Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (60 page)

The British were arming and sponsoring a coalition of the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, and Wyandot Indian tribes in Ohio, hoping to protect the British-held Northwest Territory by blocking further westward expansion by the United States. Wayne was given command of the Legion of the United States, with the mission of driving the British out and destroying the coalition.

General Wayne spent almost two years recruiting and training his command, then went into action. On August 20, 1794, the U.S. Legion destroyed the tribal army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo. The Treaty of Greenville was signed August 3, 1795, opening the Northwest Territory to American settlement.

Pants milestone: In 1923 the U.S. Attorney General…

His mission accomplished, Wayne headed home…but never made it. He fell ill en route and died of complications from gout on December 15, 1796, at the age of 51. His body was buried in a plain oak coffin near Erie, Pennsylvania, almost 300 miles west of his family home in Radnor, near Philadelphia. There he rested for 13 years, until his family decided they wanted to bring their hero’s body home for a proper funeral. His son, Isaac, was given the task of bringing the general’s remains back to the family.

CARRY ME BACK

Isaac Wayne made the long journey to Erie in a one-horse sulky—a two-wheeled cart more suitable for carrying light loads in urban areas than for carrying a heavy casket all the way back to Radnor. When his father’s body was exhumed, it was remarkably well preserved, but there was no way it could bear bouncing along rutted dirt roads for 300 miles. It was a dilemma for the son. He couldn’t return empty-handed—he had to find another solution. So he asked Dr. Wallace, who had cared for his father during his final illness, to dismember the body. (He refused to watch the operation, saying he wanted to remember his father as he looked in life.)

Next, the body parts were boiled in a large iron pot. Wallace and four assistants then carefully scraped the flesh from the bones, which were reverently placed in a wooden box and presented to the old soldier’s son. The flesh was returned to the original oak casket and reburied in the original grave.

THE OTHER FINAL RESTING PLACE

Isaac returned home with his precious cargo, and, after the long-delayed funeral, the bones of “Mad Anthony” Wayne were finally interred in St. David’s Episcopal Church Cemetery in Radnor, giving the Revolutionary War hero two graves.

But that’s not the end of the story. Today, Radnor is connected to Erie by paved freeways instead of rutted dirt roads. There is a legend that some of the bones were lost on the grueling trip home …and the ghost of “Mad Anthony” haunts the freeways, searching for his lost leg.

…declared it legal for women to wear trousers.

WAYNE’S WORLD

•
Have you every been to…
Wayne City, Illinois; Waynesville, North Carolina; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Wayne, Michigan; Waynesboro, Virginia; Wayne, Waynesburg, or Waynesboro, Pennsylvania; Waynesfield or Waynesville, Ohio; or Wayne Township, New Jersey?

•
Did you attend…
Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; Wayne High School in Huber Heights, Ohio; Wayne Middle School in Erie, Pennsylvania; Wayne High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Anthony Wayne Middle School in Wayne, New Jersey; or General Wayne Elementary School in Paoli, Pennsylvania?

•
Did anyone in your family…
perform military service at Fort Wayne in Detroit, Michigan?

•
Did you ever…
picnic in Anthony Wayne Recreation Area in Harriman State Park, New York, or drive across the Anthony Wayne Suspension Bridge near downtown Toledo, Ohio?

•
Have you ever driven on…
Anthony Wayne Drive in Detroit, Michigan; Wayne Avenue in Ticonderoga, New York; or Anthony Wayne Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio?

•
Did you ever…
see a film at the Anthony Wayne Movie Theater in Wayne, Pennsylvania; get your hair cut at the Anthony Wayne Barber Shop in Maumee, Ohio; or fish on the Mad River in Dayton, Ohio?

They’re all named after Mad Anthony Wayne.

MORE MAD-NESS

• In 1930 actor Marion “Duke” Morrison was about to get his first starring role, in director Raoul Walsh’s Western,
The Big Trail
. But Fox Studios didn’t like the name “Duke Morrison”—it wasn’t American-sounding enough. So Walsh suggested changing it to “Anthony Wayne,” after the general. The film’s producer thought that Anthony Wayne sounded “too Italian,” and that Tony Wayne “sounded like a girl.” So they changed his name to John Wayne.

