Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  Using a candle as an example, when you apply a burning match (the ignition source) to the wax on the wick (the fuel), the wax will heat to a certain temperature (the ignition temperature). It will begin to evaporate and release gases (the volatiles), which then react with the oxygen in the air (combustion). Result: fire.

  What U.S. state has more than 40 active volcanoes? Alaska.

  The heat from the fire will then cause the wax to keep melting and moving down the wick, evaporating, igniting, and burning away. Because the fire then produces its own heat—a necessary ingredient—it’s called a persistent chemical reaction.

  EXTINGUISHED

  You already know how to put out a candle—but do you know why it goes out? When you blow out a candle, the wax has cooled below its ignition temperature. If it didn’t go out, you didn’t lower the temperature enough—or for long enough. Try pressing the wick between your thumb and finger. The fire will go out because you removed the fuel source by stopping the wax from climbing up the wick. Or put a glass over the candle, taking away the oxygen.

  With larger fires, it’s usually difficult to take away the fuel, so fire extinguishers work by eliminating either the oxygen, the heat, or both. Water extinguishers work by cooling the fuel; dry powder extinguishers work by smothering the fire, thereby taking away the oxygen; foam extinguishers both smother and cool the fuel; and carbon dioxide extinguishers displace the oxygen in the air while simultaneously cooling it.

  MORE FACTS

  • Spontaneous combustion occurs when a fuel reaches its ignition temperature without the aid of an outside ignition source. This can happen because some substances naturally react with oxygen in the air, but most often it’s from spontaneous heating, a slow buildup of heat. A cause of many house fires is the spontaneous heating of oily rags. If there is insufficient ventilation—like in the back of a garage—the heat can build up enough for fire to occur.

  • Hot fact: You can’t have fire without oxygen, right? Wrong. All that’s necessary is an oxidizing agent, meaning an element that easily takes electrons from other atoms. Oxygen is the most common agent, which is why the reaction is called “oxidation.” Fluorine, however, is the strongest known oxidizer—much stronger than oxygen. Used in the production of atomic bombs and rocket fuel, fluorine can cause substances like steel or glass to instantly burst into flame. And those flames are virtually impossible to put out.

  Man of steel: Ty Cobb had a .22 bullet lodged in his left shoulder.

  UNPLANNED WORLD RECORDS

  More people who made it into the Guinness Book of World Records and probably wish they hadn’t.

  WORST STUDENT DRIVER

  On August 3, 1970, Miriam Hargrave, 62, of Yorkshire, England, finally passed her driving test…on her 40th attempt. After so much effort, did she start driving right away? Nope. Hargrave had spent so much money on her driving lessons—$720 was a lot of money in 1970—that she couldn’t afford to buy a car.

  OLDEST SURGERY PATIENT

  James Henry Brett Jr. was 111 years and 105 days old when he had hip surgery in Houston in November 1960. He died four months later (from old age, not from the surgery).

  SHORTEST MARRIAGE

  On September 11, 1976, 39-year-old Robert Neiderhiser dropped dead at the altar just after he and his fiancée, Naomi Nicely, were pronounced man and wife at a Presbyterian church in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

  SLOWEST-SELLING PUBLISHED BOOK

  In 1716 the Oxford University Press printed 500 copies of a book titled Translation of the New Testament from Coptic into Latin, by David Wilkins. It took 191 years to sell them all.

  FARTHEST-FLYING HUMAN PROJECTILE (involuntary)

  On December 6, 1917, a ship loaded with munitions exploded in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing more than 1,900 people. It was the largest man-made explosion of the pre-nuclear age. One man, William Becker, was lucky: He was in a rowboat about 300 feet away from the ship when it exploded, propelling him 1,600 yards—the length of 16 football fields—across the harbor. He swam to safety and lived until 1969.

  Polar bears have been known to swim more than 100 miles from shore.

