Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (40 page)

REAL ALCHEMY

So, where did all these metals come from? Here’s a very simplified explanation:

• All elements, including metals, are made of the same stuff: atomic material—electrons, neutrons, and protons. Atoms of different elements can be distinguished from one another by the number of protons they contain. (The number of neutrons and electrons can vary even among atoms of the same element.)

• For example, a hydrogen atom contains just one proton. A gold atom has 79. This is true of every one of the countless hydrogen and gold atoms in the universe.

• If you could find a way to mash 79 hydrogen atoms together into one atom, you’d have an atom with 79 protons, and therefore you’d have a gold atom. And that’s almost exactly what happens... except it happens inside stars.

Unique, in a bad way: Dalmatians are the only dogs that get gout.

THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THAR STARS

According to cosmologists, the very first matter to appear in the universe was formed as a result of the cosmological event known as the Big Bang, roughly 13.7 billion years ago. Matter first appeared in the form of atoms of the two lightest elements: hydrogen, with one proton, and helium, with two. They remain, by far, the most abundant elements in the universe.

After many millions of years those first hydrogen and helium atoms collected in clouds of dust and gases so huge they would have to be measured in light years (1 light year = 6 trillion miles or 9.5 trillion kilometers). The clouds eventually gave in to their own enormous gravity and collapsed, forming the first stars. And stars were atom destroyers—hot enough to break down those hydrogen and helium atoms, and fuse the bits back together, remaking them into larger atoms of different, heavier elements.

For example, if you fuse two hydrogen atoms together, you have an atom with two protons—or helium. Fuse three hydrogens together and you get an atom with three protons—lithium, the first and lightest metal. Fuse three heliums together and you get an atom with six protons—carbon. This is what’s happening in all the stars you see in the sky at night. In the massive ones the process can result in the production of heavier and heavier elements, including metals such as titanium (22 protons), and iron (26 protons). If they’re especially massive, they can produce the heaviest metals, such as gold (79 protons), and uranium (92 protons). This is one of the things stars do, and that’s how all the elements—including all those shiny metals—are formed in nature.

Now, how did they get here?

DOWN TO EARTH

In the first few billion years after the Big Bang, billions and billions of stars were born, in the way we just described. Many were extremely massive (hundreds of times larger than our sun) and massive stars live relatively short lives—just a few million years in some cases (smaller stars can live for billions of years)—and then die by exploding as supernovas. And when those massive stars exploded billions of years ago, they expelled the heavy elements they had been creating, sending them into space. They had, to put it one way, “seeded” the universe with elements, including metals. And super-massive, impossible-to-comprehend amounts of it—trillions and trillions and trillions of megatons of it. That means that when new stars were later formed—they had already been “seeded” with metals left behind by those supernovas.

Walter Anderson’s two claims to fame: inventing the hamburger bun (1916) and co-founding White Castle (1921).

One of those later, metal-rich stars was our own sun. A quick look at that story:

• About 4.5 billion years ago, a massive cosmic cloud of dust and gas, seeded with lots of heavier elements, collapsed, beginning the process of forming a new star.

• Most of the hydrogen and helium in the cloud became part of the newly formed star. The rest of the dust and gas, including the metals, accumulated in a molten mass, spinning around the new star. The spinning motion flattened out the mass (picture spinning pizza dough) into a molten, spinning disk.

• Over millions of years, as the disk cooled, bits of it clumped together here and there, and those clumps became the planets in our solar system. And the metals in the dust? They became all the metals found in all the planets, including our own.

Our Share:
Earth has a lot of metal. Nearly a third of the planet’s mass is the element iron, most of that located in the planet’s core. Another 14 percent is magnesium, 1.5 percent is nickel, and 1.4 percent is aluminum. That’s 49 percent of the planet. The rest of Earth’s metals, including “precious” metals such as gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, exist only in trace amounts. The rest—the non-metal portion—is about 30 percent oxygen and 15 percent silicon, along with smaller amounts of numerous other non-metal elements.

For Part II of “Metals,” turn to
page 323
.

Music Trivia:
Before deciding on “Beatles,” the Fab Four called themselves the Beetles, the Beatals, the Silver Beets, the Silver Beetles, the Silver Beatles, and Long John and the Silver Beatles.

MOON
STRUCK

Our favorite childhood classics make us feel as snug as a bunny in bed. Here’s a look at what’s down the rabbit hole
.

G
OODNIGHT MOON
“Goodnight light and the red balloon...” Margaret Wise Brown wrote more than 100 books for children, but her most famous is
Goodnight Moon
, published in 1947. It was a revolutionary book in its time, inspired in part by the poetry of Gertrude Stein. More than four generations of children have nodded off to this classic’s hynpnotic spell, and 11 million copies have been sold since its first printing. But in the beginning, the book’s prospects looked dim.

In its first year,
Moon
sold a modest 6,000 copies at $1.75 each. That yielded a typical author’s royalty rate of a dime or less per book, earning Brown around $500. Sales declined from there. In 1951
Goodnight Moon
sold only 1,300 copies, and there was no reason to believe that sales would ever recover. That may explain why in May the following year, Brown made a whimsical addition to her will: Upon her death, the royalties from her books would go to the three sons of her neighbors, Joan and Albert Clarke, probably figuring they’d get a few dollars a year to blow on toys and bubblegum. But that’s not how it turned out.

GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY

The Clarke family had provided a measure of stability to Brown, who lived a bohemian life in her nextdoor flat, never marrying and never having kids of her own. Apparently she loved the Clarke children and allocated royalties from various books to each. Her will provided that the middle child, nine-year-old Albert, would receive 100 percent of
Goodnight Moon
. What happened next was completely unexpected. Four months after writing her will, while on a book tour of Europe in late 1952, the 42-year-old author suffered a coronary embolism and died.

