Read Now I Know Online

Authors: Dan Lewis

Now I Know (8 page)

In the end, some UX members were brought up on criminal charges but, as noted by the
Guardian
, were acquitted. As for the clock? It is, again, stopped. In the Panthéon, the time is, eternally, 10:51.

BONUS FACT

Marie Curie, whose groundbreaking work on radioactivity changed the history of science, is interred in the Panthéon, as noted above. She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia due to her regular exposure to radioactive isotopes. During her research career, she stored the isotopes in a desk drawer along with her papers. To this day, her papers are tainted with radioactivity and are too dangerous to read as one normally would. According to her Wikipedia entry, her documents “are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.”

DOUBLE BONUS!

In 1903, Curie—with her husband Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel—won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work with radioactivity. In 1911, Marie Curie herself won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. To date, she is the only person to win Nobels in two different scientific disciplines.

DISSOLVING MEDALS
HOW TO HIDE NOBEL PRIZES FROM NAZIS

During World War II, Adolf Hitler prohibited the export of gold from Germany. But gold, being valuable and not easily traced, is very difficult to regulate. (Indeed, that is probably where its true value comes from.) Hitler’s edict was, in almost all cases, unenforceable.

One exception? Nobel Prize medals.

Before 1980, the medals given by Sweden (all of them except the Nobel Peace Prize—that award is given by Norway) were made of 600 grams of 23-karat gold—and therefore subject to Hitler’s export ban. The recipient’s name was engraved on the back of the medal, making it clear who might be breaking the law. This proved uniquely dangerous for two physics laureates, Max von Laue (winner, 1914) and James Franck (1925), both Germans. When World War II began, the two entrusted the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark (the research institution of fellow physics laureate Neils Bohr) with the safekeeping of their medals, assuming that Nazi soldiers would have otherwise confiscated their prizes. When Nazi troops invaded Denmark, they raided the Institute. Had von Laue’s and Franck’s medals been discovered, the consequences would most likely have been dire.

Enter Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy, a future Nobel Laureate himself (in chemistry). He, Jewish, had gone to the Institute looking for—and temporarily at least, finding—safe haven from the Nazis. He and Bohr decided that more standard ways of hiding the medals (e.g. burying them) would not suffice, as the risk of harm to von Laue and Franck was too great to chance the medals’ discovery. The chemist de Hevesy took more drastic action. He created a solution of aqua regia—a concoction consisting typically of one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid—so named because it can dissolve two of the “royal” metals, gold and platinum. He placed the medals in the solution, which promptly dissolved them. He then left the gold-bearing aqua regia solution on his laboratory shelf within the Institute, hidden in plain sight as Nazi storm troopers ransacked the Institute.

The plan worked, and von Laue and Franck were safe—as were their awards. The gold remained safely on that shelf, suspended in aqua regia, for the remainder of the war, unnoticed by the German soldiers. When the war ended, de Hevesy precipitated the gold out of the solution, and the Nobel committee recast the medals.

BONUS FACT

Throughout human history (through 2009, at least), humankind has successfully mined roughly 165,000 metric tons of gold. At gold’s density, that comes out to about 300,000 cubic feet—a relatively tiny amount. For comparison’s sake, all the gold ever mined could be contained by the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, which has a volume of approximately 1.2 million cubic feet.

A CITY FIT FOR A KING
COCA-COLA’S BATTLE AGAINST RACISM

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. On October 14, 1964, he became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. His hometown of Atlanta wanted to throw him a party: an interracial banquet, with official invitations going to the city’s leaders and titans of industry. The city’s mayor, religious leaders from across faiths, a university president, and the publisher of the major area newspaper signed the invites.