  UNCLE JOHN’S STALL OF FAME

  More examples of people and bathrooms making beautiful music together.

  Honoree: Paul Moghadan, who owns the Chevron gas station in West Covina, California, 20 miles east of L.A.

  Notable Achievement: Created the best gas station restroom in America, perhaps in the world

  True Story: When Moghadan started at Chevron in 1966, they told him that keeping the gas station bathroom clean and well stocked should be his highest priority. He took the message to heart…and when the time came for him to remodel his restroom in 1992, he had his brother, an architectural designer, come up with something special.

  Moghadan’s brother delivered. If you ever have to make a pit stop in West Covina, be sure to stop at the Chevron: you’ll see silver columns, marble counters, stone tile, and even a chandelier. The job cost $5,000 more than a typical remodel, but Moghadan says he averages 20 compliments a day and business at the gas station is booming. People even bring their relatives in to see the bathroom. “It’s the best restroom I’ve ever seen,” said Jose Montes, who lives in town. “You feel like you’re rich when you’re in there.”

  Honoree: Archaeologists working for English Heritage, an organization that renovates old castles and other important historic sites

  Notable Achievement: Finding England’s most important bathroom

  True Story: In May 2005, the archaeologists were restoring Bolsover Castle in northern England when they unsealed an outbuilding that had been blocked off for more than a century. Inside was a large room, thought to have been the bathroom, and a smaller room that was used to heat the bathwater. What makes them so sure the rooms were once used for bathing? A small hole in the wall that connects the two rooms is very similar to one in a nearby well house; they think the holes were used to run a lead pipe from the well house to the bathroom.

  Ted Turner owns about 2% of New Mexico.

  The castle was once the home of Sir William Cavendish (1593–1676), who was exiled to Paris at the end of the English Civil War. It was in Paris that Cavendish picked up the habit of regular bathing, which hadn’t been common in England since the fall of the Roman Empire a thousand years before. Historians have long credited him for starting a “bathing room” fad when he returned home from exile, but it’s only now that they’ve found the bathing room that started it all.

  Honoree: Michael Zinman, a businessman, book collector, and supporter of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

  Notable Achievement: Donating money to help pay for the Van Pelt Library’s men’s rooms…and not being shy about it

  True Story: If you’re ever in the library and need to make a standing pit stop, you’ll notice a silver plaque posted at eye level above the urinal. It reads: “The relief you are now experiencing is made possible by a gift from Michael Zinman.” The plaques were installed above each urinal at Zinman’s request. “I have a warped sense of what the world is like, and I am poking barbed gentle fun at society,” Zinman said. (The library also has a plaque next to the spot where President Gerald Ford once got stuck in the elevator.)

  Honoree: The city of Hampton, Virginia

  Notable Achievement: Creating new life with old toilets

  True Story: In 2000 the city began a program to collect old toilets, sinks, and other porcelain fixtures that could be used to rebuild oyster beds in the nearby Back River that have been damaged by pollution and disease. The city collected fixtures for about two years, then smashed them into pieces about the size of oyster shells (baby oysters like to attach themselves to mature oyster shells) and built an artificial reef in the Back River.

  In 2004 scientists examined the reefs to see if the oysters were putting the toilets to good use. Sure enough, they were—in samples taken from the reefs, just as many baby oysters had attached themselves to the toilet shard
s as had attached themselves to real oyster shells. “Really, anything that’s made into the size of a shell, is hard, and doesn’t float, oysters will find it and grow there just fine,” says Jim Wesson, the director of oyster restoration at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

  The Pentagon was built with twice as many bathrooms as needed (because of segregation).

  THE TALLEST MAN IN THE WORLD

  You may think being the tallest guy in the room is a great thing. Here’s the story of a man who probably wouldn’t agree.

  TALL TALE

  On February 22, 1918, Addie Wadlow gave birth to an 81/2-pound baby boy in the town of Alton, Illinois. She and her husband, Harold, named him Robert.

