Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids (17 page)

• Mum, however, was the first commercial deodorant ever, introduced in Philadelphia in 1888. Bristol-Meyers bought the brand in 1932, and in the 1950s, playing off of the gimmick of the newly invented ballpoint pen, marketers created Ban Roll-On using the same rolling-ball design.

• A chemist in Chicago named Jules Montenier reduced some of the damage in 1941 by adding a chemical called nitrile, which neutralized the acidity of aluminum chloride. He created Stopette, the best-selling deodorant of the 1950s. When Montenier's patent ran out in the late 1950s, Stopette was eclipsed by several new brands, including Gillette's Right Guard, the first spray deodorant.

• Today, aluminum choloride remains the active ingredient of choice in many antiperspirants. How does it work? Its tiny particles get wedged into the sweat glands, creating a plug that keeps sweat from coming out. And because, technically, it alters your natural body functions, the FDA classifies antiperspirants as “drugs.”

BENEFITS OF BO

Most people in the United States today use deodorants to mask their smell, but there are actually some positives to BO.

• Humans' unusually stinky BO gives them a disadvantage in hunting, of course, requiring a downwind approach to prey. But it may have also helped early humans to survive by making them unappetizing to predators.

• Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that a compound in male underarm sweat activates brain areas that improve women's mood and sexual receptiveness.

• The smell of your sweat may be an early health warning. If your sweat smells a little like bleach, it can be a sign of liver or kidney disease; if it smells fruity, a sign of diabetes.

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Juliette Gordon Low founded the first Girl Scout troop in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912.

Whale Tales

Humans absorb only about 15 percent of the oxygen they inhale. Whales absorb as much as 90 percent.

When traveling as a group, orcas breathe in unison.

A whale caught near Alaska in 2007 had the tip of a harpoon from the 1880s stuck in its skin.

Whales are able to swim backward and can make facial expressions.

The “whale bones” in ladies' corsets during the 19th century were actually whale teeth.

A whale's teeth tell its age. Each year, whales grow a new layer of enamel around their teeth, making rings like those of a tree.

Whale oil was used as a lubricant for car transmissions as recently as 1973.

Many people say that whale blubber tastes like fresh coconut.

The California gray whale has one of the longest migration routes of any mammal (12,000 miles).

Rhyme & Reason

How much does the job of United States poet laureate pay? Just $35,000 for a one-year term, plus a $5,000 travel budget.

British poets laureate used to serve for life, but now their term is 10 years. Since 1668, there have been only 19 of them.

Canada alternates between an English-speaking poet laureate and a French-speaking one.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a fan of poet E. A. Robinson and arranged a cushy “job” for Robinson in the Customs Department. The poet's official duties consisted of opening his roll-top desk, reading the paper, closing the desk, and leaving the paper on his chair to let his boss know he'd been there. When Roosevelt left office, however, Robinson was told that he'd actually have to start doing a real job. He quit immediately.

Nearly all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” If you get tired of that, the
Gilligan's Island
theme usually works, too.

A study of prominent American writers showed that poets lived an average of 66.2 years, compared to 72.7 years for nonfiction writers.

Of successful poets studied, one in five killed themselves. This compares badly to the 1 percent suicide rate of the general population.

Langston Hughes was a busboy before he became a key Harlem Renaissance writer. When poet Vachel Lindsay was dining at his restaurant, Hughes placed a packet of his poems next to Lindsay's plate. Lindsay liked what he read and helped Hughes launch his career.

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Warning label on French cigarette boxes:
“Smoking may cause a slow and painful death.”

On the Air

In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi, one of radio's earliest developers, wrote to the Italian minister of telegraphs, explaining his wireless telegraph experiments. The official scrawled “To the Longara [insane asylum]” on the letter and recommended that Marconi be committed.

How to tell if a radio is North Korean: The tuning dial is soldered in place. It's preset to official government broadcasts.

The first fleeing fugitive captured with the help of radio was in 1910. Hawley Crippen poisoned his wife in England and hopped an ocean liner for Canada with his mistress disguised as a boy. They were recognized onboard, and after a flurry of Morse code messages, he was arrested when the boat docked.

Peter Jennings hosted a radio show on the Canadian network CBC at age nine.

The first radio commercial ran on August 28, 1922. New York's WEAF broadcast an infomercial for Queensboro Real Estate. The 10-minute ad cost $50.

Glow with the Flow

Marie and Pierre Curie first isolated radium on April 20, 1902. Prolonged exposure to radioactivity killed Marie in 1934. (Pierre died in 1906 after being hit by a horse-drawn wagon.)

In the 1920s, radium was mistakenly considered harmless and used liberally in kids' toys to make them glow in the dark. Everyone started to notice the danger after radiation sickness became common among radium workers.

Spas also grew up around radioactive springs and even abandoned radium mines. Tourists could buy a radium-lined jar that came with a guarantee “to make any water placed herein radioactive within 12 hours” and a prescription to “drink at least eight glasses of water daily.”

Some foods are slightly radioactive from naturally present radium and/or potassium, including Brazil nuts, white potatoes, carrots, lima beans, red meat, and beer.