Unfortunately, Atlanta was still racially segregated, and although King had many fans, he also had many enemies. Many whites were upset that King had been honored by the Nobel committee; one of the state’s senators, Herman Talmadge, expressed his dissatisfaction with the honor, wondering aloud why the committee gave a peace prize to a person who promoted law-breaking. Invitations to the highly exclusive event came back with many more declinations than expected. A
New York Times
report claimed that a well-known (but unidentified) banker in the Atlanta area took to the phones, hoping to convince other whites to abstain from attending the banquet, and certainly others preached the same message.

As the days ticked by, it looked more and more likely that the Dinkler Plaza Hotel—the site of the gala—was going to be rather empty on the evening of the event. Mayor Ivan Allen realized that such a result would be a stain on the city’s reputation, both immediately and forevermore. He also knew that it could significantly set back the clock on racial relations in Atlanta. He struggled to find a solution, but then, an unlikely hero stepped in.

Mayor Allen and J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, called a meeting of Atlanta’s business leaders, and Austin threw down the gauntlet. According to a memoir (
An Easy Burden
) by a former aide to King named Andrew Brown, Austin told those assembled that “it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”

They decided. Within two hours, all the tickets were sold, and interest in the event skyrocketed so much that Martin Luther King, Sr. (yes, the honoree’s father) had trouble getting enough tickets for his own use. The Dinkler Plaza was stuffed to the brim with more than 1,500 partygoers, and, perhaps most importantly, the police detail outside had nothing to do. The police were there to combat the hordes of protesters expected to descend upon and disrupt the party—but the threat never materialized.

BONUS FACT

MLK’s birthday became a holiday in 1986, but some states were slow to adopt it. It would not be celebrated in all fifty states until 2000, and Mississippi celebrates it in conjunction with the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, born January 19, 1807.

COLA ENFORCEMENT AGENCY
HOW COKE GETS ITS COKE

In 1886, Atlanta, Georgia, passed a short-lived law prohibiting the sale and/or manufacture of alcohol. In response, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a faux wine, mixing together fruit flavors with extracts from kola nuts (caffeine) and coca leaves (cocaine). He dispensed it via soda fountains—at the time, carbonated water was believed to have a medicinal benefit—and with that, Coca-Cola was born.

The original Coke formula had a significant amount of cocaine in it, but that was quickly stemmed and, by 1903 or thereabouts, eliminated from the recipe. This was done, in part, because the desired flavor can be extracted from the coca leaves, thereby removing the cocaine, setting the drug aside as a by-product. To this day, Coca-Cola needs coca leaves to make its drinks; as a Coke exec told
The
New York Times
, “Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.”

In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) allowing Coke to import dried coca leaves from Peru in huge quantities (and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia). The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year, stripping the active ingredient—cocaine—from them. The cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into syrup, and, ultimately, soda.

What does Stepan do with the cocaine? It goes to the Mallinckrodt Group, which creates a legal, topical anesthesia called cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is used to numb the lining of the mouth, nose, or throat and requires a DEA order form to obtain.

BONUS FACT

Legend has it that Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” It is heavily guarded. In early 2011,
This American Life
broadcast an episode discussing a potential early recipe for the drink but almost certainly not the one in use today. (Coke denied that NPR had discovered the true formula.) In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola
, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), said that “only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual, and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”

MR. ACID
HOW AMERICA GOT ITS LSD

The typical LSD “hit” has about 100 micrograms of the drug in it. At the high end, that means a gram contains about 10,000 doses. A kilogram of LSD has about 10 million hits in it. It should go without saying that a kilo of LSD is a whole lot of acid.

But not for William Leonard Pickard. At his peak, Pickard was producing a kilogram of the stuff every five weeks.

Pickard was born in California in 1945; his father was a lawyer and his mother an expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (better known as the CDC). He graduated from Purdue University and returned to California to study advanced chemistry, ending up with a high-level position at UCLA’s Drug Policy Research Program in the 1980s. How he obtained his knowledge of drugs and drug making is unclear, but we are sure of one thing: He made a whole lot of LSD.

