Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (54 page)

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI (1869–1948)

Claim to Fame:
Led the Indian nationalist movement, which won India’s independence from the British Empire in 1947

After the Funeral:
After he was assassinated in January 1948, Gandhi was cremated atop a funeral pyre. Custom dictated that his oldest son scatter the ashes into a river or into the sea within 13 days. But Gandhi’s oldest son, Harilal, was estranged from his father and the duty was never performed. Instead, Gandhi’s ashes were placed in numerous small copper urns and distributed all over India to be scattered in local rivers.
Most
of the ashes were scattered, but several urns’ worth were not.

• One urn sat forgotten in a bank vault in the Indian state of Orissa until it was rediscovered in 1994. After a three-year legal battle, one of Gandhi’s great-grandsons scattered the ashes at the
confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.

African bush babies have “toilet claws” on their hind feet that they use just for “grooming.”

• Another surfaced in 2007, when the son of one of Gandhi’s close friends tried to donate it to a museum in Mumbai. Those ashes were also claimed by the family, and in 2008 one of Harilal’s granddaughters scattered them in the Arabian Sea.

• A third urn is in southern California, entombed in a Gandhi memorial at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades. The owners have no plans to hand it over. No one knows how many urns were filled with Gandhi’s ashes in 1948, so there may be more urns out there, waiting to be discovered.

BENITO MUSSOLINI (1883–1945)

Claim to Fame:
Founder of Italian fascism,
Il Duce
(“The Leader”) was the dictator of Italy from 1925 to 1943.

After the Funeral:
Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were captured by Communist partisans and executed while trying to flee to Spain in the closing days of World War II. Their bodies were transported to Milan, where they were hung upside down from the roof of a gas station. After the bodies were taken down, Mussolini was autopsied (the Americans kept a sample of his brain for study), then buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Milan’s Musocco Cemetery.

A year later, a right-wing journalist named Domenico “the Body Snatcher” Leccisi located Mussolini’s grave, dug up the decaying corpse and made off with it. (Most of it, anyway: Leccisi is believed to have lost one of Il Duce’s legs and perhaps a finger or two as he made his escape.) Fascist sympathizers moved the body from one place to another in the months that followed, but in August 1946 the authorities caught up with it in a Franciscan monastery near Milan, where it was hidden in a trunk. Fearing that Mussolini’s grave might become a fascist shrine, the Italian government hid the dictator’s body in another monastery for eleven years before returning it to the Mussolini family in 1957. They placed the body, minus the brain sample and missing appendages, in the Mussolini family crypt in the town of Dovia di Predappio, Italy. (The brain sample was returned in 1966; the leg and missing fingers were never recovered.) Just as the authorities feared, the crypt has become a pilgrimage site: As many as 100,000 tourists, many of them neofascists, visit the tomb each year.

It would take about 3 years of nonstop pedaling to ride your bike to the moon.

METAL, PART II

It’s part of so many products in your life, from your car to your pen, but you probably never even think about where it comes from. Here’s part II of the story. (Part 1 is on
page 236
.)

L
OOK! SHINY!
For at least a few million years, human beings and their ancestors used tools made from such materials as wood, bone, and rock, to help make their lives a little easier. It didn’t make their lives
that
much easier:
Homo sapiens
have been relatively primitive nomadic hunters and gatherers for almost all of their existence. Then, around 10,000 years ago they began discovering ways to work with a “new” material: metal.

The first metals used by humans were the ones that early metalsmiths didn’t have to do very much with to make them usable. These are the
native metals
—metals that occur in nature in a pure state, or are naturally mixed with other elements in a way that maintains their usable properties. They include copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold.

Someone might have just found nuggets of these metals in a streambed, or in the roots of an unearthed tree, and thought they were attractive. They may have pounded them with stone hammers and found that they could shape them. That could have led to metals being used in jewelry or ornaments, or to the making of metal tools and weapons like axes, knives, and swords—a vast improvement over the old stone tools. All of this eventually led to people actively searching for more metals, the establishment of mines, trading in metals between different peoples, and the birth of a metal industry. However it happened—it happened in numerous locations all over the world.

METALLURGY

Starting around 8,000 years ago, archaeologists say, people started discovering that they could alter the metal. They may have discovered it by accident, or perhaps people just got creative, or maybe it was a combination of both. In any case, new processes were developed to alter metals, then to create entirely new ones
that didn’t exist in nature at all—with huge improvements in quality. Over the next few thousand years, mining and metalworking became integral to most of the cultures on Earth, and metal became one of the most civilization-changing substances in human history. Each of these new processes involved fire, and it’s likely that experimentation with one led directly to the next. The most important advancements:

Your tuition dollars at work: The University of Alabama offers an “Intro to Zombies” course.

Annealing.
This is simply the process of heating metal until it’s cherry red. This restores old, brittle metal to its original malleable state, allowing it to be reworked and prolonging its usability. Annealing can be done at relatively low temperatures (copper can be annealed in a campfire). It was first done sometime around 6000 B.C., somewhere in the Middle East, and possibly in Europe and India around the same time.

Smelting.
In this process, metals are melted into a liquid state, offering for much more freedom to shape them into different forms. Metals were first smelted around 5000 B.C., after the development of more advanced pottery kilns, which can produce much higher heats than could be achieved in simple open fires.

Alloy Production.
This is the process of mixing different metals while they are in a molten state. It began around 3300 B.C. (the beginning of the Bronze Age), with the first production of bronze—a mixture of copper and tin that is much harder and more durable than either of its components.