• According to many pop-culture historians, the comic book character Bruce Wayne—better known as Batman—was named after Scottish patriot Robert the Bruce…and Mad Anthony Wayne.

The world’s smallest park—452 sq. inches—is in Portland, OR. (It was designed for snail racing.)

TOILET TECH

Better living through bathroom technology.

P
roduct:
Fresh-Air Breathing Device (a.k.a.Toilet Snorkel)
How It Works:
The biggest cause of fire-related injury and death isn’t the flames—it’s the smoke. In 1982 William Holmes received a patent for a device designed to access a source of fresh air during fires in high-rise buildings, where help may be slow to arrive. Snake this slender breathing tube down through any toilet and into the water trap, and access fresh air from the sewer line’s vent pipe. At the user end, the breathing tube is connected to a strap-on mask. Good news: The Toilet Snorkel comes with an odor-eating charcoal filter.

Product:
No-Flush Urinal

How It Works:
In recent years, some states, such as Arizona and California, have required all new toilets to be low-flow, water-conserving models. Waterless Co. of Vista, California, went one step further: They invented a urinal that uses no water at all. The No-Flush uses a glazed, ultrasmooth drain so slick and so narrow that urine is whisked away via gravity. Waterless claims that one of their devices can save 45,000 gallons of water a year.

Product:
Intelligence Toilet

How It Works:
The Japanese manufacturer Toto has a commode with a computer chip and a built-in urine analyzer. But that’s not all you’ll find in Toto’s integrated bathroom: There’s also a blood-pressure cuff housed in the sink countertop, a scale in front of the counter to weigh the user, and a device above the sink that measures body fat when briefly gripped after washing your hands. All results are recorded automatically on the toilet’s hard drive and sent via the Internet to a home computer, which then dispenses dietary and health recommendations. Cost: $5,230.

Product:
Compost Toilet

How It Works:
It’s essentially a litter box for people. According to the World Toilet Organization, a trade group based in Singapore, this Chinese toilet is a steel box filled with sawdust. It has a microcomputer that senses when the box has solid waste in it, and a mechanical arm that rotates the sawdust, burying the waste (which the company says can later be used as organic fertilizer). The device stays at a constant temperature of about 120°F, hot enough to make liquid waste evaporate, and has specially formulated low-odor sawdust that needs to be changed only once a year.

Not as special as you think: You share your birthday with at least 9 million other people.

Product:
Indipod

How It Works:
First there were car phones, then car DVD players. Now there’s a car toilet. Indipod is a small chemical toilet within an inflatable opaque “bubble,” designed to work inside most SUVs. A fan, powered by the car’s cigarette lighter, inflates the tentlike bubble, creating a private bathroom in the back of the car. Chemicals in the toilet break down waste into a “sweet-smelling” liquid housed in a detachable, disposable container. Bonus: The fan noise masks any…um…sounds made inside the bubble. The company’s motto: “Freedom to go wherever you want to go.”

Product:
New Plunge

How It Works:
This product aims to replace the traditional toilet plunger. New Plunge is a straight rod of flexible plastic that you stick down the drain and twist around until the obstruction is cleared. But wait—there’s more. New Plunge can also be used to
prevent
toilet clogs: One end of the plastic rod is a dull blade that can be used to “slice and dice” waste into smaller, more easily flushable chunks. What’s more, says the manufacturer, it cleans up easily with toilet paper (“simply run the tissue down the length of New Plunge”) and leaves no toilet residue on the floor.

Product:
iCarta

How It Works:
Now you can really “go anywhere” with your iPod. The iCarta resembles an ordinary wall-mounted toilet paper dispenser. But while TP comes out the roll on the bottom, the top has an iPod “docking station.” Music comes out two moisture-resistant speakers.

