most of his time in Europe as an agent for the American colonies and often attended musical concerts. One evening in 1761, while listening to virtuoso Richard Puckridge perform on the “singing glasses,” Franklin was struck with the beauty of the sound. He immediately set about inventing his own glass musical instrument.

BEN INVENTS IT

Franklin worked with London glassblower Charles James to create a special set of glass bowls that did not need to be filled with water to make different musical notes because each was tuned to its own pitch. Painted different colors to represent each note of the scale, the bowls were nested inside each other and looked like a stack of goblets lying on their sides. An iron rod ran through them to a wheel, which was turned by a foot pedal. To create musical sounds, the player would touch the spinning glasses with moistened fingers. By the end of the year, Franklin had completed his invention and using the Italian word for harmony, he named it the
armonica
. He wrote,

The advantages of this instrument are that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued at any length; and that the instrument, being once well tuned, never again wants tuning.

Why did Mick Jagger have the emerald filling on his front tooth replaced with a diamond?

PLEASANT UNDER GLASS

The armonica was an overnight success. Franklin received orders for the instrument from customers in Paris, Versailles, Prague, and Turin. Marie Antoinette took lessons on it. The world’s greatest composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, Richard Strauss, and Saint-Saëns, wrote music for it. Thomas Jefferson called it “the greatest present offered to the musical world in this century.”

Because of its angelic tones, many people believed the glass armonica had healing powers. Franklin agreed: he used it to heal the “melancholia” of Princess Izabela Czartoryska of Poland in 1772. Dr. Franz Mesmer, the father of hypnotism, used the armonica to calm his patients during his magnetic séances. By 1790 more than 5,000 armonicas had been sold, making it the most celebrated musical instrument of the 18th century.

Then, just as quickly as it began, the musical fad ended.

SHATTERED

Disturbing tales began to circulate about the harmful effects of the glass armonica. Virtuoso player Marion Davies had become extremely ill. Her health and nerves were said to have been ruined by her armonica playing. Other performers were beginning to complain of nervousness, numbness in their hands, muscle spasms, and dizziness. Even some listeners became ill.

In 1798 the German musicologist Friedrich Rochlitz wrote in the
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
,

The armonica excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood that it is an apt method for slow self-annihilation. If you are suffering from any nervous disorder, you should not play it; if you are not yet ill you should not play it; if you are feeling melancholy you should not play it.

Then in 1808, Marianne Kirchgessner, a blind concert artist who had inspired Mozart to write for the armonica, died at the age of 39. Her death was said to be a result of “deterioration of her nerves caused by the vibrations of the armonica.”

…Because people kept telling him he had spinach in his teeth.

Many believed the strange nerve disorders were caused by lead poisoning coming from the lead in the glass and in the paint. Others believed that the high-pitched harmonies, having mystical powers, invoked the spirits of the dead and drove listeners insane.

Nothing was ever proven against the glass armonica, but it didn’t matter—people became so frightened of the instrument that few people would play one and few would even listen to one being played. By 1820 the armonica was all but forgotten.

THE GLASS IS BACK

The glass armonica made a comeback in 1984, thanks to the efforts of master glassblower and musician Gerhard Finkenbeiner of Boston. The German-born Finkenbeiner first thought of making a glass instrument in 1956. After many years of experimenting, he finally re-created Franklin’s armonica, using only lead-free quartz crystal for the glass. Some of the rims have gold baked into them to identify the pitches. (The ones with the gold bands are like the “black keys” on a piano. The “white keys” are clear. The gold bands—and they’re real gold—are on the inside of the cups, so the player doesn’t actually touch them.) Today, G. Finkenbeiner Inc. in Waltham, Massachusetts, continues to produce the beautiful singing glass armonica.

WARNING

(
posted in J. C. Muller’s armonica manual of 1788
)

If you have been upset by harmful novels, false friends, or perhaps a deceiving girl, then abstain from playing the armonica—it will only upset you even more. There are people of this kind—of both sexes—who must be advised not to study the instrument, in order that their state of mind should not be aggravated.

*        *        *

MUSICAL IRONY

The song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” was written by a German named George Graff…who never went to Ireland in his life.

Farting contests were held in ancient Japan. Prizes were awarded for loudness and duration.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WHIGS

Andrew Jackson was one of the founders of the modern Democratic party (see
page 153
). But in a sense, he is the founder of two political parties: the Democrats, who loved him, and the Whigs, who hated him
.

J
ACKSON IN OFFICE

Andrew Jackson, a.k.a. “Old Hickory,” was probably the most popular man in the United States when he won the presidency in 1828. And when he left office in 1836, he was still considered the champion of the common man—if for no other reason than he angered (and impoverished) a lot of wealthy and powerful people during his two terms.

For starters, Jackson instituted a policy of filling federal government jobs by firing supporters of former president John Quincy Adams and replacing them with his own. And although he ran on an anti-corruption platform, his appointees were, as Jackson biographer Robert Remini puts it, “generally wretched.” One of the worst was Samuel Swartwout, a Jackson crony who was appointed to the job of collector of customs in New York. In this position, Swartwout oversaw the collection of more cash than any other government official, about $15 million a year. Swartwout absconded to Europe with more than $1.2 million of it, “more money than all the felons in the Adams administration put together,” Remini writes. Adjusting for inflation, Swartwout is
still
the worst embezzler in the history of the federal government.

Jackson also managed to alienate many of his fellow Southerners. In 1832 South Carolina passed a law banning exorbitant federal tariffs, and even considered seceding from the union. That prompted Jackson to threaten to personally lead an army into the state, put down the rebellion and hang the ringleaders himself. The crisis was eventually resolved when Congress lowered the tariffs, but by then Jackson had lost a lot of support in the South.

THE BANK WAR

But what galvanized Old Hickory’s opposition more than anything else was what he did to the American banking system.

Charles Dickens’s original phrase for Scrooge was “Bah Christmas,” not “Bah Humbug.”

Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Jackson hated banks, believing them to be corrupt institutions that enriched the wealthy and well-connected. He especially hated the Second Bank of the United States. He hated it all the more when the bank and its director, Nicholas Biddle, sided with presidential candidate Henry Clay in the election of 1832 and even offered to lend money to pro-Clay newspapers to attack Jackson.

Big mistake—Jackson was furious that the bank would try to influence the outcome of the election. “The bank is trying to kill me,” he complained, “but I will kill
it
.”

FROM SECOND TO NONE

When Jackson won reelection against Clay in a landslide in 1832, he set out to make good on his word. He ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to pay government expenditures out of the Treasury’s Second Bank accounts, while making any deposits to state banks. (Critics called them Jackson’s “pet” banks.) In less than three months, the federal government’s deposits to the Second Bank dwindled to almost nothing.