The line went dead: In 2007 a Chicago man faked his death to try to get out of his cell phone contract. (It didn’t work.)
HAMBURGER FACTS
This page would go great with a page of french fry facts, and maybe some milkshake trivia.
First patent for a mechanical beef cutter: E. Wade in 1829. In 1845 G. A. Coffman of Virginia improved on Wade’s invention, and received a patent for a meat grinder, which made grinding meat fast—and cutting no longer had to be done with a knife or chisel.
Ancestor: the 18th-century Hamburg steak. German immigrants in New York City bought this cheap lunch-counter or restaurant item that was similar to a Salisbury steak. The beef was hand-minced, salted, smoked, served with onions and breadcrumbs on a plate, and eaten with a knife and fork.
Who came up with the idea to put cheese on it? In 1935 Louis Ballast of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In in Denver got a trademark for the word “cheeseburger,” but he never defended it, so the word and concept spread. (Actually, burgers with cheese had been available since the 1920s.)
Louis’ Lunch, a lunch counter in New Haven, Connecticut, is regarded by many as the birthplace of the hamburger. In 1900 it started offering ground beef patties between bread slices for a quick lunch on the go. Louis’ Lunch is still open today.
Another claim to the burger’s invention: Fletcher Davis, who put ground beef on bread in Athens, Texas, in the 1880s. Then he took them to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where the food was widely popularized.
Another claimant to the “inventor of the hamburger” title: Oscar Weber Bilby. On the Fourth of July, 1891, he had a party on his farm near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and served ground beef on his wife’s homemade rolls—not bread. That’s the birth of the hamburger on a hamburger bun.
In 2000 North Korea’s “glorious leader,” Kim Jong Il, told his people that he invented the hamburger.
McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers every second.
At the 1885 Erie County Fair—coincidentally in Hamburg, New York—Frank and Charles Menches ran a food stand selling pork sausages. When they ran out, they started serving ground beef sandwiches on rolls. That same year, Charlie Nagreen in Seymour, Wisconsin, sold the same thing at the Outagamie County Fair. The hamburger was born.
About 71 percent of all beef served in restaurants in the United States is in the form of hamburgers (or cheeseburgers).
Each week, the average American eats three hamburgers. Altogether, that’s about 50 billion burgers a year.
60 percent of all sandwiches sold around the world are hamburgers.
First fast-food hamburger chain: White Castle, which opened in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, selling burgers for five cents each.
Cardinals get their name because their bright red color reminded people of the red vestments worn by cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church.
THE HUNT FOR “PLANET X”
Here’s the unlikely tale of how a 23-year-old farm boy was enlisted to search for a new and unknown planet at the far edges of the solar system…and found it.
EYES ON THE SKIES
Clyde Tombaugh grew up on a Kansas farm in the 1910s and 1920s. He was a bright kid: his hobby was building telescopes from scratch, using materials he found around the farm. About the only part he had to send away for was the thick ship’s porthole glass that he needed to make the lenses, which he ground into shape by hand. It was a painstaking process that required skill, patience, and tremendous attention to detail. In 1928 he cobbled together a telescope using a crankshaft from a 1910 Buick and parts from a cream separator, and with it he spent hundreds of hours studying the night sky. The telescope worked so well that he was able to make meticulous drawings of the visible features on the surface of Mars and Jupiter.
Tombaugh’s dream was to become a college professor or an astronomer at an observatory one day, and to do either he would need a college degree. But times were tough in Kansas. The Great Depression, which would sweep the country in late 1929, was already wreaking havoc in farm country. There was little chance of him or his family ever being able to raise the money he’d need to go to college. So Tombaugh set his dream aside and worked on his parents’ farm, and he hired out to his neighbors’ farms as well. He thought about starting his own telescope business one day, or maybe getting an apprentice job on the railroad, where he might one day work his way up to being an engineer.
TAKE A LOOK
In his spare time, Tombaugh continued to study the night sky through his telescopes and making drawings of the planets. When he read in an old copy of Popular Astronomy magazine that the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was also studying the planets (most observatories studied celestial objects that were more distant than the planets), he mailed some of his best drawings to the director of the observatory, Vesto Slipher, and asked Slipher for his professional opinion of the work.
Slipher “responded almost immediately with a letter, asking a series of questions, which I promptly answered,” Tombaugh recalled in his memoir, Out of Darkness. “Then came another letter with more questions, one of them being, ‘Are you in good physical health?’ which again was promptly answered. I realized that there was more than just polite interest.” In a third letter, Slipher explained that the observatory had ordered a new telescope that they were going to use to photograph the night sky, and they needed someone to operate it. The job would involve lots of overnight work in an unheated observatory, high atop a mesa that received as much as 15 feet of snow each winter. That’s why Slipher asked about Tombaugh’s health. “Would you be interested in coming to Flagstaff on a few months trial basis?” he wrote.
The “Dont Walk” sign is misspelled. (It’s missing the apostrophe.)
