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

by Michael Brunsfeld

  The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century marked the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe and a near-halt in the progress of glassmaking. But by the seventh century, new Muslim empires began to flourish in Asia and Africa. Over the next several centuries, Arab artisans, especially those from Syria, became the world’s premier glassmakers. They made huge advances in cutting, engraving, and coloring techniques, as well as inventing ways to paint, enamel, and gild glass. Intricately decorated, multicolored, gilded glass pieces from this era—especially vases in a wide variety of shapes—have been found in all parts of the Arab world. Even after dominance in the trade would shift back to Europe, European glassmakers were greatly influenced by the artistic and scientific advances of their Arab counterparts.

  VENETIAN GLASS

  Nobody knows exactly when glassmaking began in Venice, but by 1224 the city’s glassmakers had already formed a guild to protect their trade. By 1291 there were so many Venetian glassmakers that the furnaces were causing fires all over the city, which prompted the city council to move them all to the nearby island of Murano. This actually helped the guilds—they were better able to hide their advances from competitors. By the 14th century Venetian glassmakers were the world leaders in all aspects of the craft, including mastering the ingredients for making colored glass. For instance, the right amount of cobalt resulted in a deep blue glass; manganese made yellow or purple. One of their more significant achievements was the development of the clearest glass at that time, cristallo. And that led to the first glass lenses, developed in the Netherlands in 1590, which would eventually lead to the invention of eyeglasses, the telescope, and the microscope.

  Ant lion larvae are called doodlebugs.

  THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

  As with many other crafts, the change to factory-made, mass-produced glass meant a fatal blow to an artisan’s craft that had been practiced for thousands of years, but it also meant great leaps forward in quality.

  • In 1820 a mechanized process of bottle production was introduced in the United States, greatly increasing the public’s familiarity with the use of glass.

  • In 1876 John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb started Bausch and Lomb in Rochester, New York. They developed and refined many types of lenses for use in microscopes, eyeglasses, and magnifiers.

  • In 1915 Corning Glass made the first heat-resistant glass for cookware, calling it Pyrex, from pyro, the Greek word for “fire.”

  • In 1919 Henry Ford borrowed from a French invention, putting two layers of glass together with a very thin layer of cellulose in between. The resulting two-ply sheet was transparent and shatterproof. Ford ordered this “safety glass” put on all his cars. (Safety glass is made basically the same way today.)

  • In 1926 Corning developed the “399” or “Ribbon” machine to make lightbulbs. It was soon capable of making 400,000 bulbs a day, more than five times the amount made by previous machines—which made lightbulbs affordable for ordinary households.

  • In 1959 Britain’s Alastair Pilkington invented the “float process” for making sheet glass. A sheet of molten glass is drawn from a tank, then floated over the surface of a tank of molten tin and allowed to cool. This results in the smooth, lustrous, and consistent finish that consumers now expect—and take for granted—in windows. Nearly all sheet glass made today uses the float process.

  Ulcers are more aggravated by decaf than by regular coffee.

  • In 1970 Corning developed a workable silica optical fiber, an idea that had been around for decades. Used mostly for data transmission, this breakthrough jump-started the “fiber-optic” age.

  GLASS PRESENT AND FUTURE

  What’s next? A fairly recent development: “smart glass,” or glass coated with different substances that make it react to outside stimuli. You’ve probably seen photochromic glass—glass that responds to light—in self-darkening sunglasses. Thermochromic glass does the same thing in response to heat, and electrochromic, the most promising, responds to electricity; a flick of a switch can change the opaqueness of the glass or how it reflects light. Other techniques can even change the color of glass.

  The science of glassmaking continues to advance. New methods are being discovered to produce glass faster and better; more uses for it are being found in computers, medical devices, and communications, to name a few. Thousands of years have passed since the discovery of that strange stone in the ashes of a fire. Who knows what uses the future holds for that simple but elegant substance—glass.

  * * *

  PAST-EGO EXPERIENCE

  The 2003 book Unlock Your Secret Dreams by Craig Hamilton Parker unlocks some “past life” secrets of several stars:

  • Sylvester Stallone believes in reincarnation and is convinced he was guillotined during the French Revolution.

  • Englebert Humperdinck believes he was a Roman emperor.

  • Tina Turner says she was told by a psychic that she’s the reincarnation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh in ancient Egypt.

  • John Travolta believes he was once Rudolph Valentino.

  Give thanks: There are 61 U.S. towns with names that include the word “turkey.”

  HARD-BOILED

  Here’s the story of Dashiell Hammett, the king of the crime novel.

  Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

  He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?”

  She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with an effect of dampness. Her eyes were brown and playful in a shiny boyish face. She finished shutting the door behind her, leaned against it, and said: “There’s a girl wants to see you. Her name’s Wonderly.”

  “A customer?”

  “I guess so. You’ll want to see her anyway: she’s a knockout.”

  “Shoo her in, darling,” said Spade. “Shoo her in.”

