Yes, the pneumatic subway was dead and buried.
Beach allowed the subway tunnel to be used as a shooting gallery and later as a wine cellar, but he never was able to clear a profit. Giving up, Beach had the tunnel sealed and it was forgotten.
Beach died in 1896 without ever seeing a subway built in New York City.
Of course, one was eventually built. In February 1912, when the Degnon Contracting Company was constructing part of the new Broadway subway tunnel, they cut right into Beach’s old pneumatic tube. The construction workers actually knew that the subway was there, so it was no great surprise when they found it.
However, they were shocked to see how intact the entire pneumatic subway was. The tunnel and its accompanying station were in great shape. The car still sat on the tracks, although most of its wood components had rotted away. The hydraulic shield still sat there waiting to complete Beach’s dream.
Today, a discovery of this type would be preserved. Unfortunately, this did not happen in 1912. The old subway tunnel was excavated and made part of the new BMT City Hall subway station. No one knows for sure, but it is believed that the pneumatic subway station itself is still intact and buried somewhere under the city’s streets.
In 1940, a bronze plaque to commemorate Beach and his creation was erected in the subway station. Don’t try to find it today-it disappeared from the walls of the station years ago. (it probably has been replaced by graffiti.)
Beach is another one of those great thinkers whom history has forgotten. This seems to be the typical honor for those who are ahead of their time.
Interesting side note: Take a visit to any one of the thousands of Subway sandwich shops around the world and you will see images of Beach’s pneumatic subway incorporated into the wallpaper.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
uaseline
it’s yummy for your tummy!
This story is a favorite among people whom 1 have told it to.
After all, we know Vaseline is Mmm, mmm, good!
First, a bit about where this multipurpose goop comes from:
It all started way back in 1859 in Brooklyn, New York. Imagine a young chemist named Robert Chesebrough (of Chesebrough-Ponds fame) at work in his office. Young Robby was burdened by a very common problem of the time: He sold kerosene for fuel, but the great oil strikes in Pennsylvania threatened his livelihood. It was clear to him that oil was to become the fuel source of the future.
What to do? What to do?
He did the obvious thing. He hopped in his horse and buggy and made his way to Titusville, Pennsylvania, the home of the oil well. His intention was to strike it rich in the oil industry.
However, he became intrigued with a paraffin-like gooey substance that stuck to the drilling rigs. The riggers hated this stuff because it caused the drilling rigs to seize up. For all the problems this substance caused, the riggers found one small use. When they rubbed it on a cut or bruise it sped healing.
Robby bottled the stuff up and dragged it back to his Brooklyn laboratory. It didn’t take him long to extract the key pasty ingredient, the translucent material we now know as Petro leum jelly. He received his patent for the wonder jelly in 1870.
He needed a guinea pig to test it out on. Slashing his wife and kids up for the sake of science was definitely out of the question. He chose to inflict all types of cuts and burns on himself to test the stuff out. The injuries all seemed to heal quickly without any sign of infection when the goop was applied.
His next problem: what to name it?
We can imagine the names he may have tossed around”Yellow slippery stuff,” “100-million-year-old stuff from oil wells,” or “Slip ‘n Slide brand lubricant.”
They were all catchy names for our modern society, but people were dumber back then (your parents were dumber than you and they thought the same of their parents, and so on …).
He chose a great name-Vaseline.
Why Vaseline? No one really knows.
1 like to believe the story that he stored the stuff in his wife’s vases in the lab, and since all medical products back then ended in “ire” (Listerine, Murine, etc.)-he came up with Vaseline. Others claim that it is derived from the Greek words wasser (water) and elain (oil). You can choose whichever version you like better. (Or, you could make up your own. No one would be any the wiser.)
Selling it was easy for Chesebrough. He simply loaded up his horse and buggy and gave out free samples across New York State. Within six months he had twelve buggy setups distributing the stuff.
People used this goop for everything: cuts and bruises, removing stains from furniture, polishing wood surfaces, restoring leather, preventing rust, cat hairball remedy, and as a sexual aid (you can use your imagination on this one). Druggists used Vaseline as a base for their other medicines and ointments.
It is very safe to assume that Mr. Chesebrough (we can’t possibly refer to him as Robby anymore) was a very wealthy man. In 1881, the company came under the control of Standard Oil. In May 1909, at the age of seventy-two, Chesebrough was forced to give up the presidency of the company under Standard’s mandatory retirement rule.
The best use of Vaseline ever had to be by Mr. Chesebrough himself. He believed that a person should eat a spoonful every day for good health.
He lived to ninety-six years of age and never missed that delicious spoonful every morning.
Too bad he ate the goop; he probably would have lived until 106 years of age if he hadn’t gulped that stuff down!
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
(Vaseline is a registered trademark of Chesebrough-Ponds, Inc.)
hedy lainarr
not eeactly your typical nerdy inventor with a pocket protector
Hedy Lamarr is best known as the incredibly beautiful and sexy screen siren of the World War 11 era. In modern Wayne’s World speak, she was babelicious. Yet, perhaps the most fascinating part of Lamarr’s life had absolutely nothing to do with her beauty or film career. Hedy Lamarr is almost certainly the only Hollywood star who has claim to a patent on a significant technological breakthrough-one that has become the basis for modern communications.