Can you name all five Great Lakes? (Michigan, Huron, Superior, Erie, and Ontario.)

THE ICE AGE

This article isn’t about what you think. It’s about the
other
ice age—the 19th century, when ice was big business and the iceman delivered right to your door.

C
OLD COMFORT
Humans have used freezing as a way to preserve food since the days they lived in caves. The practice was probably discovered around 12,000 years ago during the last ice age. By 4,000 years ago, the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia were commonly using ice pits to store food and chill drinks. The Chinese got into it around 1100 B.C. The Egyptian pharaohs had ice shipped from Lebanon. Alexander the Great ordered ditches to be dug at the cave city of Petra and filled with snow so his troops could have chilled wine during the blistering Jordanian summer. In each case, the ice had to be imported from the mountains, and most of it melted along the way, making ice as valuable a commodity as gold. In Persia, Greece, and later Rome, it was a sign of affluence to be able to enjoy icy treats in summer. By the Renaissance, European nobility competed to display the most lavish ice sculptures at their banquets, accompanied by indulgent sherbets and
gelati
(soft ice cream).

PUT IT ON ICE

The technology of storing ice was simple—dig a pit, line it with some insulating material such as sawdust or straw, cart the snow or ice down from the nearest snowcapped mountain, cover it with more straw, and enjoy it while it lasted. With very few modifications, this is how ice was stored for centuries.

Eventually, people realized that ice lasted longer if it was kept aboveground in an icehouse, usually just a simple roofed pen built of boards and insulated with sand, wood chips, and branches—the first coolers. By the 19th century, sawdust had become the insulator of choice. It would be spread two or three feet deep across the floor of the icehouse. Once the ice blocks were loaded in, more sawdust was spread over and around them. If the icehouse was built in the shade, this well-insulated winter ice could easily last into August. Ice harvesting was an equally simple process: Find a frozen lake, get a saw, cut the ice into chunks, load it on a cart, and race like crazy to the nearest icehouse.

In 1892 Italy raised the minimum marrying age for females…to 12.

THE ICEMAN COMETH

Early Americans seemed to have had a particular fixation with ice. One of the first things the colonists at Jamestown did was build pits for the ice they cut from winter ponds. In parts of North America, like Maine, the ice-harvesting season could last until March, which led enterprising New Englanders to try exporting it. Ice harvesting was expensive—every block had to be sawn by hand—but it was also lucrative. A ton of ice was worth hundreds of dollars at a time when most commodities were valued in pennies. The first recorded American ice shipment went from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1799. By 1805, ice harvesting was one of New England’s biggest businesses—and one man dominated that business like a colossus.

Around 1800, Frederic Tudor passed up a chance to go to Harvard in favor of a visit to the Bahamas. While sweating in the islands, it occurred to him that shipping ice from Boston to the Caribbean could be very profitable. At the time, New England produced very little that could be exported. Ships that brought goods into Boston left with empty holds, meaning ship owners made money only in one direction. Even worse, they often had to fill their holds with rocks for ballast on the outward voyage. Ice made a perfect substitute: It was plentiful and it was heavy. Ship owners remained skeptical; people had tried transporting ice over long distances before, and it was a risky proposition.

THE ICE KING

Tudor persisted, and in 1805 he shipped his first load of ice to Martinique. But that and subsequent attempts failed so badly that he wound up in debtor’s prison for a time. Still, he kept at it, experimenting with ways of better insulating his cargo. He introduced the use of cavity walls in his icehouses and ships, which kept the sawdust from getting wet and protected the ice from being soiled by sawdust. His innovations worked: By 1816 the Tudor Ice Company dominated the ice trade to Cuba and the Caribbean.

But ice exports were necessarily limited by the handmade nature of the product. In 1825 Tudor’s employee, Nathaniel Wyeth, harnessed a cutting blade to a team of horses. The “ice plow” tripled Tudor’s ice production. Needing new markets for his now plentiful ice, Tudor began looking west to what would become the greatest ice market of all…India.

Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
was marketed in Sweden as…