Extraction.
With further improvements in kiln technology and the subsequent ability to achieve higher temperatures, techniques were developed that allowed for the extraction of metals from ore. It was first done with iron in the Middle East around 1500 B.C.—marking the beginning of the Iron Age.

Smelting, alloy production, and extraction were practiced by ancient peoples in Europe, Asia, South America, and as far north as Mexico, but not in the rest of North America, or in Australia, until Europeans arrived. These simple processes remain the foundation of what is likely the largest and most successful industry in human history: the metal industry.

For Part III of “Metals,” turn to
page 504
.

Rocky Mountain high: Colorado has more microbreweries per capita than any other state.

AMAZING COINCIDENCES

The universe sometimes works in mysterious ways
.

• What do American cartoonist Hank Ketcham and British cartoonist David Law have in common? Both—independently—came up with comic-strip characters named “Dennis the Menace,” both of whom were obnoxious youngsters. Not only that, both characters debuted on the exact same day: March 12, 1951. Neither man filed suit against the other, because both understood that it was just a strange coincidence. (But to avoid confusion, the U.S. version was shortened to “Dennis” when it ran in the U.K.)

• Two women named Patricia Ann Campbell were born on March 13, 1941. Due to an administrative goof, they were both issued the same Social Security number. Forty years later, when they were called in to the government office to rectify the mistake, they discovered that they both were bookkeepers, both had studied cosmetics, both had fathers named Robert, both had married military men a few days apart in 1959, both had two children, and their kids were the exact same ages.

• In 1992 Sue Hamilton, a British office worker, needed to call her co-worker, Jason Pegler, when the fax machine broke. She found his number on a bulletin board, dialed it, and he picked up. “Sorry to ring you at home, Jason,” she said. “I’m not at home,” he replied. “I was walking past a phone booth when it rang.” Instead of dialing Pegler’s phone number, Hamilton had accidentally dialed his employee number—which happened to be the same number as the phone booth he happened to be walking past.

• In 1858 a poker player named Robert Fallon was caught cheating and was shot dead in a San Francisco saloon. No one wanted his $600 (money won by cheating was considered unlucky), but they had no problem
winning
it back. So they plucked a young man from the street to take the dead man’s place. He obliged...and started winning. When a police officer arrived to investigate the killing, he seized the original $600 to give to Fallon’s next of kin. The young man then said to the cop, “His name was Fallon? So’s mine!” It turned out that the new player
was
Fallon’s next of kin—his son. He hadn’t seen his father in seven years. (He kept the money.)

Oldest surviving log cabin in America: New Jersey’s Nothnagle Log House (circa 1640).

“THE EIGHTH WONDER
OF THE WORLD”

Need publicity? Adding your project (or yourself) to the “Seven Wonders” list is an easy way to get noticed. Here are a few modern contenders
.

•
The Pikeville Cut-Through.
Opening in 1987, it was one of the biggest construction projects of all time, taking 14 years and costing $78 million to blast a four-lane highway and railroad line through a mountain in Kentucky.

•
The Sydney Opera House.
Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon in 1957, the iconic building won architecture’s highest award, the Pritzker Prize. An opera about the creation of the expressionist shell-shaped building, called
The Eighth Wonder
, debuted in 1995 (at the Sydney Opera House).

•
Andre the Giant.
The World Wrestling Federation gave their star 7’4”-tall, 500-pound grappler this title in the 1980s. (A decade later, the WWF labeled 180-pound female wrestler Chyna the “Ninth Wonder of the World.”)

•
The Houston Astrodome.
Major League Baseball awarded a team to Houston contingent on the city building a stadium with a roof, because it was thought that Houston was too hot for open-air baseball. So civil engineers conceived this building, the world’s first domed arena, which opened in 1965.

•
The Karakoram Highway.
The world’s highest international highway, this 15,397-foot high freeway connects China and Pakistan across an 800-mile mountain range. Both countries promote it as a tourist attraction with the “Eighth Wonder” nickname.

•
The Panama Canal.
Before this channel in the Isthmus of Panama opened in 1914, ships in the Pacific Ocean had to go all the way around South America to reach the Atlantic. Although 27,000 people died during its construction, the canal significantly improved (and cheapened) international commerce.

•
The International Space Station.
Wait—this one isn’t even
on the world
.

Besides ovens, Easy-Bake has also made toy popcorn poppers and potato-chip makers.

MYTH AMERICA:
“THE PRICE THEY PAID”

If “The Price They Paid” hasn’t landed in your e-mail inbox already, it probably will someday. It’s very popular—the kind of thing people like to share with friends. Why? Because it’s a great story...if only it were true
.

I
T’S ALL OVER THE INTERNET
The last time we checked, more than 200,000 websites had reprinted a short essay called “The Price They Paid.” And every year since 1999, the Fourth of July has triggered thousands more appearances. It’s an inspiring story, detailing the troubles and persecutions that befell the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence: fortunes lost, families split, heroes killed, ships seized, homes burned. To give the signers their due, they did risk a lot in voting to declare independence from Great Britain. They had every reason to believe that their lives—and everyone else’s, for that matter—would be turned upside down. Some anonymous writer, though, decided that the signers’ bravery wasn’t brave enough, so he “improved” the story by distorting or leaving out important facts, or just creating new “facts” to make it a better story.

Historians have tried to determine the original source of the “Price They Paid” stories. The best anyone’s been able to figure out is that this shot heard ’round the Internet was actually the echo of a piece from a book called
The Rest of the Story
by radio commentator Paul Harvey, published in 1956. Harvey was a great storyteller, but it seems he told a few whoppers. Here are a few examples from “The Price They Paid.”