  The boy was normal-sized at birth, but he didn’t stay that way for long: by the time he was six months old, he weighed 30 pounds (twice as much as a typical six-month-old weighs). By 18 months, he weighed 62 pounds. In the first two years of Robert’s life, his parents—and apparently even his doctors—didn’t think there was anything particularly odd about the rapid growth. They just thought he was a naturally big kid who was growing earlier than most kids. Sooner or later, they figured, his growth would slow down and his peers would catch up.

  BIG KID

  That notion could not have lasted long. By the time Robert was five years old, he stood 5'4" tall, just seven inches shorter than his father, and wore clothing made for a 17-year-old. He passed his father in height before he turned eight, and by nine Robert could carry his dad up the stairs of the family home.

  What was it that caused Robert to grow at such an astonishing rate? Ironically, it was caused by one of the smallest organs in the human body: the pituitary gland, a pea-sized organ located in the center of the skull, just beneath the brain. Robert’s pituitary gland was producing too much growth hormone. Today pituitary abnormalities can be treated with surgery and hormone therapy, but in the early 1920s things were different. When Robert was 11, a doctor told the family that attempting such surgery would probably kill the boy, so the Wadlows gave up on that idea and focused on giving their son as normal a childhood as possible.

  Patriotic fact: Bald eagles can swim.

  THE BIG TIME

  As a young boy, Robert naturally turned heads wherever he went. (He once terrified a department store Santa when he ran after him to tell him what he wanted for Christmas.) But he remained virtually unknown outside the small community of Alton until 1927, when he visited St. Louis with his father and caught the eye of some newspaper reporters. The reporters measured and weighed the third-grader (he was 6'2½" and 180 pounds) and published several photos in the Globe-Democrat.

  The pictures were picked up by the Associated Press and published in newspapers all over the country, and Robert became one of the most famous kids in the United States. Visitors began trekking to Alton in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the world’s biggest little boy. People would park their cars outside his elementary school just to watch him walk home from school. When he passed their car they’d drive down a few hundred feet, park the car, and watch Robert walk by again. Some people followed him all the way home.

  SMALL WORLD

  From his earliest memories, Robert towered over his peers—he never knew people his own age who were his size. By the start of his teenage years he’d grown taller than all of the adults he knew. By his mid-teens, Robert entered a new phase of his life: he literally began to outgrow the world around him. Until then his hobbies had included photography and playing the guitar, but his hands grew so large that operating a camera or playing his favorite instrument became impossible.

  By his 16th birthday, Robert stood more than 7'10" tall and weighed 370 pounds, making him the tallest person in the United States. Even the largest-sized clothing didn’t fit him anymore; from now on everything he wore would have to be tailor-made, using three times as much cloth as normal-sized clothing. His shoes had to be made by hand, too (the machinery that mass-produced footwear was designed to make shoes only up to about a size 15, and Robert’s feet would one day top out at size 37). And because Robert’s feet never stopped growing, he had to order his shoes a few sizes too large so they would still fit by the time they arrived.

  Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, weighed less than the Titanic’s rudder.

  TAKING ITS TOLL

  Robert’s rapid, uncontrollable growth was more of a handicap than you might think: he needed to take long walks and participate in other regular exercise to keep up the muscle strength that supported his enormous frame. But his rapidly growing bones couldn’t get all the calcium they needed, so they were weak and prone to injury. He didn’t have much sensation in his feet, either, which made walking more difficult. As Robert got older his body became increasingly frail and unsteady; falls became more dangerous. By his late teens he was walking with a cane.

  When Robert entered college in 1936 at the age of 18, he was 8'3½" tall and less than an inch away from becoming the tallest human in recorded history. Rather than walk to school as he had in high school, he now had to take a cab. Too large to sit upright in a normal-sized car, he had to crouch on his hands and knees across the backseat. When he arrived at school, he shoved one leg backward out the door, then the other, and backed his way out of the cab.

