Foul ball. After experiencing pain in his right testicle for 15 years, in 2013 Steven Haines decided to see a urologist at J. C. Blair Memorial Hospital in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Dr. V. Spencer Long discovered that Haines’s right testicle had atrophied due to scarring and damage from a previous injury. He performed surgery to remove the testicle, but when Haines woke up, the pain was still there. An examination revealed that Dr. Long had removed his healthy left testicle, and left the atrophied right testicle in place. According to Haines’s attorney, Braden Lepisto, “The doctor gave an explanation that really made no anatomical or medical sense. He claimed that he removed the testicle that was on the right side of the scrotum and the testicle had a spermatic cord that led to the left side of the body. Essentially, the doctor claimed that the testicles had switched sides.” At last report, Haines was still living with his atrophied right testicle and the pain that it causes him—Lepisto says he has a “debilitating fear” of receiving further treatment for his condition. (If he has the testicle removed, he’ll need testosterone therapy for the rest of his life.) In June 2017, a jury awarded him $870,000 in damages for the botched surgery.
There’s enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America a foot deep.
THINKING OUTSIDE
(AND INSIDE) THE BOX
You probably haven’t heard of Malcom McLean, but he was one of the most innovative businessmen of the 20th century and, for good or bad, one of the architects of the modern globalized economy.
GAS MONEY
Malcom McLean was like a lot of kids who graduated from high school during the Great Depression in the 1930s: He had big dreams, but his family didn’t have enough money to send him to college. So he got a job pumping gas, and after a few years he saved up enough money—$120—to buy a used pickup truck. With it, he went into business for himself, hauling produce, animal feed, and empty tobacco barrels around Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He soon had more work than he could handle alone, so he brought his sister and brother into the business. Then he began buying more trucks and hiring additional drivers to operate them.
Two years later, during Thanksgiving week in 1937, McLean hauled a shipment of cotton bales to Jersey City, New Jersey, where they were going to be loaded onto a ship bound for Istanbul, Turkey. Jersey City is at least a day’s drive from Winston-Salem, and when McLean arrived at the port he discovered that it was going to take at least that long for the longshoremen to unload his truck.
In those days, ships were still loaded and unloaded the same way they’d always been: by hand, once piece of cargo at a time, using manual labor. Each of McLean’s bales of cotton had to be taken aboard the ship individually, by hand if it was small enough, or using a crane if it was too heavy for longshoremen to carry. Once aboard, the bale had to be secured in place with ropes, again by hand, to prevent it from being tossed about by rough waters when the ship was at sea. Only after that first bale was secured in place would the longshoremen return for the next bale, and then only if some other piece of cargo didn’t need to be loaded first.
TIME IS MONEY
Loading and unloading a ship in this fashion was so inefficient and time-consuming that cargo ships typically spent half of their entire service lives stuck in port. This was the most expensive part of the journey: shipping companies spent more money moving cargo on and off their ships than they did sailing them to distant ports and back. As McLean sat there, waiting for his truck to finally be unloaded and wondering if he’d make it back home in time for Thanksgiving, it occurred to him that the process would be much quicker if his entire truck, along with the cargo it contained, could be loaded aboard the ship as one unit. Then when it arrived in Istanbul, the truck could be unloaded and used to drive the cotton bales to their destination.
The Internet’s very first web page (info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html), which went live in 1991, is still active.
More than 20 years passed before McLean was able to act on his intuition. He was just a truck driver, after all.
GOING TO SEA
By the 1950s, McLean and his siblings had built their business into the second-largest trucking company in the United States. In 1955 they sold the company and its fleet of 1,700 trucks for $25 million, the equivalent of more than $220 million today.
McLean believed that if the decks of tanker ships were retrofitted to carry trucks loaded with cargo, the ships would make more money hauling the extra freight, and they would make it in both directions.
