Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (8 page)

• In 2007 a Dutch cheesemaker created the largest cheese wheel in history. It was six feet wide and weighed 1,323 pounds.

• What causes milk to harden and form into cheese: rennet, an enzyme extracted from the abomasum, the cow’s fourth stomach.

• The red wax casing used on Gouda cheese in the U.S. was invented by the grandfather of 1980s pop star Huey Lewis.

• “Real” certified Brie cheese is made only in the Brie region of France and only by two companies: Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun.

• Hard cheeses, like cheddar, have less moisture than soft cheeses, like brie. Result: Hard cheeses have more fat.

• The blue stuff in blue cheese is a mold that’s actually a form of penicillin.

Whether they were burned, disintegrated, stolen, blown to smithereens, or simply lost, countless works of art from ancient Greece, Shakespeare, and even the 20th century have been lost forever
.

A
NCIENT GREEK DRAMA
• Historians consider Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.) the “father of tragedy” because he invented that basic theatrical form and, thereby, all of Western theater. More than that, he wrote about Greek gods, Greek history, and Greek life. In fact, much of what we know about that era comes from Aeschylus’s plays. But we could have known even more. Records suggest that Aeschylus wrote between 70 and 90 plays. While we know the titles, only the scripts for seven of those plays survive. Three of those (
Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers
, and
The Eumenides
) form
The Oresteia
, the only Greek tragic trilogy still in existence.

• Aeschylus wasn’t the only Greek playwright whose work was lost. His successor as the leading playwright and documentarian of Athens, Sophocles, (496–406 B.C.), wrote 123 plays, but only seven still exist today, including
Antigone, Oedipus Rex
, and
Electra. His
successor was Euripides (480–406 B.C.). Historical records indicate that he wrote as many as 80 tragedies, but the scripts of only 18 survive, including
Medea, The Trojan Women
, and
The Bacchae
.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is widely regarded as history’s finest playwright, if not the most acclaimed writer in the entire English language. When Shakespeare wrote his plays in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, he wrote them quickly and in fragments, handing scraps of paper to the actors to memorize. The publication of his plays didn’t occur until after his death, and they were based on those script fragments. How many plays? A total of 36. But historians think there may have been two
more
Shakespeare plays.

•
Love’s Labor’s Won
.
In 1598 English author Francis Meres wrote one of the first books about Shakespeare,
Palladis Tamia
. It lists nearly all of Shakespeare’s known 36 plays…along with one called
Love’s Labour’s Won
, a sequel to
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. But Meres failed to include
The Taming of the Shrew
, leading scholars to believe for nearly 400 years that
Shrew
and
Won
were the same play. They were wrong. In 1953 a 1600-era list of Shakespeare’s plays was discovered that listed both
The Taming of the Shrew
and
Love’s Labour’s Won
.

•
Cardenio
.
Shakespeare often built his plays on previously existing works. For example,
Hamlet
is based on
The Spanish Tragedy
by playwright Thomas Kyd.
Cardenio
was an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 novel
Don Quixote
. There is a record of the play being produced in 1613 by The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater troupe. The script has never been found.

Today, hundreds of thousands of films are archived, many of them stored digitally, but it turns out that almost as many have been lost as have been saved. There are many reasons. From the birth of cinema in the 1890s until the late 1940s, the standard film stock was made of a nitrate base, which gave black-and-white movies sharp contrast and crisp images. But nitrate is highly combustible. What’s worse, it disintegrates quickly if it’s not stored in a special low-oxygen, low-humidity, climate-controlled vault. But that’s an incredibly expensive storage system for films that, when they were made, weren’t considered to have any lasting value—they were worth more for their raw materials. Low-budget movie producers (and Universal Studios in a 1948 vault-clearing measure) melted down their old movies for their silver content.

Another reason films were lost: Every major studio experienced vault fires, most of them started by the very same combustible nitrate films, which in turn burned thousands of other films. More than 95% of Fox’s silent films were destroyed in a 1937 warehouse fire. The Film Preservation Foundation estimates that 80% of
all
silent-era films are gone for good. With the advent of television in the late 1940s, studios realized that their old movies could be a lucrative source of TV programming. By the 1960s, the major studios
used safer, more fireproof vaults and the standard film stock had changed to a less-combustible acetate base.

Here are some of the movies that are gone forever:

•
The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays
(1908). The first-ever adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s
Oz
books, it starred Baum interacting with drawings of his characters. The single print was in Baum’s possession, but it disintegrated and was thrown out by his heirs.

•
The Werewolf
(1913). The first werewolf film, it was destroyed in a 1924 fire.

•
Cleopatra
(1917). It starred silent-film icon Theda Bara in the title role and had a then huge budget of $500,000. All but 45 seconds were destroyed in a Fox Studio vault fire.

•
The Gulf Between
(1917). The first full-length color film made in America. Only a few frames are left.

•
El Apostol
(1917). Made in Argentina by Italian filmmaker Quirino Cristiani, this was the first-ever full-length animated movie. All copies were destroyed in a fire in 1926. Cristiani’s other major work was
Peludópolis
(1931), the first animated feature with sound. All copies of that movie were lost in a 1961 fire.

•
Humor Risk
(1921). The first Marx Brothers movie. Harpo plays a detective chasing Groucho. It had a single screening, the audience hated it, and the Marxes destroyed the only print.

•
The Great Gatsby
(1926). Only a trailer remains of the first movie version of the classic novel.

