Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (37 page)

     
—“The Edge,” in The Portland
Oregonian,
August 29, 1997

GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

“In 1977, a government clerk in Australia made a slight error in paperwork. As a result, a $300,000 police headquarters was built in St. Arnaud’s (population 3,000) instead of in St. Alban’s (population 40,000). Part of the new construction was a 50-car parking lot. It is currently being used by the two cars and two bicycles of the St. Arnaud’s police department.”

—Encyclopedia Brown’s Book of Facts,
by Donald Sobol

Everyone’s got a telephone—but it seems the only thing anyone knows about it is that Alexander Graham Bell invented it. In our
Encyclopedia Bathroomica
(
page 473
), we talk about how the phone works. Here’s a little history to go along with it.

F
EB. 14, 1876.
Beating out a competing inventor by only a few hours, Alexander Graham Bell arrives at the U.S. patent office and patents the telephone in his name. Three days later, he builds the first telephone that actually works. Hoping to earn a page in the history books, he memorizes lines from Shakespeare to use in the world’s first telephone conversation. But when the magic moment arrives, he spills acid on himself and barks out “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”

Fall 1876.
Belt offers to sell the rights to his invention to the Western Union Telegraph Co. for $100,000. He is laughed out of the office.

• Stage fright becomes a significant obstacle in expanding telephone sales. To reassure the public, Bell takes out ads claiming that “Conversations can be easily carried on after slight practice and with occasional repetitions of a word or sentence.”

1877.
Charles Williams of Somerville, Massachusetts, becomes the first American to install a telephone in his house. (But since no one else had a phone, he couldn’t call anyone. So he installed a telephone in his office, where his wife could reach him during the day).

1877.
A woman named Emma Nutt becomes the first female telephone operator in the United States. Initially the phone company preferred to hire young boys as operators, but eventually had to phase them out because of their foul language and penchant for practical jokes.

1879.
In the middle of a measles epidemic in Lowell, Massachusetts, a physician, worried about what would happen if the town’s operators succumbed to the disease, suggests to the local phone company that it begin issuing the nation’s first phone numbers to telephone subscribers. At first the public resists the idea, attacking phone numbers as being too impersonal.

1881.
Thomas Edison comes up with a new way to answer the telephone. “Originally,” writes Margaret Cousins in
The Story of Thomas Edison
, “people wound the phone with a crank, which rang a bell, and then said: ‘Are you there?’ This took too much time for Edison. During one of the hundreds of tests made in his laboratory, he picked up the phone one day, twisted the crank and shouted: “Hello!” This became the way to answer the telephone all over America, and it still is.”

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GREAT MOMENTS IN EMERGENCY DIALING

In 1995, a woman in Devizes, England, was awakened from a sound sleep by a phone ringing.

      
Upon answering it, she was greeted by moans, groans, and yelling. The woman dismissed the call as a prank and hung up.

          
A short while later the phone rang again. This time the woman heard outright screaming, followed by a female shouting, “Oh my God!” Terrified, the woman hung up. There was no mistaking it: the voice on the other end belonged to her daughter, who lived about a hundred miles away.

The woman phoned the police. They sent squad cars to the daughter’s house, broke down the door, and stormed the bedroom.

      
There they found the daughter making love to her boyfriend on the bed.

          
Apparently, during two wild moments of passion, the daughter’s big toe accidentally hit the speed-dial button on the phone, which was on a nightstand by the bed.

          
“This is a warning for other people,” a police spokesman said. “If you’re going to indulge in that sort of thing, move the phone.”

—Knuckleheads in the News

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, a visual symbol of Italy itself. Here’s a look at its unusual history.

C
IVIC RIVALRY

In 1155, builders in Venice, Italy, finished work on a bell tower next to the Cathedral of San Marco. Legend has it that citizens in the seaport town of Pisa—determined not to be outdone by the Venetians—decided to build their own bell tower next to the Cathedral of Pisa.

Work began in 1173. The plans called for a seven-story marble tower with more than 200 columns, plus a belfry with seven large bells at the top. The building would be 184 feet tall but only 52 feet in diameter.

The entire building was supposed to stand on a foundation less than 2240 feet deep. But as it turned out, the ground—largely sandy soil and waterlogged clay—was too spongy to support it.

BACK AND FORTH

By the time the second floor was finished, the building had already begun leaning slightly to the north. But rather than start over, the builders just lengthened the northern walls on the third floor and shortened the southern ones, levelling off the top of the building in the process. That way, they figured, the rest of the building would be level, too.

Stop and Go

As luck would have it, political unrest in Pisa forced builders to stop work on the building for 90 years. That meant the clay soil beneath the tower was allowed to compact and strengthen over time. Soil experts now believe that if it hadn’t, the tower would have collapsed when the upper floors were added.