Now McLean had the seed money he needed to put his shipping ideas to the test. He’d noticed over the years that when tanker ships carried crude oil from Texas to refineries on the East Coast, they made the return trip to Texas empty, without any paying freight. No cargo was ever carried on deck, either. All of the oil was transported in huge tanks in the ship’s hold belowdecks. McLean believed that if the decks of tanker ships were retrofitted to carry trucks loaded with cargo, the ships would make more money hauling the extra freight, and they would make it in both directions. He managed to sell an executive from National City Bank on the idea, and secured a $500 million loan.
ON A ROLL
McLean used $7 million to buy two old oil tankers and retrofitted them with steel platforms on their decks to hold truck trailers. At first he left the wheels on the trailers, but he soon realized that the trailers would be much more stable in rough seas if he removed the wheels and secured the trailers directly to the decks. Removing the wheels eliminated wasted space beneath each trailer, and stowing the trailers so securely made it possible to load more of them onto the ship. McLean managed to cram 58 truck trailers in a single layer onto the deck of each ship (stacking them on top of each other would come later), and on April 26, 1956, the first of them, the SS Ideal X, set sail from Port Newark, New Jersey, for Houston, Texas. When it arrived, the containers were quickly removed from the ship by cranes that lowered the containers onto waiting trucks and railroad cars, without any manual labor from longshoremen, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to unload the cargo by hand. The container-shipping era had begun.
Jay Leno owns a car that runs on tequila.
The Ideal X didn’t sink from the weight of all the trailers on its decks, as skeptics had predicted, and the containers didn’t fall over the side, either. But McLean’s shipping company, soon to be known as Sea-Land, didn’t turn a profit until 1961.
In the early 1960s, McLean talked the New York Port Authority into building the world’s first purpose-built wharf for container ships in Elizabeth, New Jersey. A few years later he convinced the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, to begin handling container ships as well, opening the way for the transatlantic container shipping trade. The first Sea-Land ship arrived in Rotterdam in May 1966.
HELP YOURSELF
McLean was careful to patent the designs of his shipping containers, the cranes that lifted them on and off of ships, and other technologies that he developed. But he was shrewd enough to understand that there was more money to be made from increasing the flow of goods by standardizing port facilities all over the world than there was in defending his patents against competitors. So he made them available, royalty-free, to the world. In the process he established a single international standard for containerized shipping.
His international standard.
In 1967 McLean secured a contract with the Pentagon to deliver war matériel from the West Coast of the United States to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The ships made the return trip to the United States empty—at least until McLean convinced the Japanese authorities that container shipping was the wave of the future. He soon began diverting his homeward-bound ships to Japanese ports, where containers packed with cameras, transistor radios, and other goods were waiting. U.S. trade with Japan soared, helping Japanese brands like Sony, Panasonic, and Nikon establish a foothold in the United States.
MOVING ON
By 1968 Sea-Land was the largest container shipping firm in the world,
with annual revenues of $227 million and a fleet of 36 ships carrying 27,000 shipping containers to and from ports all over the world. Containerized shipping was so much more efficient than the traditional method of loading and unloading cargo that other companies had little choice but to embrace the system or risk being squeezed out of the market entirely. And as the competition intensified, McLean realized that Sea-Land was going to need access to more capital to keep up.
Perhaps thinking back to his days hauling empty tobacco barrels around North Carolina, he approached the American tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds about buying Sea-Land, and in 1969 he sold the company to RJR for $530 million. His personal stake in Sea-Land sold for $160 million, the equivalent of more than $1 billion today. Not bad for a man who got his start driving a used pickup truck, paid for with $120 that he earned pumping gas.
Cheetahs don’t roar—they meow.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Containerized shipping lowered the cost of loading and unloading ships by more than 97 percent, down from nearly $6 a ton to just 16¢ a ton. In the process, McLean unleashed economic forces that even he did not fully comprehend. As shipping companies and port facilities all over the world copied his containerized shipping methods to avoid being driven out of business, manual labor jobs on the docks all but disappeared. By 1996, 90 percent of global trade was being moved by container ships. The lost longshoreman jobs were more than offset by the explosion of jobs created by increasing global trade, but many of those jobs were created thousands of miles from American shores.
The Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square in New York City, for example, is in the city’s Garment District, where clothing was designed and manufactured for decades. Clothing companies could deliver their merchandise to Macy’s on foot. But the steep decline in shipping costs meant that it was now cheaper to buy cotton fabric in India or China, ship it to clothing factories Bangladesh, Thailand, or Turkey, and ship the finished clothes to Macy’s in Herald Square, than it was to make the clothing in a Garment District factory across the street. As a consequence, the number of clothing manufacturing jobs in New York has declined steadily for 50 years, even though the clothing companies are still headquartered in the Garment District. They have moved nearly all of their production overseas.
The low cost of containerized shipping is the reason why Americans can buy a 32-inch Sony TV for $290 and a laptop computer for $350, but they can’t get a job in a TV factory or a computer factory, even though TVs and personal computers were invented in the United States. Nearly all of the manufacturing plants moved overseas many years ago, and it’s hard to imagine them ever coming back.
KARMA?
One of the casualties of the economic disruptions of the 1970s and 1980s turned out to be Malcom McLean himself, though he was more a victim of rising oil prices than declining shipping costs. Nine years after selling Sea-Land, he jumped back into the shipping business by buying the struggling United States Lines, which he hoped to turn into a strong competitor of his former company.
The price of fuel oil was one of the major expenses of shipping goods across oceans, and when the price of crude oil rose from $3 a barrel in 1972 to $34 a barrel by 1981, the shipping companies were hit hard. McLean assumed the price of oil would remain high into the future, so he bought a dozen giant, energy-efficient container ships called “Econships” that burned less fuel, but were also slower than other ships. McLean made other big bets that assumed the price of oil would climb even higher… but it didn’t. The oil crisis of the late 1970s was followed by the oil glut of the 1980s, which caused the price of oil to drop to less than $10 a barrel by 1986. McLean’s slow, expensive ships couldn’t compete with faster, cheaper ships; United States Lines went bankrupt in the mid-1980s, taking a good chunk of McLean’s fortune with it.
Drink ice water when you’re really thirsty. It will cause your stomach to constrict, forcing water into your small intestine, where it will absorb faster.
SHIPPING OUT
McLean was down but he was never out. He formed another shipping company in 1992 and was still involved in running it when he passed away in 2001 at the age of 87. The revolution he first conceived of while waiting for his truck to be unloaded on the Jersey City docks is still underway. Like it or not, the global economy continues to move production to lower-cost countries, passing tremendous savings on to the consumer but eliminating manufacturing jobs in developed countries in the process. The brave new world Malcom McLean created seems here to stay, at least until someone else comes along and thinks of something even more revolutionary to replace it.
SUCKER PUNCH
In his younger days, President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) was no stranger to beer and wine, but that all stopped after he married Lucy Ware Webb in 1852. Mrs. Hayes was active in the temperance movement, which sought to outlaw all forms of liquor. When Hayes became president in 1877, he banned the serving of alcohol at White House functions.
In time, however, a rumor began to spread that certain members of the White House staff, pitying guests who had to endure long dinners and other occasions without a drop to drink, had taken to spiking the oranges in the Roman punch with rum. Anyone who needed a pick-me-up need only pay a visit to “the Life-Saving Station,” as the punch bowl came to be known, and make sure that some slices of orange ended up in their cup. But as President Hayes himself later admitted in his diary, he was the one who spiked the oranges—and not with rum: “The joke of the Roman punch oranges was not on us but on the drinking people. My orders were to flavor them rather strongly with the same flavor that is found in Jamaica rum [but no rum]…This took! This was certainly the case after the facts alluded to reached our ears.”
