Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (78 page)

6.
Botulism timeline:

• In the 10th century, Emperor Leo VI of Byzantium bans the manufacture of blood sausage. Historians believe this, as well as many other food regulations passed throughout history, could have been due to botulism outbreaks. (Raw and undercooked meats are common botulism poisoning culprits.)

• In 1735 the first authenticated case of the mysterious disease is recorded in southern Germany, again linked to contaminated sausage.

• Between 1817 and 1822, German doctor Justinus Kerner publishes the first accurate description of botulism and calls the illness “sausage poison.” This later led to its scientific name:
botulus
is Latin for “sausage.”

• In 1895 the cause of a botulism outbreak in the small Belgian village of Ellezelles is identified: a smoked ham eaten at a funeral dinner. Emile Pierre van Ermengem, professor of bacteriology at the University of Ghent, studies the victims and becomes the first person to isolate and identify
C. botulinum
bacterium.

• In 1944 American Dr. Edward Schantz becomes the first to identify the toxin botulin.

7.
There are three main types of botulism:

•
Foodborne botulism
makes up about 15% of all cases and occurs when a person ingests food that has already-formed botulin toxin in it.

•
Infant botulism
makes up approximately 65% of cases and occurs when spores are ingested by infants. The bacteria colonize the intestines, release the toxin, and poison the child.

•
W
ound botulism
makes up the remaining 20% and occurs when wounds are infected with the bacteria and secrete the toxin.

8.
Why is honey sold with the warning label, “Do not feed to infants under one year of age”? Botulism. Bees naturally collect the spores when they gather nectar, and they mix the bacteria in their honey. Most adults have strong enough immune systems to handle it, but babies don’t, making honey a common cause of infant botulism.

9.
C. botulinum
is
anaerobic
: Oxygen kills it. That’s why, if the spores are already in the food, home-canned foods can be particularly
dangerous. The canning process depletes oxygen, and if a high-enough temperature is not maintained for long enough during the cooking and canning process, the spores can survive, and they’ll feed on the food until it’s eaten…by humans.

10.
These bacteria also prefer alkaline environments, so the most common canned-food culprits are low-acid foods such as asparagus, lima beans, green beans, corn, meats, fish, and poultry.

11.
Ever seen “swollen” cans of food? Hopefully you threw them away.
C. botulinum
creates gases when it eats, and swollen cans are a sign that the food inside might be infected. (The FDA recommends double-plastic-bagging such cans before disposal.)

12.
How toxic is it? A little over a pound of botulin is enough to kill every human on Earth.

13.
You’ve probably heard of Botox. That’s the brand name for the drug BTX-A. What’s that stand for? “Botulin Toxin Type A.” The popular cosmetic treatment is actually made from the bacterial toxin: It paralyzes the face muscles, making them flatten out and appear to be less wrinkled. (It’s also used for medical purposes, including treating muscle spasms, clubfoot, and crossed eyes.)

• On Christmas Day 2007, police in Sydney, Australia, rescued a man in a mini-skirt who’d gotten stuck head-first in a clothing donation bin. Police were able to free the 35-year-old man, who claimed he’d been trying to donate clothes when he became stuck.

• A 63-year-old woman mistook railroad tracks for a road on the evening of November 8, 2007, and her car became stuck on the tracks…with a train speeding straight for her. An off-duty police officer and her husband ran to the car as the train’s horn blared. They ripped open the car door, pulled out the woman—who needs crutches to walk—and pulled her to safety seconds before the train smashed into the car, flipped it over, and dragged it more than 100 feet down the tracks. The woman and her courageous rescuers were fine.

It’s easy to forget that until very recently in history, families who lived in cold-weather areas were snowbound on their land throughout the long winters. One man dedicated his life to changing that
.

A
N INVENTIVE KID
Fourteen-year-old Joseph-Armand Bombardier was driving his father crazy by constantly tinkering with everything around the house. Young Armand took apart and then rebuilt clocks, toy trains, even the engine on the family car. It became so maddening that his father bought him a seemingly irreparable Ford Model-T engine just to keep him busy in the garage for a while.

Growing up in the remote town of Valcourt, Quebec, in the 1920s meant long winters and impassable roads. If you needed to travel to the next town—or to a hospital—your only option was a horse-drawn sled. Joseph got the broken down Model-T engine running again, and he had grand plans for it. After working for more than a year in his father’s workshop, on New Year’s Eve 1921, he emerged driving a very loud contraption. It consisted of the engine mounted on wooden skis, with an airplane propeller on the back. And it drove right over the snow. Dad was impressed, but he had other plans for Joseph: As was the tradition with Catholic families in Quebec, the oldest boy was expected to become a priest. So Joseph went to seminary school.

Bombardier was only one of hundreds of inventors attempting to use an engine to power a vehicle through snow.

• In 1909 Russian inventor Igor Sikorsky invented the Aerosan, which also ran on skis and was powered by a propeller. If the snow was too deep, however, the prop couldn’t pull the vehicle’s massive weight. (Sikorsky would later be integral to the development of the helicopter.)

• About the same time, a French military engineer named Adolphe Kégresse invented a system that converted a regular car or truck into a snow-worthy half-track vehicle (wheels in the front, “caterpillar” tracks in the back). All that resulted was a car
that didn’t get stuck as easily—not an all-snow vehicle.

