Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (48 page)

1813:
Paris again, where Mathiew Orfila publishes the first treatise that systematically catalogs poisons and their effects. For this, he gets the title of Father of Modern Toxicology, although there probably wasn’t an official ceremony. Orfila also was one of the first to develop forensic blood tests and to examine blood and semen with a microscope for forensic purposes.

1835:
Scotland Yard investigator Henry Goddard determines that a butler had staged an attempted robbery when he traces a bullet back to a bullet mold owned by the butler. This is the first example of bullet matching, as well as one of the first actual recorded cases of “the butler did it.”

1863:
Is that blood or a spot of ketchup? A German scientist named Schönbein creates the first presumptive test for blood when he discovers that hemoglobin will oxidize hydrogen peroxide. Mixing peroxide and ketchup will simply give you inedible ketchup, although it’s unclear if Schönbein made this observation.

1879:
As police forces started keeping systematic records of crimes and criminals, they found themselves with more information than
they could keep track of, especially in big cities. Alphone Bertillon, a clerk working for the Paris police, came up with a solution—measuring a lot of body parts on each criminal. He calculated that there was a one in four chance of two different criminals having one measurement match; by taking 11 measurements, he cut the odds to one in 4 million. A lot of criminals found policemen coming toward them with calipers in their hands and a gleam in their eyes. Police departments sorted their rogues galleries by the span of their outstretched arms and the length and breadth of their ears. This sounds pretty random, but so are fingerprints, which replaced bertillonage (aka the anthropometric method) in the early 20th century. Fingerprints were more random, which made them even less likely to be duplicated.

1880:
Trouble in Tokyo! There’s been a burglary, and an innocent man has been blamed for the heist! In steps Scottish physician and missionary Henry Faulds, who uses fingerprints not only to clear the accused, but also to help bring the actual criminal to justice. Faulds writes about using fingerprints for crime-solving in the science journal Nature, and then spends the next couple of decades in a nasty little letter-writing spat with one Sir William Herschel, about which of the two of them thought up the idea first. (Herschel—not to be confused with the other Sir William Herschel, the guy who discovered Uranus—concedes the point, finally, in 1917.)

1887:
Everyone’s favorite fictional master of forensics, Sherlock Holmes, makes his debut.

1892:
Sir Francis Galton of Great Britain publishes
Fingerprints
, the first book to codify fingerprint patterns and show how to use them in solving crimes. Meanwhile, in Argentina, police investigator Juan Vucetich develops a fingerprinting classification system based on Galton’s work and uses it to accuse a mother of murdering her two sons and then slitting her own throat to make it look like the work of someone else. Seems she left bloody fingerprints on a doorpost. That’ll teach her.

1901:
Human blood groups are identified and described by Austrian doctor Karl Landsteiner, who subsequently codified his discoveries into the blood types we know today. This discovery was useful in the field of forensics (to help identify criminals by the blood they might
leave at the crime scene), as well as in medicine in general, and it lands Landsteiner a Nobel Prize in 1930.

1903:
The first academic program for forensic science is created at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, by Professor R. A. Reiss.

1905:
Teddy Roosevelt creates the FBI. He was president at the time. He could do that.

1910:
Rosella Rousseau confesses to the murder of Germaine Bichon. Why? Because her hair is matched to hairs at the crime scene, a technique pioneered by Victor Balthazard, a professor of forensic medicine at the Sorbonne. The same year, another French professor of forensic medicine, Edmund Locard, helps to create the first police crime lab. The first U.S. crime lab was founded in 1925 by Los Angeles police chief August Vollmer.

1921:
The portable polygraph (lie detector) is invented. In 1923 polygraph testimony is ruled inadmissible in U.S. courts.

1925:
Blood’s not the only bodily fluid you can type, suggested Japanese scientist K. I. Yosida, as he undertook studies to determine serological isoantibodies in other body fluids. He’s right.

1960:
An arsonist’s job gets harder as gas chromatography is used for the first time in a lab to identify specific petroleum products.

1976:
Quincy, M.E
., starring Jack Klugman as a feisty L.A. coroner, debuts and runs through 1983. The character of Quincy is allegedly based on real-life Los Angeles “Coroner to the Stars” Thomas Noguchi, who presided over the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy, and played a significant role in the investigation of the Manson family murders. The physical resemblance between Klugman and Noguchi is enigmatic at best.

1977:
Japanese forensic scientist Fuseo Matsumur notices his fingerprints popping up as he prepares a slide for examination and tells his friend Masato Soba. Soba would use this information to help develop the first process to raise latent prints with cyanoacrylate, or, as it’s more commonly known, superglue. Yes, superglue. Now you know why not to get it on your fingers.

1984:
Yes, 1984. An ironic year for the first successful DNA profiling test, created by Great Britain’s Sir Alec Jeffreys.

1986:
Jeffreys uses his DNA profiling method to help convict the ominously named Colin Pitchfork for murder. Interestingly, in this same case DNA is used to clear another man accused of the crime.

1987:
DNA profiling makes its debut in the United States and nails Tommy Lee Andrews for a number of sexual assaults in Orlando, Florida. However, in the same year, the admissibility of DNA profiling is challenged in another case,
New York v. Castro
, in which the defendant was accused of murder. This set the stage for many years of back and forth argument on the standards and practices of the labs that perform DNA profiling.

