Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® (83 page)

Seawater and freshwater
both must have a pH level of between 6.5 and 8.5—not far from human blood—to maintain aquatic life. (There are a few exceptions. The most extreme example known is
Picrophilus torridus
, a microorganism that lives in hot springs on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where it flourishes in waters with pH levels near 0—about the same as hydrochloric acid. Meaning that if
you
went into that water...your skin would burn off.)

Soil
must be within a pH range from about 4.5 to 8 to sustain the nutrients needed by plant life.

Food and drinks
must be at certain pH levels to be safe for consumption, because they affect the pH levels of bodily fluids. The safe pH range for food is between 2 and 8. Foods that are slightly more acidic or basic can be eaten—just not in large quantities.

Scientists have found 350,000-year-old footprints left by our human (genus
Homo
) ancestors.

ALWAYS REMAIN NEUTRAL

One more fascinating aspect of pH is that acids and bases can be used to counteract each other. That’s why gardeners treat soil with lime. Agricultural lime (crushed limestone) is a base, and adding it to acidic soil counteracts the acid, raising the pH to a level more suitable for growing plants. The same is true for soil that is too basic: You can add something acidic—such as coffee grounds, pine needles, or oak leaves—to bring the pH level down. It’s also true for your stomach:
Antacids
are called “antacids” because they’re bases—Tums are made from calcium carbonate, which has a pH of 9.4, and they’re very effective in counteracting stomach acids. This is all known as
neutralizing
because they are all attempts to bring pH level closer to the neutral level of 7.

MORE PHUN PHACTS

• Anything basic can also be called
alkaline
.

• Only
aqueous
(water-soluble) substances can be measured for pH. Non-aqueous substances, such as oils and fats, can’t.

• The overall pH of ocean water has been getting lower for some time, a result of acidic pollutants such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, which cause the production of excess H atoms in the water.
Acid rain
is rain water that’s been affected in the same way.

• Lye, or caustic soda, with a chart-topping alkalinity of 14, is the active ingredient in Nair hair remover.

Here are the approximate pH level of several common—and a few uncommon—substances:

ACIDS

Battery acid: 1

Apple: 3

Feta cheese: 4.5

Hot dogs: 5

Honeybee venom: 5

Coffee: 5.2 to 6.9

Cow’s milk: 6.6

BASES

Spinach: 7.8

Great Salt Lake: 8.2

Baking soda: 8.3

Tide detergent: 10

Lime (calcium hydroxide): 12.2

Oven cleaner: 13

Drano: 14

Odds that a piece of falling space junk will land on your house: 1 in a trillion.

BORN ON THE
2
ND
OF JULY

Pop Quiz: When did America’s Continental Congress pass the Declaration of Independence? No, not July 4th. When did they sign it? Nope, that wasn’t July 4th either. So what actually
did
happen on July 4th?

M
YTHING IN ACTION
Most Americans believe that July 4, 1776, was the day that their nation began its road to independence from Great Britain. Well, not exactly. Think of the significant incidents from the American Revolution that you remember from history class: The Stamp Act? Eleven years earlier. The Boston Massacre? Six years earlier. The Boston Tea Party? Two years earlier. Paul Revere’s Ride, and the battles at Lexington and Concord? Fifteen months earlier. By the time Congress got around to its Declaration of Independence, the signers were less leaders than followers in proclaiming an obvious fact: that American colonists were already fighting and dying for independence from England.

GO 4TH AND PROSPER

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to declare that the 13 American colonies were independent states and no longer part of the British Empire. The next day, John Adams predicted in a letter to his wife, Abigail,

The second day of July, 1776 will be celebrated by succeeded generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

He was mostly right about the celebration, but wrong by two days. After the vote, Congress spent the 3rd and 4th of July fine-tuning and nitpicking the formal document that explained the reasons for declaring independence. Adams was also correct in that the vote was usually considered the significant event, and the post-vote
follow-up was little more than paperwork. But for several after-the-fact reasons, that’s not what happened.

There are 15,095 airports in United States—more than in the next nine countries combined.

Working from a first draft by a talented young wordsmith, 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson, the final document was meant to replace a shorter, more prosaic version written a few months earlier by Adams. Jefferson resented the fact that other people had edited his prose and removed about 25 percent of his writing, including a long passage critical of the slave trade. But two days after declaring independence, Congress finally voted to issue the document on July 4th.

Most of it was a laundry list of complaints about King George III: that he interfered with the colonists’ elections, restricted immigration, controlled their trade, drafted their citizens into military service, levied taxes without their consent, controlled their bureaucrats and judges, sent armies to keep them in line, recruited mercenaries and Indians to help put down their rebellions, and neglected their concerns.

It was an outrage: Who died and made him king?

UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

Congress retained much of the vivid language Jefferson crafted. For example, “He has...sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” But what probably gave the document its enduring popularity was Jefferson’s attempt at infusing it with some nobility beyond mere whining. Congress wisely included much of his high-toned phrasing (some of which would later come to haunt slaveholders like Jefferson), including the most famous: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

It wasn’t that Jefferson and Congress had to go to a lot of trouble creating the bulk of the document. Jefferson himself admitted that the ideas and sentiments, although made eloquent, were not original. Some had been recycled from his earlier writings; some came from England’s own Bill of Rights, which had been written to depose King James II; some had come from the many declarations of independence that had already been passed by individual towns, cities, and states before Congress acted.