  Those are the opening lines from The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, voted one of the 100 best novels in the English language by the Modern Library, and the one for which he’s most famous. Hammett’s looks were a far cry from Sam Spade’s: he was thin—and his short white hair and little black mustache made him look anything but tough. But like the rugged antiheroes in his detective stories, Hammett lived a hard life, drank heavily, and preferred to work alone. And his character showed in the stories he wrote for Black Mask magazine during the 1920s, which established him as the king of the hard-boiled mystery writers and the father of the film noir movie classics that followed. Although Hammett didn’t invent crime fiction, he wrote with such skill that his influence dominated it, elevating the genre to an art form. But that’s not how it started out.

  Big Ma-a-a-c: In India, McDonald’s has no beef on the menu. (They do serve lamb burgers.)

  PULP FICTION

  Cheap adventure stories published in pocket-sized paperback books first appeared the mid-1800s. Publishing firms saved money by printing them on the cheapest paper available, made from pure wood pulp without any rag fiber (hence the term “pulp fiction”). The earliest were Western stories that featured frontier heroes, but as the Wild West was tamed, the cowboy’s urban counterpart began to emerge in the form of the streetwise detective. By the 1870s, the detective story had established itself as a genre. Serialized adventures of characters like Old Cap Collier, Broadway Billy, Jack Harkaway, and the mysterious Old Sleuth, Master of Disguise, helped to develop the style. These were hard-fisted, tough-guy heroes who inhabited a dark, urban underworld where violence seemed to be the only means of establishing order.

  Crime fiction magazines and dime novels grew steadily in popularity through the end of the 19
th century and into the 20th. By the 1920s, there were more than 20,000 magazines in circulation in the United States. Pulp titles like The Nick Carter Weekly, Detective Stories, Girl’s Detective, Doctor Death, Argosy, and Police Gazette dominated newsstands during Prohibition, giving rise to a class of working writers who earned about a penny a word, some using several pseudonyms so they could publish more than a million words per year. Hammett wanted to be a part of it.

  In late 1923 he arrived at Black Mask magazine, which printed “Stories of Detection, Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism.” Earlier that year, the magazine had published a story by Carroll John Daly called “Three Gun Terry,” considered the first authentic “hard-boiled” detective story. Yet although he didn’t invent the style, Hammett quickly dominated it. Over the next seven years he wrote more than 50 stories for Black Mask, becoming its premier writer, and helping it become the premier magazine of hard-boiled fiction. Hammett’s influence was such that other writers accused the magazine’s editors of forcing them to copy him.

  DASHIELL HAMMETT, P.I.

  So how was Hammett able to bring such an impressive realism to his characters? Experience. Before becoming a writer, he had been a detective—he was an operative with the Pinkerton Agency from 1915 to 1922. Hammett had had many jobs before that: newsboy, freight clerk, laborer, and rail yard messenger, but it was all just to help support his parents and his two brothers.

  Volcanic ash has been known to retain its heat for 100 years.

  SMART KID

  Born in 1894, Samuel Dashiell Hammett grew up between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He learned a love of reading from his mother, who was a nurse, and street smarts from his father, who was a farmer, gambler, occasional politician, and notorious womanizer. Although he never finished high school, young Hammett was a voracious reader. And after spending time on the road with his father, he was also streetwise. So when Hammett arrived at the Pinkerton office in Baltimore to take a clerk job, his bosses soon recognized that this 21-year-old kid would make a great field operative. They placed him under the wing of one of their best private eyes, James Wright, who taught Hammett the ins and outs of “tailing a perp and bringing him in.” Wright was the inspiration for the Continental Op, the hero of Hammett’s early stories.

  Little is known about Hammett’s days as a Pinkerton operative. Most biographers agree that he embellished his tales to help create a mystique about himself. In his book Shadow Man, author Richard Layman says that Hammett “in a half self-serving, half playful manner, characteristically amplified his stories, rewriting, revising, even inventing accounts of his experiences.” What is known, however, is that Hammett was a master at tailing suspects. According to one colleague, Dash (as he was known to friends) once followed a man through six small towns without ever being detected. He was quickly rising through the agency ranks, primed to become one of Pinkerton’s best. Everything changed when he chose to fight in World War I.

  A LIFELONG CONTRACT

  Hammett enlisted in the army in 1919 and served as a sergeant in the ambulance corps, but was discharged a year later when he contracted first tuberculosis and then the Spanish flu. The diseases would plague him for the rest of his life, not only putting a halt to his detective and military careers, but also affecting his relationships with women. (While recovering, he married a nurse named Josephine Dolan, but because TB is contagious, in 1926 she was advised by doctors to take their two daughters and leave him.)

  According to some experts, one third of all bottled water in the U.S. is contaminated with bacteria.

  Hammett did go back to Pinkerton after he recovered, but he grew disillusioned with the Pinkerton style of law enforcement after an incident in Montana. The story goes that he was offered $5,000 to kill Frank Little, a labor boss who was organizing miners. Hammett refused, but Little was ultimately captured by five men—allegedly Pinkerton ops (short for “operatives”)—and hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. Hammett biographer Diane Johnson writes:

  Perhaps at the moment he was asked to murder Frank Little, or perhaps at the moment that he learned that Little had been killed, possibly by other Pinkerton men, Hammett saw that he himself was on the fringe…and was expected to be, according to a kind of oath of fealty that he and other Pinkerton men took. He also learned something of the lives of poor miners, whose wretched strikes the Pinkerton people were hired to prevent, and about the lies of mine owners. Those things were to sit in the back of his mind.

