Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (71 page)

MILKMEN.
According to the Department of Agriculture, more than half of the milk sold in the United States in 1950 (along
with eggs, ice cream, and butter) was delivered to homes by milk-men, all employed by independent local dairies. By 1963 deliveries had dropped to a third of all milk sold. As of 2001, the last year statistics are available, it’s less than 0.4%. Milkmen began to disappear in the late 1960s when dairies were operated by large national franchises and 98% of American homes had refrigerators, reducing the need for daily milk delivery. But the real milkman killer was probably the supermarket. Stores use milk as a “loss leader”; for instance, milk can cost as much as $4 per gallon wholesale, but they sell it for as little as $2, making up the difference with the profit on other items. That’s an economic system with which small dairies can’t compete.

BRICK MAKERS.
Brick-making began in ancient Persia, and the process remained virtually the same for centuries. Brick makers dug for clay and left it exposed to the elements over winter, allowing the freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw cycle to tenderize the clay. In the spring, they ground the clay into a powder, placed it in a soaking pit with water to get it to the right consistency, then mixed it by hand. Next, a chunk of clay was rolled in sand, placed in a mold, left to dry in the sun for two weeks, then fired in a wood- or coal-burning kiln. As it did with candle-making, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century ended artisan brick-making. Ever since, bricks have been made in factories with temperature control and other processes that make all bricks uniform.

COBBLERS.
Also known as shoemakers, cobblers arrived in the Americas with the first English colonists that settled at Jamestown (the voyage was funded in part by a London shoemaker’s guild). They were fully established by 1616, and cobblers went door to door soliciting made-to-order shoes. It wasn’t until the 1750s that shoemakers abandoned to-order shoemaking and simply made whatever shoes they wanted to (in various sizes) and offered them for sale. And up until the 1840s, all shoes were made by hand with roughly the same tools used for centuries—knives to cut the leather, pliers to stretch it, awls to punch holes in it, and a needle and thread to stitch it into a shoe. The trade survives today, but only for repairs. Most shoemaking has been mechanized since 1846—the year Elias Howe invented the sewing machine.

This article is the best thing since sliced bread
.

O
TTO ROHWEDDER
Rohwedder—a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa—was convinced that the world needed evenly sliced bread, and in 1912 started working on plans and prototypes for his first bread slicer. Bad news: they were lost in a fire in 1917. Good news: since he had to start over, this time he addressed bakers’ complaints that presliced bread would dry out and consumers wouldn’t want to buy it. So in 1928 he came up with a new machine that would slice
and wrap
each loaf of bread. The following year, the stock market crashed, sending the country into the Great Depression. Rohwedder had to sell his invention to the Micro-Westco Company, but they hired him as a VP to work in the newly formed Rohwedder Bakery Machine Division. The concept of sliced bread still didn’t hit…until the Wonder Bread Company began nationwide sales of sliced, packaged bread in 1930 (using its own version of Rohwedder’s machine). Sliced bread suddenly began to catch on in a big way—along with the pop-up toaster, which had been invented in 1926, but wasn’t a very popular consumer item until presliced bread came along. During World War II, the federal government banned sliced bread, claiming that the use of waxed paper for wrapping it was wasteful. But the no-slicing ban lasted just three months: Public outcry was so loud that it forced the government to remove the ban (and anyway, the savings turned out to be minimal). Want to see the original model of Rohwedder’s 1928 bread slicer? It’s in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In 1842 Whitman opened a small shop in Philadelphia, where he made and sold fine candy. The company grew as Whitman made innovation after innovation. (For example, in 1856 he introduced the first confection ever packaged in a printed box.) But their biggest contribution to candy culture: the Whitman’s Sampler, introduced in 1912. Executives and designers worked long and hard to arrive at exactly the right image for the sampler
box: an embroidery-look logo that suggested a “sampler” of chocolates. (It was also the first candy box to be wrapped in cellophane.) Within three years the sampler was Whitman’s biggest seller and the nation’s most popular box of chocolate. The design changed over the years—brighter colors, an overhanging “French” edge, a hinged lid—but it remains basically the same. According to the company, someone buys a Whitman’s Sampler box every 1.5 seconds.

Before Internet searches and the hundreds of travel books that are now available, how did travelers know where to eat and sleep in a city or town they’d never been to? There were only two reliable sources:
Adventures in Good Eating: a Guidebook to the Best Restaurants along America’s Highways
(1936) and
Lodging for a Night
(1938), both by Duncan Hines.

In the 1930s, Hines, a salesman for a Chicago printer, traveled the country by car with his wife Florence, keeping detailed notes about every place they visited—the cleanliness, safety, atmosphere, service, value, and quality of the food. For Christmas in 1935, instead of holiday cards Hines sent his friends a list of his favorite eating spots—167 restaurants in 30 states and the District of Columbia. So many people asked for copies of the list that he decided to write
Adventures in Good Eating
. His opinion was considered completely trustworthy because he always paid for his own meals and lodging and allowed no advertising in his books. Later in his career, he created “Recommended by Duncan Hines” signs and charged restaurants and inns a small fee for the privilege of displaying them (which he monitored and controlled carefully). The presence, absence, or removal of a sign could make or break an establishment: many thousands of travelers ate and slept
only
at places approved by Duncan Hines.