A cheetah can accelerate from 0 to 63 mph in three seconds.
TOO MUCH OF
A GOOD THING
Enough of just about anything can (and will) kill you. Here’s exactly how much of various items you’d have to consume or endure (assuming you’re an average-size adult) in order for your body to shut down.
Oranges. The vitamin C that’s plentiful in oranges is water-soluble, meaning that if you consume more than your body needs, you pee it out. But it takes the body time and energy to process that extra vitamin C. If you ate about 11,000 oranges, your body couldn’t handle all that vitamin C, and you’d die of vitamin C poisoning.
Chocolate. Chocolate is derived from the cacao plant, which contains a bitter alkaloid called theobromine. It’s a natural diuretic and stimulant, and too much will completely dehydrate you or make your heart beat too fast until it gives out. It would take about 1,000 milligrams of chocolate per kilogram of body weight for that to happen. For an average adult, that works out to about 85 regular-size Hershey bars.
Sugar. Consuming 10½ cups (or 500 teaspoons) of sugar all at once is too much for your body to handle. Your pancreas wouldn’t be able to produce insulin fast enough to process it all, and you’d go into an instant—and probably fatal—diabetic coma.
Bananas. Too much of something good can be a bad thing. Like bananas. They famously pack a lot of potassium, a vital nutrient that your body needs. But if you were to eat around 480 of them, you could die from potassium poisoning.
Cherries. Eat the cherry, spit out the pit…immediately. A cherry pit contains a small amount of cyanide, a notorious toxin. But it’s not that small. If you bit into just two cherry pits, that would release enough cyanide to end you.
Apples. Apple seeds, like cherry pits, contain cyanide. There’s less in apples than there is in cherries, though. You’d have to eat 200 apple seeds, or 20 apple cores full of seeds, to die.
Caffeine. Too much coffee, espresso, or any other caffeinated beverage can lead to an arrhythmia, or a rapidly or irregularly beating heart. About 70 cups of coffee or 180 espresso shots would trigger that.
Salt. Similarly, consuming too much sodium too quickly would send your body’s sodium levels to toxic heights. So never eat 45 teaspoons of salt all at once.
Ang
elina Jolie, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon all say they’ve misplaced their Oscars.
Water. Drinking too much water all at once can throw off your body’s sodium levels. They would become too diluted and your organs would shut down. Amount of water it would take: chugging slightly less than two gallons.
Nutmeg. It’s used sparingly in cooking because it has a strong taste…but also because more than that can be toxic. How much more? Consuming two or three full teaspoons of the spice would deliver a toxic dose of a naturally occurring psychoactive compound called myristicin that could bring on convulsions, severe dehydration, and intense body pain.
Black pepper. Common pepper can be deadly, but it would take around 130 teaspoons to fell an average adult. Black pepper contains capsaicin, the chemical that makes all peppers spicy. Too much can lead to severe swelling of the skin and mucus membranes, as well as vomiting, diarrhea, heart attacks, and death.
Toothpaste. Most contain fluoride, a compound that contributes to good dental health. But there’s a good reason you spit out toothpaste and mouthwash that contain fluoride: it’s poison. Consume enough fluoride-enhanced toothpaste and your body will react the way it reacts to most poisons: with stomach pain, intestinal blockages, vomiting, diarrhea, and difficulty breathing. Consuming 24 six-ounce tubes of toothpaste might leave you with extremely fresh breath, but it would also likely kill you.
Green potatoes. Exposing potatoes to too much light enables the growth of a toxic substance called solanine, which builds up as a thin green layer just underneath the skin. The flesh of the potato can be cooked and eaten even if solanine is present in the skin, but eating the skin could lead to severe stomach cramps and nausea, and if you ate 25 solanine-laden potatoes, you could die. So keep potatoes stored in the dark.
Uncle John's Actual and Factual Bathroom Reader Page 42