It took a few years for Brown’s estate to be settled, and in 1957 the Clarke family learned the peculiar details of her will. In the meantime, though, the situation had already begun to change for
Goodnight Moon
. As parents across the country and world began telling each other about this “magic” book that put toddlers to sleep, sales grew and the publisher began issuing new printings. The result was that Albert, now 13, learned that his share of the estate was already $17,530 (about $134,000 in today’s money) and still growing robustly. By 1970
Goodnight Moon
was selling 20,000 copies a year; in the decades that followed, that number jumped into the hundreds of thousands, with total sales reaching four million in 1990.

The average American woman will spend about 8 years of her life shopping.

THE PLOT THICKENS

You’d think that a story about a children’s book might have a happy ending: Perhaps Albert would use his money wisely and generously. No. In 2000 Joshua Prager tracked Albert Clarke down for the
Wall Street Journal
, writing that “in the intervening years, the trajectories of Ms. Brown’s book and the boy who inherited it began to diverge with strange symmetry.” Prager describes a life of squandered millions, murderous fistfights, theft, a sequence of broken homes, domestic violence, lost custody of children, clothing bought and thrown away instead of being washed, houses bought and sold at a loss, vagrancy, debt, drug abuse, and arrests on an array of charges ranging from menacing and resisting arrest to criminal possession of a weapon, criminal trespass, assault, and grand larceny. According to Prager, Albert Clarke said he believed—with no supporting evidence or corroboration from any source—that Brown was his real mother, a notion his older brother Austin characterized as “delusional thinking. It’s a fairy tale that makes him feel better.”

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY

Austin’s response is understandable: Albert’s most recent six-month royalty check had been $341,000; Austin’s (for Brown’s book
The Sailor Dog
): $13.88. Their youngest brother Jimmy, also the recipient of small checks, had joined a cult years earlier before committing suicide in 1995. How long will this continue? Thanks to extensions of copyright laws in the 1990s, Albert or his heirs will be receiving royalties for
Goodnight Moon
—one of the most successful children’s books of all time—until 2043.

An average pickup truck weighs around 4,000 pounds. Average monster truck: 11,000 lbs.

TOP BANANA

There’s a saying among some older people: “Don’t buy green bananas—you might not live long enough to eat them.” Turns out the opposite is true: We might actually outlive the bananas we’re used to eating
.

B
ANANA REPUBLIC
Ever wonder why there are so many different kinds of apples on supermarket shelves but only one kind of banana? Bananas can only be grown in tropical climates, and they have to be grown in large quantities to meet the demand. And ironically, while it makes economic sense to grow large fields of just a single variety of banana, it’s this kind of setup that leads to rapid outbreaks of blight and plant diseases. So again, why is there just one kind?

There are actually dozens of edible banana varieties in the world, but the only one you’ve probably ever seen is the bright yellow Cavendish variety. Before the 1950s, the Cavendish was a rare, exotic fruit that almost nobody in the United States had ever eaten. That’s because the sole banana available in the U.S. before that was the Gros Michel. Introduced to the United States in 1870 by a Cape Cod fisherman and importer named Lorenzo Baker, the Gros Michel had a skin that was resistant to the disease and cold weather it was exposed to on the journey from the equatorial jungles and banana plantations.

By 1910 Americans were buying about 200 million Gros Michels (or “Big Mikes”) every year. Baker’s importing business, now called United Fruit, had grown to a $200 million company on the strength of the Gros Michel. In order to meet the demand for bananas, United Fruit bought enormous swaths of land in Central and South America, decimating jungles and hiring locals to work the banana plantations for a few cents a day.

YELLOW FEVER

The goal of any large commercial agricultural operation is to produce predictable, uniform, nearly identical fruit. But growing acre upon acre of just one variety results in a lack of plant diversity, which can make it susceptible to blight. Even worse, because cultivated bananas are propagated through cuttings, not seed, the plants are genetically identical to one another. Result: Any disease that can kill one Gros Michel banana tree can kill them all. And that’s exactly how the Gros Michel fields started to die off in the late 1940s—from a fungus known as Panama disease.

Bananas grow pointing up, not hanging down.

As United Fruit watched its cash crop die, the company’s tiny rival, Dole, saw the writing on the wall and switched its production from Gros Michel to another banana variety: the Cavendish, a Chinese variety discovered by British explorers in the 19th century. Its main selling point: It was immune to the diseases that were killing off the Gros Michel, so it could even be planted on the same fields already in use. It was, however, highly susceptible to other plant diseases, requiring the liberal use of pesticides, as well as special ripening rooms built near banana farms. United Fruit was so slow to switch to the healthier but less-sweet-tasting Cavendish that it lost more and more market share to Dole. (United Fruit later made a big comeback in bananas under another name: Chiquita.)

YES, WE HAVE NO MORE BANANAS

What happened to the Gros Michel is now happening to the Cavendish. Again, growing too much of one plant in a large area makes it susceptible to blight, and pesticide-resistant strains have developed over the decades. Killing off the Cavendish is a newly discovered soil-borne disease called Tropical Race Four that acts quickly and remains viable in the dirt for a long time—spores as old as 30 years have been found. The blight (a new fungus) devastates the plants, turning the centers of the fruit into putrid-smelling—and unsellable—mush. The fungus was first noticed in northern Australia in 1997, and it’s been steadily wiping out banana plantations ever since. In some areas, production is down 60 percent from peak levels in the 1980s.