“Then came another letter with more questions, one of them being, ‘Are you in good physical health?’ ”
By now Tombaugh had had his fill of farming. He wrote back to Slipher and accepted the job, and a few weeks later boarded the train to Flagstaff. (Muron Tombaugh’s parting words to his son: “Clyde, make yourself useful, and beware of easy women.”)
THE AMATEUR
That the Lowell Observatory was even willing to offer a job to a young man with no college degree and no professional experience was due in no small part to the institution’s status as a pariah in the world of astronomy. It had its deceased founder, Percival Lowell—a wealthy former diplomat, amateur astronomer, and popular author—to thank for that.
For many years Lowell had been obsessed with the idea that the surface of Mars was crisscrossed with canals built by an intelligent race of Martians. That idea dated back to 1877, when an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli observed Mars through a telescope and saw what he described as canali, an Italian word that can mean either “channels” or “canals.” Schiaparelli meant “channels,” which are naturally occurring, like rivers or streams. But when his writings were translated into English, canali was mistranslated as “canal,” and that led many people to jump to the more exciting conclusion that the lines were artificial structures made by Martians.
OUT OF LINE
Percival Lowell was one such person. He was so enthralled by the idea of intelligent life on Mars that he left the diplomatic service and used much of the wealth he’d inherited to build the Lowell Observatory on a 7,250-foot mesa, which he named Mars Hill. He outfitted it with a state-of-the-art, 24-inch telescope that cost $20,000, the equivalent of more than $500,000 today, and used the telescope to study the Martian surface.
And just as he’d hoped, when Lowell looked through his telescope he saw plenty of lines that he believed were canals. He shared his enthusiasm for the subject in countless newspaper and magazine articles, and in three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). “These lines run for thousands of miles in an unswerving direction, as far relatively as from London to Bombay, and as far actually as from Boston to San Francisco,” he wrote in Mars and Its Canals.
In England’s Great Frost of 1709, loa
ves of bread froze so hard that they had to be cut with axes.
Lowell’s books and articles were light on substance but they captured the public’s imagination. They made him, in at least a superficial sense, the Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson of his age—someone who took the arcane subject of astronomy and made it into something that ordinary people found thrilling. His influence is still felt today. When you think of aliens, do you think of Martians more than Venusians, Uranians, and Saturnians? You have Percival Lowell to thank for it.
RED AWAKENING
Lowell’s books may have been popular with the general reader, but they gave professional astronomers fits. Many had made their own observations of Mars, and they had not seen any canals. Even Schiaparelli thought Lowell was imagining things.
Lowell’s critics were soon proven correct. In 1908 the Pic du Midi Observatory, set atop a mountain in the French Pyrenees, opened its doors. It had a better telescope than the one at the Lowell Observatory, and when Mars passed close to Earth in 1909, astronomers there took some of the highest-resolution photographs of the Red Planet that had yet been taken…and they showed no canals. There weren’t any naturally occurring channels on Mars, either, at least none that could be detected by telescopes in 1909. Lowell, Schiaparelli, and others who’d thought they’d seen lines on Mars were actually looking at optical illusions. The lines may have been caused by flaws that were common in telescopes of the day; it’s also possible that Lowell and the others were looking at the veins inside their own eyeballs.
When you think of aliens, do you think of Martians more than Venusians, Uranians, and Saturnians? You have Percival Lowell to thank for it.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Lowell had spent 15 years of his life and a good chunk of his fortune trying to prove his Martian canal theory. Being proven wrong was humiliating: “The Lowell Observatory became virtually an outcast in professional astronomical circles,” Tombaugh recalled. But by then Lowell was already working on another project to redeem himself.
For several years, when he wasn’t observing Mars, Lowell had been studying the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the two outermost planets in the solar system. Neptune had been discovered less than a hundred years earlier, when discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus suggested that another large planet farther out was pulling on it. In 1846 one group of astronomers in England and another group in France both calculated mathematically where in the solar system that planet was likely to be. Later that year, when a third group of astronomers at an observatory in Berlin used the calculations to look for the planet, they found Neptune in less than an hour.
Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. carries a good-luck charm at all times. He won’t say what it is—he believes that if he does, it will stop working.
But while Neptune explained some of the irregularity of the orbit of Uranus, it did not explain all of it, at least not according to the observations of Uranus that had been made up until then. And Neptune appeared to have some discrepancies in its orbit as well. That led many astronomers, Lowell included, to suspect that a ninth planet, even farther out than Neptune, remained to be discovered. Lowell saw in the search for “Planet X,” as he called it, a chance to restore his and his observatory’s reputation.
PASSING THE BUCK
Lowell began his search for Planet X in 1905. He was still looking in November 1916 when he suffered a stroke while working at the observatory and died at the age of 61. In his will, Lowell had set aside $1 million to keep his observatory funded after his death, but his widow, Constance Lowell, contested the will. It wasn’t until the late 1920s that the estate was finally settled and the search for Planet X could be resumed.