The release of radioactivity outside of the Three Mile Island facility was actually minimal. If you lived within 10 miles of the nuclear plant when it partially melted down in 1979, you would have been exposed to only about 8 millirems of radioactivity, the equivalent of one chest X-ray.

Spring Forward

In most early cultures, the New Year began in the spring to mark the start of the agricultural year.

The Gregorian calendar, first adopted by the Catholic Church in 1582, proclaimed January 1 as the beginning of the year. However, many European towns continued to celebrate their traditional spring “new year” holidays into the late 1700s.

Easter takes place on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring. March 22 is the earliest it can be; April 25, the latest.

Groundhog Day (February 2) originated in Germany, where it was part of a larger festival called Candlemas, when all of a church's candles were blessed…but the animal they used was a badger. There were no badgers in the New World, though, so German immigrants substituted a groundhog instead.

Lent comes from
lencten
, an Anglo-Saxon word that meant “long,” but it also meant “spring,” in the sense of days growing longer. (
Lencten
is also where we get the word “lengthen.”)

Easter lilies bloom in spring because people alter their growing environments to keep them warm and force them to open early. On their own, lilies generally bloom in the summer.

Eostre was the pagan goddess of fertility and spring. Festivals dedicated to her were so popular in pre-Christian Europe that early missionaries kept the trappings and name of her holiday, but redefined what it meant, assigning the “new beginning” to Jesus's resurrection. Originally, though, Eostre ruled the roost and celebrations in her honor included lots of eggs and rabbits because both were symbols of spring, fertility, and new beginnings.

The Largest…

…
single business in Italy
is the Mafia.

…
crop in Mississippi
is catfish.

…
swimming pool in the world,
located in Chile, is more than half a mile long.

…
family of birds on earth:
the
Tyrannidae
, or flycatchers, with more than 400 species.

…
use of freshwater in the United States:
thermoelectric power.

…
joint in the human body:
the knee.

…
cyclone on record:
Typhoon Tip (1979). Its diameter: 1,380 miles, about half the size of the continental United States.

…
county in the United States:
San Bernardino County in California covers 20,160 square miles.

…
comic-book collection:
The Library of Congress has more than 100,000.

…
retail box of pasta
was five feet tall and weighed half a ton. Supermarkets in Turkey sold them in 2012 for 999 Turkish lira (about $560), with proceeds going to UNICEF.

…
frog on earth:
The Goliath frog, an endangered species in western Africa that weighs up to 7 pounds and can stretch out as long as 3 feet.

…
fiberglass cow in the world:
“Salem Sue” in New Salem, North Dakota. She stands 38 feet tall.

The Sporting Life

“Pro football is like nuclear war: there are no winners, only survivors.”

—Frank Gifford

“There are only two kinds of coaches: those who have been fired, and those who will be fired.”

—Ken Loeffler

“Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”

—Heywood Broun

“My doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.”

—Justice Hugo Black

“You can't think and hit at the same time.”

—Yogi Berra

“In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.”

—Russell Baker

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

—Yogi Berra

“Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the ‘me' for the ‘we.'”

—Phil Jackson

“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.”

—Erma Bombeck

The Olympic Spirit

It was traditional for ancient Greek Olympic athletes to compete naked. Women weren't invited as competitors or spectators.

An Olympic torch weighs 3½ pounds, a little more than four cans of beer. It's made of wood, aluminum, and gold-plated brass, with a tank hidden in the base that holds 40 minutes' worth of propane. About 10,000 are made so that runners in the intercontinental relay can keep the torches they run with.

Part of the ancient Olympics were also competitions in the arts, so when the games were revived in modern times, sports-themed painting, literature, music, architecture, and sculpture became medal events. This lasted until 1952, when the games downgraded the arts to noncompetitive exhibitions.

The only country to host the Summer Olympics but not win a single gold medal was Canada, in 1976.

The official Olympic five-rings flag was first flown during the 1920 Olympics but disappeared from the flagpole on the last day. Its fate was unknown until 1997 when diver and bronze medalist Haig Prieste admitted to stealing it on a dare from champion swimmer Duke Kahanamoku. Prieste, then 103 years old, returned the flag in 2000.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, renowned pediatrician and best-selling author, competed in the 1924 Olympics as a rower…and won a gold medal.

Kick-start

Motorcycles were around long before cars—an inventor tested his steam-powered
velocipedraisiavaporianna
in Paris in 1818. But it wasn't until 1869 that American Silvester H. Roper built a “steam velocipede” that could outrun a horse.

World's best-selling vehicle? At 60 million-plus, the Honda Super Cub motorcycle.

The Fonz on
Happy Days
famously owned a motorcycle, but Henry Winkler, who played him for a decade, never learned how to ride one.

The Triumph motorcycle that Marlon Brando rode in
The Wild Ones
was his personal bike.

In 2009 Israeli bikers protested motorcycle insurance rate hikes by riding in only their underwear. Their slogan: “Insurance Is Stripping Us.”

In the company's early years, there was only one guy named Harley, but there were three brothers named Davidson.

The first Harley-Davidson motorcycle, built in 1903, used an empty tomato can for a carburetor.