Lamarr was frequently quoted as saying, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She may have played that role on the silver screen, but when it came to real life, Hedy proved that brainpower was everything.
Before examining her important contribution, let’s take a quick look at her background (in case your memory has failed you, or, as in my case, you are too young to have ever known):
First of all, Lamarr was only her stage name. She was actually born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, on November 9, 1913.
As a teenager, Hedy attended acting school and quickly made the transition into films. Like most movie stars, her first few films were forgettable. Yet, the one that she made at age seventeen made her an international star. A very controversial star, that is. In the Czech film Ecstasy, Lamarr acted in a steamy love scene and appeared nude in a ten-minute swimming sequence. That was definitely not the thing to do. While mild by today’s standards, her nudity was considered morally unacceptable at the time, and the film was banned in the United States for several years on charges of indecency.
In 1933, at age nineteen, her parents placed her in an arranged marriage with an Austrian armament manufacturer named Fritz Mandl. Mandl was the type of shady character who would sell arms to anyone, even if it meant selling them in violation of the Versailles Treaty.
Of course, to make these deals, Mandl had to entertain all of his prospects. This included attending hundreds of dinners with the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. And what would a business dinner be like without Mandl’s gorgeous and equally famous wife dazzling these arms developers, buyers, and manufacturers? But as we will soon learn from the outcome of this story, Hedy did not just entertain these men. She listened carefully and learned a great deal.
&nbs
p; To an outsider, Hedy had everything. She was married to one of the wealthiest men in Europe. She lived in the famous Salzburg castle where The Sound of Music was filmed. Add to that all the clothes, jewelry, servants, and cars (one 1935 Mercedes owned by Mandl sold for over $200,000 several years ago) one could ever want. It sure sounds like the ideal life to me, but it was not.
Hedy became more of a trophy than a wife to Mandl. He was a control freak and would not even let her go swimming without his supervision. After four years of marriage, Hedy could take no more. She decided to escape.
In her first attempt to flee, Mandl followed her. She was forced to sneak into a club that had peep shows upstairs. Hedy paid off the attendant to keep his mouth shut, but Mandl paid even more to get in. Hedy was forced to hide in one of the rooms. While she was in there, a male customer came in and assumed that Hedy was the lady he had hired to spend the evening with him. Without going into all of the details, Hedy was forced into the position of having sex with the man to avoid her husband (she claimed that he was banging on the door).
During her real escape, Hedy supposedly drugged (that old trick-three sleeping pills in the coffee) the maid that was assigned to her, put on a maid’s uniform, and walked out the service entrance to freedom. Hedy eventually made it to London, where she appeared on the stage.
Hedy hopped aboard the ship Normandie bound for Hollywood and stardom. She signed a contract with MGM’s Louis B. Mayer while on the boat, but he insisted on a name change to avoid the controversy from Ecstasy. At this point, MGM publicist Howard Strickling (according to a 1970 New York Times article) approached Hedy and handed her a typewritten list of last names and asked her to make a choice. You guessed it; she chose Lamarr and the rest is Hollywood history. Lamarr was immediately crowned the most beautiful woman in the world by MGM and quickly became one of Hollywood’s glamour gals.
Which leads us to the real focus of this story: her incredible invention.
First, l must introduce you to the other lead character in this story, George Antheil. Antheil was internationally famous for his mechanistic avant-garde musical style. When Antheil moved to Hollywood, he became a film composer and a syndicated columnist for Esquire magazine, to which he also contributed articles on romance and endocrinology. He even published a book on the subject-the 1937 Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology. What made him an expert on this subject one will never know. Maybe it is because, according to my hormone-laden teenage students, that if you say “pianist” very quickly, it sounds just like “penis.” Since they sound so much alike, one can only conclude that being an expert in the first makes one knowledgeable in the latter. (Well, maybe 1 am stretching it a wee bit here …)
In the summer of 1940, Lamarr sought out Antheil. They were neighbors in Hollywood and supposedly met at a party. The story goes that 1-iedy did not want to see Antheil about his music. Lamarr wanted to consult Antheil about glandsher mammary glands to be specific. Lamarr wanted to find out how she could enlarge the size of her breasts. (Doesn’t this part of the story seem kind of fishy? Only two articles actually make this claim.)
Hedy Lamarr’s and George Antheil’s patent for their Secret Communication System.
Very quickly, it became clear that Antheil didn’t have the answer (those toxic silicone implants had not been invented yet), so the topic of conversation changed to the impending war and torpedoes. Lamarr feared Hitler (remember that she actually knew the guy) and began to talk about an idea that she had for the radio control of torpedoes. At the time, radio control sounded like a great idea, but was not practical. All one had to do was jam the particular frequency that the torpedo operated on and the missile would fail to reach its target.
Lamarr was sitting at the piano with Antheil when that flash of genius struck her. Antheil was hitting keys on the piano and she would repeat the sequence. It became clear that Antheil was changing the keys that he was hitting, yet he was still able to communicate to her. What if this could be translated into radio control for a torpedo?