Respect for Hines was so great that in 1950 an entrepreneur named Roy Park came up with the idea of making Duncan Hines a “name brand,” and licensed a line of products that included ice cream, pickles, dinnerware, cookbooks, and most famously, cake mixes. Park sold it to Proctor & Gamble in 1956; when Hines died in 1959, the line had expanded to more than 100 products.

There’s nothing like a good dose of irony to put the problems of day-to-day life into proper perspective
.

Y
IELD TO ONCOMING IRONY
• While driving the WDJT news van out to Wisconsin’s Big Muskego Lake on a Sunday afternoon in January 2007, 27-year-old Susan Wronsky
thought
she was traveling on an icy road. She was actually driving on top of an iced-over channel that ran parallel to the road. The vehicle broke through the ice and came to rest in the mud on the bottom of the five-foot-deep waterway. The van was totaled, but Wronsky escaped without injury. At the time of the accident, she was covering a story on how to drive safely in icy conditions.

• In the early 1990s, in an effort to convince people to drive safely, British transportation officials placed dozens of signs along the notoriously dangerous A1 highway, displaying the number of road casualties over the previous year. In 2008 the signs were removed. Why? They were distracting drivers and—according to some officials—leading to more road casualties.

In 2008 University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) student Akshay Thusu was assigned to help write the school’s new honor code. After it was posted on the Internet for review, many people pointed out that a few key sections of the honor code had been plagiarized—they were exact replicas of honor codes from other schools. (Even the definition of “plagiarism” was plagiarized.) Thusu blamed the goof on an “oversight.”

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett, a married couple in Sunnyvale, California, are concerned about the environment. They point to the grove of eight redwood trees they planted in their backyard as proof. Their neighbor, Mark Vargas, is also concerned about the environment. He installed solar panels on his roof. One problem: Treanor and Bissett’s redwoods have grown so tall that they block
the sun from hitting Vargas’s roof, rendering his expensive solar panels nearly useless. After asking the couple several times to cut down the trees (they refused), Vargas contacted Santa Clara County officials, who cited “California’s Solar Shade Control Act,” which protects solar panels from shade. Treanor and Bissett were informed that they must remove their trees because, according to the Act, the redwoods have become an “environmental hazard.”

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has claimed that music filesharing Internet sites violate the copyrights of musicians, thus cutting into their royalties. After numerous legal battles, the RIAA was awarded nearly $400 million in damages from people who ran the file sharing sites. Yet so far none of that money has been paid to the artists whose copyrights were violated in the first place. So some of these acts (such as the Rolling Stones, Van Halen, and Christina Aguilera) have threatened legal action, but the RIAA says it doesn’t have the money—they used it to pay their massive legal bills.

In 2008 a water main broke in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sending a deluge into the SportsWorks building, which was hosting a high-profile museum exhibit. The water didn’t harm the exhibit (thanks to the building’s sloped floors), although it did shut it down for a few days. What was the exhibit that proved unsinkable? A collection of artifacts from the
Titanic
.

Ian Down, 42, of London, England, took some pictures of himself in a photo booth and handed them in with the necessary paperwork when he applied for a passport. The passport clerk looked at the photos…and refused to accept them. Why? Because the glare from Down’s bald head was too shiny. The clerk instructed Down that he had to get a new set of photos made, and they had to be glare-free. “It was a little embarrassing,” said Down.

But are they really any odder than a guy who wears his red underwear over his blue tights or a guy who shoots goo out of his wrists
?

BOUNCING BOY.
First appearing in a 1961 Action comic, Chuck Taine drank what he thought was a bottle of soda, but it was really a “super-plastic fluid” that gives him the ability to turn into a gigantic bouncing ball. He even gets to join the Legion of Superheroes (sidekicks of Superboy) along with other uniquely powered characters, such as Matter-Eater Lad (his superpower: he can eat anything).

ZSAZSA ZATURNNAH.
By day, Ada is the meek owner of a beauty salon in a small town in the Philippines (where the comic originates). At night, he eats a piece of magic rock and transforms himself into Zsazsa, a muscular, curvaceous, crime-fighting woman.

SUPER PRESIDENT.
On this 1967 cartoon show, American President James Norcross gets caught in a “cosmic storm” and gains the ability to turn himself into steel, water, stone, or electricity.

SUPERDUPONT.
Satirizing French stereotypes, this 1972 French-made superhero is a snooty, mustachioed Frenchman who wears a beret, carries a baguette, drinks red wine, and smokes Gauloise cigarettes. He flies around foiling the schemes of an enemy organization called “Anti-France.”

LEECH.
His parents abandoned him at birth because he had green skin and hollow eyes. Even his superhero friends (Leech is a minor character in
X-Men
comics) avoid him because his power is to negate the powers of those around him.

AQUANUS.
An Indonesian version of Aquaman, he can breathe underwater and communicate with fish. But he can do something Aquaman can’t—he can shoot rainbows from his belt.