  IF THE SHOE FITS

  College proved to be too much of an ordeal for Robert. He could not sit at a normal desk. Fountain pens and notebooks were tiny and unwieldy in his hands, making note-taking during lectures almost impossible. He had trouble working the microscope in his biology class and drawing diagrams of the organisms he was studying in his lab notebook. Even going up and down stairs was a challenge—Robert’s 18-inch-long feet were too big to fit on the steps. And because he didn’t fit in—literally—with the other students, he was frequently lonely.

  Robert finished his first year of college but didn’t return for a second. Instead, he decided to open a shoe store. To do that he needed money, of course, and he knew how to get it: in the past he and his dad had made occasional promotional tours for the International Shoe Company. Now that Robert was finished with school, he talked his dad into quitting his job and traveling with him full-time until he had enough money to open his own shoe store in Alton.

  By now Robert was so large that travel by train or airplane was pretty much out of the question—sure, if the railroad or the airline agreed to remove a row or two of seats, there might be room enough for Robert to sit, but he could no longer squeeze himself into the tiny train and plane bathrooms. So he and his dad bought a car that was big enough to seat seven people, ripped out the middle row of seats, and hit the road—Dad did the driving, and Robert sat in the back (he was too tall to drive).

  According to experts: School buses are eight times safer than cars.

  In the summer months, Robert made appearances in northern states; in the winter Robert and his dad headed south. They would stay out for a few weeks at a time, typically visiting two towns every day. Robert drew huge crowds wherever he went, and it soon proved to be impractical to greet so many people inside the shoe stores. So they began working with an advance man who arranged for either a large truck or a platform to be set up outside each store.

  Most of the people who came to see Robert were polite, but he had to put up with the same old jokes (“How’s the weather up there?”) at every stop, and some people even pinched his legs through his trousers or kicked him in the shins to see if he was walking on stilts. Robert took it in stride—but if the pincher or kicker was wearing a hat (and nearly everyone did in the 1930s), he playfully retaliated by grabbing it and putting it someplace high where the person couldn’t easily get it back.

  GENTLE GIANT

  In all, Robert and his dad visited more than 800 towns in 41 different states between 1937 and 1940, traveling more than 300,000 miles in the process. On July 4, 1940, they were scheduled to ride in a parade in Manistee, Michigan. Robert wasn’t feeling well, but he decided to go ahead with the parade anyway.

  The p
arade lasted more than two hours, and in that time Robert’s condition deteriorated until he could barely hold his head up. By the time he made it back to the hotel he had a fever of 101°F. The hotel doctor looked Robert over and found the source of the problem: an infected blister on Robert’s ankle, caused by a poor-fitting metal brace. The brace had been fitted a few weeks earlier to strengthen his ankle. (By his early 20s, Robert had very little feeling left in his feet; if he had noticed the blister at all, he didn’t realize how serious it was.) When doctors couldn’t find a hospital nearby that was equipped to handle a patient as large as Robert—he was too big to fit in a hospital bed—they decided it would be better to treat him right there in the hotel room.

  That’s a latte! 30% of all coffee sold in the U.S. is classified as “gourmet.”

  Over the next several days, the infection worsened and Robert’s condition deteriorated. Had it happened just a few years later, Robert could have been treated with penicillin and might have made a full recovery. But penicillin had not yet come into widespread use, and once an infection got established there was little that could be done to stop it. At 1:30 a.m. on the morning of July 15, Robert passed away in his sleep. At the time of his death he was 8'11", making him a full seven inches taller than the previous record holder, an Irishman who died in 1877.

  He never did get to open his own shoe store.

  Robert’s body was returned to Alton, where it was buried in a 10'9"-long, 1,000-pound casket, carried by 12 pallbearers and eight assistants. The big man got a big send-off as every business in Alton shut down on the day of the funeral. More than 40,000 people filed past the casket before it was laid to rest.