The next day they sat on his floor and figured the whole scheme out. Lamarr realized that the frequency needed to be randomly changed so that the enemy could not jam it. Any attempt to knock out the signal controlling the missile would only knock out a small blip of the communication stream and have virtually no effect on its overall control. Hence, the concept known as “frequency hopping” was born.
Of course, getting this grand scheme to actually work was another story. Keep in mind that this was the time of large vacuum tubes, not the miniaturized microprocessors that rule our world today.
Antheil offered the solution to the problem. He had previously composed his Ballet mechanique, which was scored for sixteen player pianos to perform at the same time. He suggested using punched piano rolls to keep the radio transmitter and torpedo receiver in synch. The transmitting signal was designed to broadcast over a band of eighty-eight possible frequencies, one for each key of the piano keyboard.
It took Lamarr and Antheil several months to work out the exact details of their invention. Then, in December of 1940, they sent a description of their idea to the National Inventor’s Council (set up by the government to get ideas from the general public). Very few of the hundreds of thousands of submissions that the council ever received actually caused any kind of excitement, but Lamarr’s and Antheil’s did. Under the direction of the council’s chairman (and inventive bigwig over at General Motors), Charles Kettering, the government helped to improve the concept. Patent 2,292,387 for the “Secret Communication System” was granted on August 11, 1942. (The patent is actually under her married name at the time-1-ledy Kiesler Markey.)
Unfortunately, other members of the council were less than enthusiastic. There’s no surprise here just think about the feasibility of placing a synchronized player piano mechanism into a torpedo and having it operate properly. The Navy declared the mechanism too cumbersome and shelved the idea. The concept of frequency hopping was too far ahead of its time. Lamarr and Antheil pursued their invention no further.
Yet, Lamarr was still able to help out in another way-by selling war bonds. As part of one promotion, anyone who purchased $25,000 worth of bonds could get a kiss from Lamarr (Would Pamela Anderson do the same today?). She was actually able to sell $7 million worth in one night.
Not all great ideas are forgotten, however. In 1957, engineers at the Sylvania Electronics Systems Division, located in Buffalo, New York, used transistor electronics to accomplish the goal that Lamarr and Antheil had set out to achieve years before. Finally, in 1962 (three years after the Lamarr/Antheil patent expired), the concept of frequency hopping was used by the United States government in the communication systems placed aboard ships sent out to blockade Cuba.
Today, the concept is not only used by the military (it is used in the Milstar defense communications satellite system), but it has also become the technology behind the latest in wireless Internet transmission and the newest cellular phones. A quick search of the United States Patent Office shows 1,203 patents dealing with frequency shifting (now called “spread spectrum”) between 1995 and 1997. How much influence the Lamarr-Antheil patent has had, if any, on this technology will probably never be known.
Lamarr never earned a penny from this invention from which so many others have profited. Instead, she slowly faded from public view. She was married and divorced six times between 1933 and 1965 to Fritz Mandl, Gene Markey, Sir John Loder, Ted Stauffer, W. Howard Lee (who later married actress Gene Tierney), and Lewis J. Boles. In 1966, Lamarr made international headlines when she was arrested for shoplifting in a May department store in Los Angeles, but was acquitted by a 10-2 jury vote. The bad publicity from this incident coupled with her controversial auto biography, Ecstasy and Me (which she later claimed was ghostwritten), brought an end to her movie career.
On March 12, 1997, Hedy Lamarr was finally honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for her great contribution to society. Her son Anthony Loder
accepted the award for his mother and played an audiotape for the audience-the first time she had publicly spoken in over two decades.
Sadly, Hedy Lamarr passed away on January 19, 2000, at her Altamonte Springs home in Florida. The bulk of her nearly $3 million estate was willed to her two children, but a portion was left to her former personal secretary and to a friend. Most surprisingly, however, was that she bequeathed $83,000 to a local police officer who had befriended her in the last years of her life. Lamarr asked that her ashes be scattered over the Vienna Woods, near where she was born in Austria.
In one of those weird twists of fate, that same son Anthony today owns a Los Angeles phone store in which half of the phone systems that he sells are based on his mom’s pioneering technology.
Useful? Useless? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
the 2i��oer
hey! your fly is open!
Several years ago 1 posted a short story on the Internet detailing the invention of that thing that holds your fly closed: the zipper. The large volume of e-mail that this story has generated over the years shocked me. Even more surprising was that the bulk of these messages were from students who were writing term papers on the zipper.
1 can’t help but wonder why students would choose the zipper as their topic. I like to imagine that it goes something like this:
A teacher assigns the student a research paper on any topic of his or her choice. The student is clueless. (We’ve all been in this boat before.) The student looks down and sees the zipper sitting in his lap below.
Eureka! (A light bulb goes off in the student’s head.) The student mumbles something like, “I’ll do my report on the zipper!”
That sounds great, but the student has one big problem: Where does one find information on the history of the zipper? To no one’s surprise, there is not a whole lot of information out there on this topic. Students almost invariably end up reading my story. (If they are typical, they probably just cut and paste my story into their word processor and put their name at the top.)
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 7