But they didn’t. Six more stories were successfully added between 1270 and 1278. This time, however, the added weight caused the building to lean to the
south,
the direction it still leans today. The builders applied the same solution to the fifth floor that they’d used on the third, only in reverse: they lengthened the southern walls and shortened the northern ones, giving the building a slight banana shape. Once again, the top was level.

Final Addition

Political unrest halted construction again, this time until 1360. By now the building was terribly off-center, but builders added the belfry anyway—again making the southern walls taller than the northern ones, to level out the roof. One hundred eighty-seven years after it was begun, the tower was finally finished.

But the tilt was only beginning. Over the next six centuries, the building moved a fraction of an inch each year. By the early 1990s, it was more than 14 feet off-center.

SAVING THE TOWER

By 1900, the Leaning Tower of Pisa had already become one of the world’s great tourist attractions. So the Italian government just appointed a commission to figure out how to keep it from falling over.

The commission wasn’t much help—except to the government, which was able to take credit for actively trying to save the tower. After that, whenever scientists speculated that the tower was falling, the government just appointed another commission. The only one that had any lasting impact was the 1933 commission…which made things worse. They drilled 361 holes in the ground surrounding the tower and filled them with 1,800 tons of concrete. Instead of stabilizing the ground, the concrete added weight to the tower’s foundation, causing it to tip six times faster.

THE FINAL FIX

In 1989, the Italian government appointed its 15th commission. This time, it actually helped. In 1992, scientists began implementing a three-phase plan to halt the tilting:

1.
In April 1992, five steel bands were strapped around the second floor of the building (judged to be weakest part). The belts act like girdles—when a masonry building collapses at the base, the part that gives way bursts
outward,
not inward. The bands hold everything in place.

2.
In the summer of 1993, scientists began placing 75 eight-ton weights on the north side of the tower, hoping that by compressing the earth to the north, the building would stop leaning so much to the south. By November, the tower had actually straightened up about a quarter of an inch.

3.
In 1995, the scientists began removing clay soil from beneath the tower, extracting the water, and replacing it all in a process they called “controlled subsistence.” When they’re finished, the tower will be resting on a drier, firmer soil base that will be better able to support the building.

The End?

In April 1997, John Burland, the British soil mechanics expert who devised the plan, announced that the Leaning Tower of Pisa had finally stopped its tilt. Has the tower been saved.’ Only time—a lot of it—will tell.

TOWER FACTS

• Six of the tower’s eight floors are without safety rails. More than 250 people have fallen to their deaths since 1174.

• According to Italian officials, there’s little danger anyone will be hurt if the tower does come crashing down. They predict that a collapse won’t be sudden—that there will be plenty of rumbling and groaning in the building ahead of time to warn people. Besides: The building has been closed to the public since 1990.

• Restoration officials get an average of two letters a week with suggestions on how to keep the tower upright. Some of the weirdest: building an identical tower to lean against the first one; building a huge statue of a man who looks like he’s holding the tower up; tying helium balloons to the roof; anchoring the top of the tower to a hillside several miles away with a large steel cable.

• Of course, officials could tear the tower down, stone by stone, and rebuild it—this time perfectly vertical—on a strengthened foundation. But there’s no chance of that—the tower brings in $300 million a year from tourists. “Let’s face it, the tower would have no significance if it were straight,” caretaker Spartaco Campani admitted in 1983. “Its lean is Pisa’s bread-and-butter.”

People like Arnold Schwarzenegger would probably just as soon you forgot about the films they had to make before hitting it big. But Jami Bernard didn’t forget—she wrote
First Films,
a book we used to research this section. We recommend it. The best of its kind.

M
ERYL STREEP

First Film:
Julia
(1976)

The Role:
She plays a snooty, shallow friend of the lead characters (played by Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave). If you blink, you might miss her—her two scenes last a total of 61 seconds and her back is to the camera most of the time. She’s also wearing a black wig (which she hated).

Memorable Line:
“Oooh…you’re so famous.”

PAUL NEWMAN

First Film:
The Silver Chalice
(1954)

The Role:
Newman plays Basil, a Roman slave selected to make the chalice for Jesus’ last meal because he can whittle better than anyone in Jerusalem. Publicity posters called it
The
Mightiest
Story of Good and Evil Ever Told, Ever Lived, Ever Made into a Motion Picture!
Newman called it “the worst film made in the entirety of the 1950s.” At one point, he even took out a magazine ad urging people not to see it.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

First Film:
Hercules in New York
(1969)—rereleased on video as
Hercules Goes Bananas

The Role:
Arnold plays Hercules, of course. Viewers got their first look at his pumped-up body (including a ludicrous scene in which he “bounces one pectoral muscle at a time”). But they never heard his voice. The 22-year-old Austrian’s accent was so thick, no one could understand him. Result: His entire part (but
only
his) had to be dubbed. The film is so bad that Schwarzenegger—who was originally billed as “Arnold Strong”—won’t acknowledge it.

Memorable Line
(when a cabbie demands payment): “Bucks? Doe? What is all this zoological talk about the male and female species?”