Then a new problem arose: Who was going to search for Planet X? The astronomers who worked at Lowell were busy with their own serious research, and didn’t want to be bothered with Percival Lowell’s silly quest. The observatory couldn’t afford to hire another professional astronomer, even if it could find one willing to risk their professional reputation by working for the Lowell Observatory.
But the terms of Lowell’s will required that the observatory continue the search. Somebody had to look for Planet X, but who?
HOW SOON CAN YOU START?
It was at about this time that Clyde Tombaugh, the 23-year-old Kansas farm boy with a high school diploma and a love of building telescopes, sent his drawings of Mars and Jupiter to Vesto Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory.
Here was the perfect candidate for the task: Tombaugh loved astronomy, and he was smart enough to build sophisticated telescopes from scratch. He was also young enough and naive enough to accept any job assigned to him, no matter how menial or tedious—and the search for Planet X promised to be very tedious—freeing the other astronomers to continue with their own work. And with no college diploma and no professional experience, he could be hired on the cheap.
Tombaugh arrived at the observatory in January 1929 and began his photographic work the following April. That consisted of using the Planet X telescope to photograph a particular area of the night sky, then photographing the identical spot several nights later. He’d develop the two images himself and view them through a device called a “blink comparator,” which allowed him to quickly flip or “blink” from the first image to the second, which is how the device got its name. When he finished photographing one area of the night sky he’d move on to another area, and so on, until he’d taken pictures of every place a planet might be hiding.
Daylight Saving Time was adopted during WWI to save fuel. After the war, it was repealed.
The blink comparator made it easier to spot celestial objects that had changed position from one night to the next against the background of stars, which were so far away that they appeared not to move at all. Closer objects, such as asteroids or comets, and undiscovered planets, would “jump” from their spot on the first image to their new position on the image taken several nights later.
If an object moved a great distance, it was moving quickly and therefore was likely an asteroid or a comet. If an object moved more slowly, it might well be the planet that Tombaugh was looking for.
NEEDLE IN A SPACE-STACK
Each section of sky that Tombaugh studied in the blink comparator contained anywhere from 150,000 to nearly a million stars. It took him as long as a week to complete the “grim task,” as he put it, of carefully studying a pair of images for several hours each day until he was satisfied that Planet X was nowhere to be seen. Only then could he move on to the next pair of images in his pile, and start the process all over again.
After ten interminable months of this mind-numbing, laborious searching, on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh was studying a pair of images of the constellation Gemini taken on January 23 and January 29, when he saw an object move from its position on the first image to the next. It was, Tombaugh observed, too slow to be an asteroid or comet.
The object also exhibited what is known as “apparent retrograde motion.” All of the planets in our system orbit the Sun from west to east, but when viewed from Earth, they occasionally appear to move from east to west. The phenomenon is similar to two cars driving down a highway side by side, with one car traveling 60 mph and the other traveling 55 mph. From the point of view of people in the faster car, the slower car appears to be moving backward.
He saw an object move from its position on the first image to the next. It was too slow to be an asteroid or comet.
In the case of astronomy, the “cars” are planets moving in circular orbits around the sun. No celestial objects besides planets demonstrate apparent retrograde motion, so Tombaugh knew that if he observed the phenomenon, he was looking at a planet. He had been careful to point his camera in directions where a planet, if it was present, would exhibit apparent retrograde motion. And just as he’d hoped, the object he was looking at appeared to move from east to west. And he could tell that the object was orbiting the sun at a distance far beyond Neptune.
NASA astronauts personally award Silver Snoop
y lapel pins to NASA employees for…
“A terrific thrill came over me,” Tombaugh remembered. “I switched the shutter back and forth, studying the images. This would be a historic discovery.” He spent about 45 minutes looking at the images over and over again, then he got up and walked down the hall to Vesto Slipher’s office and told him, “Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X.”
BY ANY OTHER NAME
The observatory photographed Planet X for three more weeks, carefully studying its orbit. All the evidence pointed to it being a planet (as the term was then understood) orbiting the Sun. Then on March 13, 1930, the 75th anniversary of Percival Lowell’s birth, the discovery of Planet X was announced. Clyde Tombaugh became a celebrity overnight, appearing in motion picture newsreels and countless newspaper and magazine articles around the world.
“Dr. Slipher, I have found your Planet X.”
The first order of business following the announcement, besides continuing to study Planet X, was to name it. Suggestions included Zeus and Lowell (suggested by Percival Lowell’s widow Constance, who had nearly bankrupted the Lowell Observatory when she contested her husband’s will). Other names considered were Splendor, PAX, Utopia, Atlas, Burdett (after Tombaugh’s hometown of Burdett, Kansas), Eagle, and Usofa (“U.S. of A.”).
Because the Lowell Observatory discovered Planet X, they were the ones that got to pick a name and submit it to the American Astronomical Society for approval. After the list of suggestions was whittled down to three, members of the observatory got to vote on the finalists: Minerva, Cronus, and a name first suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl living in Oxford, England: Pluto, after the Greek god of the underworld. Her suggestion won unanimously, and she received an award of £5, the equivalent of about $500 today.
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