  Not only was Hammett at odds with his Pinkerton bosses because of his idealism and growing distrust of authority, but his chronic TB made it impossible for him to endure assignments that often took place on long, cold nights. He left the agency in 1922 to find something that required less physical effort.

  PEN IN HAND

  Unemployed and disabled, Hammett took a job as an ad writer for a San Francisco jewelry store, but found the work unfulfilling. He wanted to write about something that he knew, that he was passionate about. Being a fan of detective stories—but disappointed by their lack of authenticity—Dashiell Hammett decided to create the detective that he was never able to be in real life.

  “Your private detective does not,” he said, “want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner, he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.” So Hammett started pounding out the dark characters and vigilante justice that expressed his cynical views of the world of crime and punishment. Just as he had impressed the Pinkertons with his skill and wit a few years before, he equally impressed the editors at Black Mask with his descriptive prose and tight storytelling.

  A cow must consume over 125 pounds of food and water to produce one pound of butter.

  MEAN STREETS

  After Hammett’s highly successful run with Black Mask, he published his first full novel, Red Harvest, in 1929. Drawing on his strike-breaking experience with Pinkertons, Hammett used his Continental Op character to narrate the tale of a corrupt and lawless Montana mining town in the aftermath of a violent labor clash. Just a few months later, Hammett and the Continental Op were back with The Dain Curse. Without stopping for a rest, he then banged out The Maltese Falcon in time for a spring 1930 release.

  Considered his finest novel, The Maltese Falcon introduced Sam Spade, who became one of America’s best-known fictional heroes during the tough times of the Great Depression. In a decade that saw a high rise in crime—especially in the nation’s cities—readers looked up to Spade. He was tough but full of integrity and got results from playing by his own rules. Spade’s world was violent, unsympathetic, and full of irony and black humor. Readers ate it up. Sam Spade went on to star in radio dramas, comic books, and on film. Three different movies were made of The Maltese Falcon; the classic 1941 Humphrey Bogart version was the third.

  EASY STREET

  The 1930s was a good decade for Hammett. He was rich and famous (and single), hopping back and forth between Manhattan and Los Angeles to attend star-studded parties with the likes of Harpo Marx, Jean Harlow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Hammett drank and partied for days at a time. But he was also writing. He would work on movie scripts, first at Paramount and later at MGM—where he was paid $2,000 per week. In 1934 he published his fifth and final novel, The Thin Man, which spawned a series of films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. He wrote script stories for three The Thin Man sequels but found writing for Hollywood less rewarding than writing novels. So he worked as little as he could get away with and drank heavily. Result: Hammett garnered an “unreliable” reputation among the film studios. His earlier impressive productivity soon fizzled into nothing. He wanted to get away from detective fiction and write more serious novels, but could never bring himself to do it. “I quit writing because I was repeating myself,” he later explained. “It is the beginning of the end when you notice that you have style.”
/>
  Americans buy more than 515 million pairs of jeans every year.

  Perhaps Hammett could have written the Great American Novel had he not become such a raging alcoholic. His daughter Jo Hammett recounts in her biography, A Daughter Remembers, that the drinking “turned my father maudlin, sarcastic, and mean.” He lost focus, starting many projects and finishing none of them.

  But with a steady stream of royalties coming in, he didn’t have to work, so in the 1940s Hammett became involved in leftist politics. Still stung from his strike-breaking days in Montana, Hammett became a civil rights activist and staunch opponent of Nazi Germany. Despite his age—he was in his 40s—he reenlisted to serve in World War II. They shipped him off to the Aleutian Islands (in Alaska), where he spent nearly three years editing a newspaper for the troops and helping train young writers to be good news correspondents. Hammett said later that this was the last happy time of his life.

  LEFT OUT

  When he returned home, Hammett found himself ostracized from the industry that made him famous. Moving further to the fringe, he became vice-chairman of the leftist Civil Rights Congress in 1948, an organization that the FBI called “subversive.” He also quit drinking that year, but the damage had been done—his immune system was shot, making him continuously sick with a hacking cough that was as unpleasant for Hammett as it was for those around him.

  Downtrodden and out of the public eye, in 1951 Hammett was ordered to turn over a list of names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress. But he refused. Following in the footsteps of the Continental Op and Sam Spade, he remained loyal and didn’t “rat them out.” Taking the Fifth, Hammett was charged with contempt of court and thrown into federal prison for five months. When he got out, he was informed by the IRS that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. They garnished all his income from new publications or productions of his previous work. His days of being the toast of Tinseltown now seemed like ancient history. Hammett was broke and alone, and his health was deteriorating. He took a job in New York teaching creative writing just to pay the bills.