In 1988, Pickard was making LSD at an architectural shop outside San Francisco, when a neighbor called authorities after detecting a foreign odor. The FBI raided what turned out to be Pickard’s lab, discovering 200,000 doses of acid and capturing the mastermind on the premises. Pickard was convicted of manufacturing LSD and served a five-year prison sentence.

After his release, Pickard soon returned to bad habits—and multiplied them. With an accomplice named Clyde Apperson (whose role was limited to setting up and taking down acid labs), Pickard traversed the United States, creating temporary LSD labs. He was in Oregon in early 1996, then in Colorado later in that year, and from part of 1997 through most of 1999, in Santa Fe. In his labs, Pickard cranked out absurd amounts of the drug, moving on to another location before neighbors took notice.

Pickard was apprehended in 2000 in Wamego, Kansas, after another accomplice turned informant and assisted the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in apprehending him and Apperson. The informant, Gordon Todd Skinner, advised the DEA that the pair was moving operations to a former missile silo in that town (even though Skinner had actually moved the lab already but not yet informed Pickard or Apperson). The DEA arrested the pair when they attempted to relocate it again, in the back of a Ryder rental truck a few days later.

Per the
Washington Times
, the amount of LSD available in the United States plummeted by 95 percent after Pickard’s arrest. He is serving two life sentences in Arizona.

BONUS FACT

The little circles or dots you may “see” when your eyes are closed are hallucinations called phosphenes. Typically, when your eyes are open, light hits your retinas and your eyes’ optics work to build a picture of what the eyes are focused on. But the retinas can be stimulated mechanically as well—if something pushes down on them, the pressure will be translated into nonsensical images. When you rub your closed eyes, the pressure creates the images you’re experiencing. (This is also why you sometimes see “stars” when you sneeze or get hit in the head.)

HIGH AND OUTSIDE
BASEBALL’S MOST UNLIKELY NO-HITTER

One of the rare feats a Major League Baseball pitcher can accomplish is a no-hitter—a game in which he (or a group of pitchers on his team) prevents the other team from getting even a single hit during a regulation, nine-inning game. From 1875 through 2012, there have been only 272 “no-no”s. The accomplishment takes not only exceptional physical abilities—one has to be able to command multiple pitch types, throw a ball with superhuman velocity, and have pitching mechanics that are near-perfect—but also requires a lot of luck. And given the pressure of the situation, in most cases, pitching a no-hitter also requires mental acuity.

“In most cases” because of a man named Dock Ellis.

Ellis was, as Major League pitchers go, a bit of an odd duck. He took to wearing hair curlers during pregame warmups, and, according to the Baseball Reliquary, only stopped when MLB’s commissioner demanded he do so. In 1974, while pitching against the Cincinnati Reds, he hoped to motivate his team by taking aim at the other players—literally. In the first inning alone, he beaned three players (including Pete Rose) before throwing the ball behind Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench’s head, after which he was promptly removed from the game. As a member of the Texas Rangers in 1977, he famously led a player uprising against his manager, Billy Hunter; Ellis told the AP that “[Hunter] is Hitler but he ain’t gonna make no lampshade out of me.”

A character, he was also apparently bad at managing his calendar. For Ellis, June 12, 1970, began in a way unlike many other summer mornings—he had the day off. As he’d recount a decade and a half later, his team, the Pittsburgh Pirates had just finished a two-game series in San Francisco and were en route to San Diego, and it was not Ellis’s turn to pitch. So he spent the day prior in Los Angeles with some friends, relaxing—and dropping acid. It was not until the morning of the 12th that his friend’s girlfriend told him that the Pirates had a doubleheader in San Diego that afternoon and, because of the extra game, Ellis was expected to take the mound. He hopped onto a shuttle and made it to the ballpark in time to start his game. Through the nine innings he pitched, he struck out six batters, walked eight, but gave up no hits—and won, 2–0. (Who knew LSD could be a performance-enhancing drug?)

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