•
Hats Off
(1927). Laurel and Hardy’s first hit. There was only one print, and it was misplaced after the movie’s theatrical run.

•
The Way of All Flesh
(1927). Emil Jennings won the first Oscar for Best Actor, but only five minutes of footage remains. It’s the only lost Academy Award–winning performance.

•
For the Love of Mike
(1927). It was directed by Frank Capra (
It’s a Wonderful Life
) and marked the screen debut of Claudette Colbert.

•
King Kong Appears in Edo
(1938). One of the first Japanese “giant monster” movies, it was destroyed during World War II.

Plays and films aren’t the only artworks that get lost to time. Turn to page 382 for paintings, books, and even
TV shows that have vanished forever
.

Practically everybody has daydreamed about prospecting for gold and striking it rich. But what happens after the big strike? Here’s the amazing tale of one of the biggest bonanzas in U.S. history
.

K
ILLING TIME
In January 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, California, sparking the Gold Rush that brought more than 300,000 people to the territory. In the spring of 1850, some prospectors heading for the California gold fields stopped at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains about 20 miles outside of modern-day Reno, Nevada, to wait for the snow to melt before they continued over the mountains. Why not look for gold while they waited? They fanned out along the Carson River’s edge and up a stream that fed into the river from a nearby canyon. And sure enough, they did manage to find some gold…but not enough to justify staying put. So after the snow melted a few weeks later, they moved on to California. Before they left, though, they named the spot “Gold Canyon.”

Word of the discovery at Gold Canyon spread, and each spring as a new wave of settlers and prospectors headed to California along the same route, many stopped there long enough to pan for gold. As the years passed and the original deposits were played out, prospectors started exploring farther afield. In January 1859, a prospector named James “Old Virginny” Finney and three friends took advantage of some good weather and went prospecting on top of a low hill in Gold Canyon where the dirt was yellower than in the surrounding lowlands. Old Virginny thought that was a good sign. When they started testing the soil, each pan yielded about 15¢ worth of gold. Not exactly Sutter’s Mill, but it was enough to justify staking a claim and exploring the area further.

In those days, tradition and mining law dictated that no miner could stake a claim larger than he could work himself. Old Virginny and his associates each filed a claim for a 50-by-400-foot area, and over the next few days some other miners filed adjacent claims. Many more made trips to the site to look around, but for
most of them, 15¢ a pan wasn’t enough gold to make them abandon the claims they were already working.

When Old Virginny and the others finished washing all the surface dirt through their “rockers”—mining equipment resembling baby cradles that rocked back and forth to separate out the gold—they dug deeper. As they did, the amount of gold steadily increased, first to $5 per day for each miner, then $12, and for a time as high as $20, at a time when gold sold for $13.50 an ounce.

So why isn’t the Comstock Lode known as the Finney Lode or the Old Virginny Lode? Because as the months passed and the miners dug deeper, they eventually hit a deposit of difficult-to-work clay that had very little gold in it. Most deposits of gold are small, so when the miners ran out of the easy diggings they assumed they’d found all there was. That’s what happened to Old Virginny: the gold ran out, so he moved on.

That June, just a mile down the hill, two miners named Peter O’Riley and Pat McLaughlin struggled to make a profit on a 900-foot-long claim they’d staked for themselves. The claim was yielding only one or two dollars’ worth of gold a day, and the men had heard about richer claims near the West Walker River, about 25 miles away. But they decided to stick around a little longer, probably until they made enough money to pay for the move.

It takes water to sift gold out of sand and dirt, and the closest water source was a tiny spring that the men decided to dam up with some strange bluish sand they’d uncovered nearby. Almost on a whim, they tossed some of the odd sand into the rocker to see if it contained any gold. It was heavy and difficult to work with, but when they cleared it away they were stunned to see that the entire bottom of the rocker was covered in a layer of shimmering gold. Where Old Virginny had recovered gold by the ounce, O’Riley and McLaughlin were mining it by the
pound
.

So why isn’t the Comstock Lode known as the O’Riley Lode or the McLaughlin Lode? Because later that same day, another miner, Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock, happened to ride by while the men were celebrating their good fortune. When Comstock saw
the gold, he hopped off his pony and told the two men that they were prospecting on land that he and a partner had already claimed for a ranch. In those days, you could claim unoccupied land for a ranch just as easily as you could stake a mining claim. Comstock told the “trespassers” that if they would let him and his partner, Emmanuel Penrod, become equal partners in the claim, he wouldn’t take them to court. Furthermore, if he and Penrod were given 100 feet of the claim to work by themselves, he’d even let them use the water from “his” stream.

Nearly 150 years have passed since then, and in all that time no record of a ranch claim by Comstock has ever been found. But O’Riley and McLaughlin didn’t know that, and in those days it was common to settle mining disputes quickly without resorting to lawsuits—why waste money on lawyers when nobody knew how long the gold would last? Even the best claims might peter out after a month or two.

O’Riley and McLaughlin took the deal…and Comstock started getting credit for their discovery. Comstock “was the man who did all the heavy talking,” Dan DeQuille wrote in his 1876 book
A History of The Big Bonanza
. “He made himself so conspicuous on every occasion that he soon came to be considered not only the discoverer but almost the father of the lode. People began to speak of the vein as Comstock’s mine, Comstock’s lode…while the names of O’Riley and McLaughlin, the real discoverers, are seldom heard.”