The space suits worn by Apollo astronauts weighed 180 lbs. on Earth and 30 lbs. on the moon.

Having finally come up with words to justify their act of rebellion against the king, Congress went about selling their decision to their less-than-unified countrymen, printing up a few hundred copies of the resolution and mailing them off to newspapers and state governments. The famous signatures weren’t included, and there was a good reason: They hadn’t been affixed to the document yet. In fact, the historic parchment version of the Declaration wouldn’t even come into existence until sometime after July 19, when Congress voted that the official declaration should be “engrossed on parchment” and “signed by every member of Congress.” According to records, that happened on August 2, with out-of-town stragglers adding their names over weeks and months after that. Of the roughly 50 people who voted for independence on July 2, only 42 were still in office on August 2 to sign the Declaration of Independence, so the eight new members signed too, even though they hadn’t voted for it.

The typeset version of the Declaration, the one without signatures, came back from the printer in time for public readings on July 8 in Philadelphia and Easton, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey. Other cities and towns held similar events once their copies arrived. On July 9, General George Washington ordered that it be read to his troops, who had already been fighting the British for a year.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The public readings and subsequent newspaper reprintings served their purpose:

• The Declaration stirred the population into a frenzy of anti-British sentiment. Riots broke out in some cities, with mobs attacking the trappings of British rule. (Of the many statues pulled down, an equestrian statue of King George in New York City ended up being melted into musket balls for the war effort.)

• It also helped solidify crucial financial support from the French, Spanish, and Dutch, who were happy to make things difficult for their longtime rivals the British.

Its mission accomplished, the autographed document became largely forgotten, generating about as much enduring interest then as an autographed copy of last year’s
Congressional Record
would today. Its few lines of flowery language about the inalienable rights
of humans were later shrugged off as not germane when the Constitution was being written, 10 years later. Not even the French revolutionaries borrowed from it—they were more heavily influenced by the newly passed American Constitution.

Insects do not have lungs.

A LONG CAMPAIGN

Ironically, it was only because of politics that the Declaration of Independence ascended from forgotten document to American icon. During the presidential campaign of 1796, Federalist John Adams and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson got into a public feud over who had contributed more to the founding of the United States. Jefferson laid claim to writing the Declaration of Independence; Adams retorted that he’d pushed the legislation through Congress and that Jefferson was just one member of a writing committee whose work needed a lot of editing. Jefferson lost the election, but eventually won the debate—the public began to see the nation’s independence and the document that declared it as the same thing, and gave Jefferson overly generous credit for both.

Having been a contentious campaign issue, the Declaration was further pushed into the public’s awareness during the War of 1812, when the United States and England fought once again. In 1817, seeing the public relations benefit of having people equate the act of drafting legislation with actual heroism, Congress commissioned John Trumbull to paint
Declaration of Independence
, the famous 12-by-18-foot portrayal of the drafting committee presenting the Declaration’s first draft to the Continental Congress (not, as is often assumed, stepping forward to sign the finished work).

AN ICON FOR ICONOCLASTS

As time passed and the Declaration of Independence moved into the symbolic realm of July 4th fireworks and parades, a funny thing happened: Some people actually read it again and found that parts of it were still relevant. Not the complaints about King George, but the parts that inspired dreams about “self-evident” truths that “all men are created equal,” which raised questions: If all men are created equal, why should only wealthy landowners be allowed to vote? How was it that some people could be forced into enslavement? And if all men are created equal, then why not minorities
and women as well? Anti-slavery activists proclaimed “the twin rocks of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence” as the basis of the abolition movement. Similarly, Abraham Lincoln, when deciding what to do about slavery, cited the Declaration’s stance on equality as the way to interpret what the Constitution really meant, a view that was controversial in its time (and, in some ways, still is).

Are you keeping count? If you live to age 75, you’ll have been alive for 2.4 billion seconds.

THE CULT OF THE SIGNERS

Sometime in the 1820s came what Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills would later call “the cult of the signers”—the idea that the politicians had engaged in a particularly brave action by signing the document. For the first time, the mostly obscure signers became the subjects of biographies, their images polished to a heroic sheen. It was a time of westward expansion, and the image of our forefathers joining together to pledge their lives and fortunes to the new nation gave America a sense of united purpose.

The stories of the
signing
had now completely overshadowed the earlier—and more significant—vote on the
Declaration
itself. In fact, the new view of the document completely obscured the memory that Americans had been fighting and dying for independence for a long time before. The July 2 date of the Declarations’s passage and August 2 signing were both erroneously moved in collective memory to July 4, the day Congress finalized its language (and therefore the date written on the document), and stories that were almost too clever to be true started to emerge from the new signing date: John Hancock’s announcement that he signed his name large so that King George III could read it without his spectacles (as if the king would ever have a chance to see the actual document; he read its text in memos and the London newspapers) and Hancock’s setup (“Now we must all hang together”), followed by the gallows-humor of the ever-quotable Benjamin Franklin: “Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”