1991:
Silence of the Lambs
is released, starring Jodie Foster as an FBI investigator who uses forensic techniques to track down a serial killer, and Anthony Hopkins as the oddly genteel cannibal who helps her. Foster becomes the first actress to win an Oscar for playing an FBI agent; Hopkins becomes the first actor to win an Oscar for playing a character that has a good friend for lunch with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

1996:
In Tennessee a fellow named Paul Ware is accused of murder, but the only physical evidence is a few hairs. Investigators use those hairs to extract DNA from mitochondria, a small structure within human cells. Mitochondrial DNA is different from DNA found in a cell’s nucleus. Since there are quite a few mitochondria in every human cell, the amount of mitochondrial DNA to work with is larger. The mitochondrial DNA in the hairs is a match for Ware’s. Ware is serving a life term in prison. It’s the first use of mitochondrial DNA to convict someone of a crime.

2001:
Not one but two shows about forensic scientists hit the TV: the redundantly titled
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
and
Crossing Jordan
. None of the stars look remotely like Thomas Noguchi.

2005:
There were at least a dozen new forensic TV shows, including the additions of
CSI: Miami
and
CSI: New York
based on the success of the original
Crime Scene Investigation
.

Was it the world’s most expensive private residence . . . or the world’s biggest white elephant? Luckily, California’s Hearst Castle is open for public tours. Pay it a visit and see for yourself
.

O
THER PEOPLE’S MONEY

In 1894 William Randolph Hearst, age 31, a member of one of California’s wealthiest families and the publisher of the
San Francisco Examiner
, commissioned an architect to build a mansion on a large tract of land in Pleasanton, California.

Somehow he never got around to telling the owner—his mother—he was building himself a house on her property. When she found out, she took it and kept it for herself. There wasn’t much William could do about it—his mother, the widow of U.S. senator George Hearst, controlled the family’s entire $20 million fortune. William hadn’t inherited a penny of his father’s estate and had nothing in his own name, not even the
Examiner
. His mother owned that, too.

Twenty-five years later, Hearst, now 56, wanted to build a hilltop house on the 60,000-acre ranch his mother owned in San Simeon, a small coastal whaling town halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hearst was fond of camping with his family and an entourage of as many as 50 guests and servants at the site, but wanted something “a little more comfortable.”

A SLIGHT CHANGE IN PLANS

By now Hearst was well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful publishers in the country . . . but his mother still controlled the family fortune. He must have learned something from his 1894 experience, because he told his mother about the plan for San Simeon before he started construction, and he limited himself to a single tiny “Jappo-Swisso bungalow.” Mrs. Hearst agreed to let him build, but insisted on keeping the property in her name because, she
explained, “I’m afraid he might get carried away.” She had good reason to worry.

Just a few months later, in April 1919, Hearst’s mother died of influenza. William, her only son, inherited everything . . . and began rethinking his simple bungalow. He told architect Julia Morgan that he wanted something a little bigger.

“I don’t think it was a month before we were going on a grand scale,” Morgan’s employee Walter Steilberg remembered. The bungalow quickly evolved into a large house . . . then a mansion . . . and finally one enormous mansion called Casa Grande, surrounded by three smaller “cottages”—Casa del Sol, Casa del Mar, and Casa del Monte—giving the hilltop retreat the appearance of an entire Mediterranean hill town.

Hearst called it La Cuesta Encantata, “The Enchanted Hill.” To the public, it would become known as Hearst Castle.

AN UPHILL BATTLE

That was the plan, but as Julia Morgan explained to Hearst, bringing the large project to completion would not be easy or cheap. For one thing, there was no paved road and the rocky, barren spot where Hearst wanted to build was 1,600 feet up, which meant there was no easy way to get construction materials to the site. And with no topsoil, there was no way to plant the trees and gardens Hearst wanted, either. Furthermore, San Simeon was in the middle of nowhere, which meant that skilled workers would have to be brought in from hundreds of miles away and housed and fed on-site.

None of this mattered to Hearst. He’d loved San Simeon since childhood, and for the first time in his life he had the money to build his dream house. Nothing was going to get in his way. The dirt trail up the hill was paved; the pier in the town of San Simeon was enlarged to allow steamships to unload construction materials; dormitories were constructed for the workers; and tons of topsoil were hauled up to the site, enough to bury 50 acres of land under four feet of dirt. Construction began in 1919 . . . and was still underway more than 30 years later, when Hearst died in August 1951.

SALE OF THE CENTURY

While Morgan was working on the building plans, Hearst was hard at work indulging what his mother had once described as his “mania for
antiquities”—he spent millions of dollars acquiring entire trainloads of antiques to furnish and decorate the 165 rooms—including 56 bedrooms and 19 sitting rooms—and the 61 bathrooms that made up his estate. His timing was perfect: cash-strapped European governments were instituting income and estate taxes to finance rebuilding in the aftermath of World War I. Once-wealthy families found themselves having to auction off artwork, antiques, and even entire castles, monasteries, and country estates to raise cash to pay their taxes. Hearst was their biggest customer.

RECYCLED MATERIALS

Hearst was especially fond of acquiring “architectural fragments”—floors, doorways, windows, mantles, chimneys, etc.—that could be carted off to San Simeon and set into the concrete walls of his estate. For more than 20 years, he compulsively bought just about everything that caught his eye and shipped it across the Atlantic to warehouses in the Bronx; from there most of it was sent by rail to warehouses in San Simeon.

Hearst peppered Julia Morgan with suggestions on which artifacts should go where, and none of these treasures were too sacred to be “improved” if need be. If something was too small, Morgan had it enlarged; if it was too big, she had it chopped down to size. “So far we have received from Hearst, to incorporate into the new buildings, some 12 or 13 railroad cars of antiques,” Morgan wrote in 1920: