Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (26 page)

The system was wide open to abuse. It was common for people to hide some kind of coded message on the
outside
of the envelope, which the recipient could read without having to pay the postage on the letter. Hill was sure that this was what the housemaid and the sender of her letter were up to. An educator by profession, he decided to conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis of the British postal system to see if he could improve upon it.

In 1837 Hill completed his study and published his findings in a pamphlet titled Post
Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.
In it, he pointed out the obvious problems associated with having the recipient of a letter pay the postage. He also criticized the practice of calculating postage by the mile: In those days a letter that traveled 15 miles or less required 4¢ postage, and a letter that traveled 500 miles or more cost 15¢. But charging by the mile meant that postal employees had to spend time measuring distances between towns and calculating postage due for every letter they delivered, a practice Hill thought was wasteful.

Hill calculated that when all of the inefficiencies were taken into consideration, on average it cost the Post Office about one and one-half cents to deliver a letter. He proposed lowering the postage rate to a uniform price of one cent per letter, regardless of how far it had to travel to get to its destination. And he proposed that the
sender
of the letter pay the postage in advance, so that the Post Office wouldn’t waste time or money delivering letters that no one wanted to pay for. Payment in advance also saved postmen from the trouble of calculating postage due, as well as from the hassle of trying to get letter recipients to pay it. They could now devote their time to actually delivering the mail.

Better yet, by wringing dead letters and other inefficiencies out of the system, Hill believed that the Post Office’s cost of delivering a letter would drop from one and one-half cents per letter to under a cent, which meant that the penny stamp would cover the entire cost of sending the letter. Reducing postage rates from four to fifteen cents down to a penny would also mean that ordinary people would be able to afford to send a letter for the first time. And with payment required in advance, people couldn’t cheat the system.

Each year India increases its population equal to the population of Australia.

But how would the Post Office know for sure whether postage for a particular letter had been paid in advance or not? Hill proposed that the Post Office mark each letter using a special rubber stamp to indicate the postage had been paid. And to save customers the trouble of standing in line every time they needed a post office to stamp a piece of mail, he proposed that the Post Office sell prestamped envelopes that people could just drop in a mailbox whenever they were ready to send a letter.

For those who preferred to use their own stationery, Hill proposed that the Post Office sell “a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp,” complete with gum on the reverse side that, when moistened, would allow the piece of paper to stick to the envelope. Hill didn’t realize the significance of his idea at the time—he thought the prestamped envelopes would be a bigger hit than the prestamped “bits of paper,” as he called them—but he had just invented the world’s first adhesive postage stamp.

England’s House of Commons was intrigued enough by Hill’s proposals that it formed a committee to study them in 1837. Two years later, the government adopted his proposals, and on January 10, 1840, “universal penny postage” became the law of the land.

Just as he’d predicted, Hill’s reforms revolutionized mail service in England. The number of letters delivered by the Post Office doubled from 83 million in 1839—the last year of the old system—to nearly 170 million the following year; by 1847 the Post Office was delivering more than 322 million letters a year. And although it had lowered its postal rates in some cases as much as 94%, by 1850 the Post Office was generating just as much revenue as it had in 1839.

The advantages of Hill’s system were obvious, and other countries took note. In 1845 the United States reformed its postal rate structure to be in line with England’s; Canada and France followed four years later. By 1870, more than 30 countries around the world had adopted Hill’s system; for the rest of the world it was just a matter of time.

First stamp design selected by vote of the U.S. public: The 1993 Elvis Presley 29¢ stamp.

Words of wisdom from one of the world’s leading human rights activists, Bishop Desmond Tutu.

“History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder.”

“Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that liberates the victim.… One asks, ‘Have you forgiven those who held you prisoner of war?’ ‘I will never forgive them,’ replies the other. His mate says, ‘Then it seems they still have you in prison, don’t they?’”

“It is very easy to break down something. Throw a stone through that window; that is easy. Try fixing it, and that takes longer.”

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

“Freedom and liberty lose out by default when good people are not vigilant.”

“If you are neutral toward injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

“We are made different not in order to be separated. We’re made different to know of our need for each other.”

“To be impartial is to have taken sides already…with the status quo.”

“I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.”

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”

“Dream! Dream. And then go for it!”

It’s all relative. The largest cell in the human body is a female egg; the smallest is a male sperm.

What’s white and black and read all over? This page of riddles. Here are some BRI favorites.

1.
What does a diamond become when it is placed in water?

2.
What did the big rose say to the little rose?

3.
What is it that doesn’t ask questions, but must be answered?

4.
What does a chicken do when it stands on one foot?

5.
What kind of bird has wings, but can’t fly?

6.
What two words have the most letters in them?

7.
What has neither flesh nor bone but has four fingers and a thumb?

8.
How many of each animal did Moses bring on the ark?

9.
What is it that grows larger the more you take away from it?

10.
Poke out its eye and it has nothing left but a nose. What is it? Answers o

11.
What runs all day and never walks / Often murmurs, never talks / Has a bed and never sleeps / Has a mouth and never eats?

12.
Which side of a pitcher is the handle on?

13.
What is the difference between here and there?

14.
If two is company, and three’s a crowd, how much is four and five?

15.
What fruit do you find on a dime?

16.
How can you divide 10 potatoes equally between three people?

17.
What is no larger when it weighs 20 pounds than when it weighs 1 pound?

18.
No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?

19.
What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?

Answers on
page 508
.

One-millionth trademark issued by the U.S. Patent Office: Sweet’N Low.

The stars below are living proof that dot-com fame can be as fleeting as dot-com profits.

T
HE STAR:
Raphael Gray, 18, who lives with his parents in Clynderwen, a tiny village in south Wales.

THE HEADLINE:
Internet Robin Hood Scores the Ultimate Hack

WHAT HAPPENED:
Gray used to perform a “public service” by hacking into websites, downloading customer credit card information, and e-mailing it back to the companies to demonstrate how insecure the sites were. “It was just click, click, click, and I was downloading thousands of credit card numbers,” he says. As a direct result of Gray’s hacking, Visa and Mastercard had to spend nearly $3 million providing refunds and new credit cards to customers.

But what makes Gray truly unique is that one of the 26,000 credit card numbers he downloaded was for Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Gray used the information to order Gates some Viagra for delivery to Microsoft’s world headquarters in Redmond, Washington. When police arrested Gray in March 2001, he became an Internet folk hero overnight. (Ironically, the Bill Gates credit card was a fake—the e-commerce company had created a fake account in Gates’s name to test their software. The Viagra was never shipped.)

THE AFTERMATH:
In July 2001, Gray pled guilty to 10 counts of hacking and 2 counts of fraud; he was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to seek counseling for his “low self-esteem.”

THE STAR:
Baby [Your Name Here], born to Jason Black and Frances Schroeder in New York in 2001.

THE HEADLINE:
Parents Offer Unique Name Game

WHAT HAPPENED:
In July 2001, Black and Schroeder put the naming rights to their infant son up for auction on the eBay and Yahoo! auction sites. Their hope was to attract a corporate sponsor for their son: in exchange for naming their son “Nike,” “Microsoft,” or “A&W Root Beer,” they hoped to raise money to buy a new house and save for their children’s college education. The couple saw the promotion as a potential media moment for the sponsor: Announcing the name of the child when the auction was over would generate enough “free” publicity for the winning bidder to more than justify the expense.

After his famous midnight ride, Paul Revere billed

The couple posted their auction notices on July 18, 2001. Minimum bid: $500,000.

THE AFTERMATH:
Nobody bid—so they named him Zane.

THE STAR:
Adam Burtle, a 20-year-old student at the University of Washington.

THE HEADLINE:
It’s Official: eBay Has No Soul

WHAT HAPPENED:
In February 2001, Burtle put his soul up for auction on the eBay website. “Hardly used,” his ad read. “I make no warranties as to the condition of the soul. As of now it is near mint condition, with only minor scratches. Due to difficulties involved with removing my soul [he wasn’t dead yet], the winning bidder will either have to settle for a night of yummy Thai food and cool indie flicks, or wait until my natural death.”

The bidding started at a nickel; Burtle’s ex-girlfriend bid it up to $6.66, the number of “the Beast.” In the final hour of bidding, the price rose from $56 to $400, placed by a woman in Des Moines, Iowa…but then eBay officials learned of the auction and removed the listing before bidding closed—not because auctioning a soul over the Internet is improper, but because eBay requires that “you have a piece of merchandise that a seller can deliver to a buyer,” says eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove. (eBay also forbids the selling of drugs, alcohol, guns, and body parts.)

THE AFTERMATH:
Burtle, who was suspended from placing any more items for auction on eBay, is philosophical about the canceled sale. “I don’t think the winner is going to be able to collect on my soul anyway, to be honest,” he says. “I was just happy the bidding rose past $7.50.”

Massachusetts 10 pounds, four shillings, to cover his expenses.

THE STAR:
DotComGuy, a.k.a. Mitch Maddox, a 26-year-old computer systems manager and self-described “cyberhermit”

THE HEADLINE:
Cyber-Cabin Fever Earns Man New Name, Dog and Fiancée; Not Much More Than That

WHAT HAPPENED:
Maddox legally changed his name to DotComGuy and on January 1, 2000, placed himself in a sort of self-imposed “house arrest” in an empty Dallas townhouse for a year. There, using only a laptop computer and a credit card, he was supposed to furnish the entire “Dotcompound” and meet all of his personal needs: food, clothing, entertainment, pets, etc., without ever leaving the house or his tiny backyard. Twenty web cameras set up all over the house (except the bathroom) would record his every move 24 hours a day and broadcast the action on his website,
www.dotcomguy.com
.
If he managed to tough it out the entire year, he would be rewarded with a bonus of $98,289 in cash, raised from the sale of banner advertising on his site.