• In 1916 Ray H. Muscott of Waters, Michigan, was issued a patent for a rear-tracked, front-ski vehicle that was used by mail carriers in the Midwest. But like the Aerosan, Muscott’s vehicle worked only on dry snow. Quebec, like much of the rest of Canada, has wet, deep snow, and no one could come up with a vehicle that could get through it.

And that’s all Bombardier could think about while he was at seminary. So at 17, he convinced his father to let him drop out and become an apprentice at a garage in Valcourt. After a couple of years of learning everything he could about mechanics, in 1926 he made another request to his father: a loan so he could open his own shop. Seeing his son’s potential, dad agreed. Young Bombardier quickly earned a reputation around town as a genius who could fix anything from cars to power tools to agricultural pumps. If he needed a tool that didn’t exist, he’d build it himself. He even dammed the creek next to the shop and built a turbine to power it. Bombardier was a pretty good businessman, too: He was able to pay his father back in just three years.

As he entered adulthood, the softspoken, bespectacled inventor steadily grew his business. He married Yvonne Labrecque and the two started a family. At night and on Sundays, Bombardier would retreat to his workshop to tinker with snowmobile designs. He tried making a lighter engine so the vehicle wouldn’t sink, but it kept overheating. And despite ridicule from both friends and competitors, Bombardier kept redesigning the track, engine, and sleigh, emptying his bank account in the winter only to refill it the following spring and summer.

And that’s the way it went for the next eight years…until tragedy struck. In the winter of 1934, Bombardier’s two-year-old son’s appendix burst. The boy would die if he didn’t get to the hospital, which was 30 miles away. But with the roads snowed in and no working prototype of his snowmobile in the garage, there was nothing that Joseph and Yvonne could do, and their son did die.

Devastated by the loss, Bombardier knew he could help prevent
other families from suffering the same fate. So he went back into his workshop and redoubled his efforts. And less than a year later, he’d done it: He’d devised a sprocket-and-track system that finally worked. It consisted of a rubber-and-cotton track that wrapped around toothed wheels in the back, and steerable skis in the front—just like a modern snowmobile, only much bigger and louder, and far less streamlined. After receiving a patent, Bombardier expanded his garage into a year-round production plant, creating much-needed jobs in the little town of Valcourt. Under the banner
L’Auto-Neige Bombardier Limitée
(Snowmobile Bombardier Limited), the inventor was ready for the big time.

His first step: advertise. Driving his seven-passenger model—the B7—Bombardier easily made his way through the deep snows of the Quebec winter, always making sure he parked in front of newspaper offices. Sure enough, word of a working snow machine got out and initial sales enabled him to build a new production facility in 1940, when he introduced the 12-passenger B12. Unlike its predecessors, the wheels were solid instead of spoked, which stopped snow from accumulating and slowing down the vehicle. These early snowmobiles were used to deliver freight, take kids to school, and provide emergency services, giving people security and freedom in the winter months like they’d never had before.

When Canada entered World War II, the government decreed that only people who absolutely needed a snowmobile could buy one. Instead of panicking, Bombardier went into his workshop and within a few weeks built the prototype for the B11, designed especially for military use. Bombardier’s armored transport vehicles proved indispensable in the snowy battlefields during World War II, solidifying his reputation as both a genius inventor
and
a savvy industrialist. But he was still more than a decade away from the invention that would have the greatest impact on society: the personal snow-mobile.

Because of the technological limitations of the times, smaller engines couldn’t power their way through deep snow without overheating. But by the mid-1950s, engine technology had caught up and Bombardier was able to combine a smaller engine with a continuous track system designed by his eldest son, Germain. In
1958 the company unveiled the two-person Ski-Dog—so named because Bombardier envisioned it taking the place of the sled dogs that wintertime hunters had relied on for centuries. But a printer’s error christened the new snowmobile with an unexpected new name: “Ski-Doo.”

Thanks in part to the fun name, people viewed the Ski-Doo in a way that Bombardier hadn’t—as a recreational vehicle. But he was reluctant to market it as such, thinking the whimsical name might limit sales. Still, there was no denying it: A new winter sport had been born. Costing $900 each, 8,210 Ski-Doos were sold the first year. And although sales steadily increased, Bombardier didn’t push the Ski-Doos as hard as he could have, keeping the company’s focus on its all-terrain vehicles used by miners and the forestry service, two things for which he felt there would always be a market.

But whether he realized it or not, Bombardier had opened up a whole new world for winter sports enthusiasts. Sadly, he wouldn’t live to see the Ski-Doo’s incredible success. On February 18, 1964, he died of cancer at age 56.

Today, Bombardier is a national hero in Canada. His offspring have kept the company going. Under the name Bombardier Recreational Products, they’ve branched out with Sea-Doos for the water and a whole array of other outdoor recreational machines. Snowmobiles are still used by the military, of course, as well as by search-and-rescue teams and by indigenous hunters in Canada. But their biggest use by far is for fun, as evidenced by the 3,000 snowmobiling clubs that exist around the world. In the United States and Canada, enthusiasts spend more than $28 billion on snowmobiles and related equipment every year. And a recent focus on environmental concerns aims to make them greener, cleaner, and quieter than ever.