Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (20 page)

Pope John Paul II was an honorary Harlem Globetrotter.

UNDERDOGS

The truckers’ strike got a lot of coverage on TV news, which exposed many viewers to CB radios for the first time. People saw how truckers used the radios to exchange information about where to buy the cheapest fuel and, just as importantly, find out where state troopers were setting up speed traps. The sight of these renegade truckers banding together to fight “the Man” was a romantic image that reminded people of the Old West—only these cowboys rode trucks instead of horses, and had CBs instead of six-shooters.

• Like everyone else with a CB license, truckers were required by law to use their license number as a call sign when they went on the air. But the truckers ignored this and instead used “handles” they made up for themselves—Pigpen, Silver Fox, Maverick—so that they could warn each other about speed traps without revealing their identities to state troopers or the FCC.

• Colorful lingo made truckers and their CBs even more alluring to the general public. State troopers in many states wore flat-brimmed hats similar to the one worn by Smokey the Bear; this made them “smokeys” or “bears.” The 55 m.p.h. speed limit? The “double nickel.” Speeding tickets? “Bear bites.” Were you hauling a load of explosives from Los Angeles to Cleveland? You were a “suicide jockey” heading from “Shakey Town” to the “Mistake on the Lake.” Taking produce to New York City? You’re “hauling garbage” to “Dirty Town.” (For more CB trucker lingo, see pages 154, 289, and 484.)

COPY THAT

Inspired by the idea of using their own CB radios to avoid speed traps and fight high gas prices just like the truckers did, Americans started buying the radios in record numbers. It had taken more than a quarter century—from 1947 to 1973—for the FCC to issue its first million CB licenses. But Americans bought 2 million CBs in 1974, 5 million in 1975, 10 million in 1976, and 13 million in 1977. By January 1977, CB license applications were coming in at nearly 1 million per month—so many, in fact, that the FCC gave up licensing altogether and let anyone operate the radios, license or not. CB radio and accessory sales had grown from next to nothing to $2 billion a year in less than five years. Some experts predicted that by 1987, half of all U.S. households would own at least one CB radio.

The diameter of the universe is estimated to be 620,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

CB NATION

CBs (and truckers) made strong inroads into popular culture, too: In 1975 “Convoy,” a country song about a group of truckers who dodge state troopers as they travel across the U.S., went to #1 on both the country and pop music charts. In 1977
Smokey and the Bandit
became the second-highest-grossing movie of the year (behind
Star Wars
). Muhammad Ali had a CB in his car (his handle was “The Big Bopper”). First Lady Betty Ford had a CB in her limousine (her handle: “First Mama”). Even the Big Three automakers began offering AM/FM/CB radios as options on new cars.

How many fads turn out to be
practical
? Stranded motorists who used CBs to call for help instead of walking miles to find a pay phone wondered how they’d ever gotten along without a two-way radio in their car. In those pre-Internet days, a CB turned your car into a chat room on wheels, enabling you to talk to other drivers without revealing any more about yourself than you wanted them to know. More than one marriage was born with the click of a CB radio microphone; more than a few were probably wrecked by them, too.

SMOKEY’S GOT HIS EARS ON

Even the police came around: At first, several states tried to pressure trucking companies into pulling CBs out of their rigs. When that failed, state police agencies started installing them in squad cars to keep track of what the truckers were up to. The truckers proved to be an asset: They reported so many accidents and drunk drivers that troopers began broadcasting license numbers of wanted cars and descriptions of suspects over the CB, so that truckers could watch out for them.

Which crayon color is used most often? Black.

OFF THE AIR

So why don’t we all have CBs in our cars today?

• For one thing, the CB system wasn’t equipped to handle the millions of people who bought radios. In those days, CBs had only 23 channels (and one—channel 9—was reserved for emergency traffic). That limited the number of people who could talk at a time, especially in crowded urban areas. People spent $150 or more on a CB, only to find that they couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

• The FCC responded to the overcrowding by adding 17 new channels, bringing the number to 40, but that actually hurt sales of CB radios—consumers didn’t want the 23-channel radios any more, but they didn’t want to pay $200 to $300 for the 40-channel radios, either.

• Rising gasoline prices prompted Americans to start buying smaller cars, which had less room for bulky CBs; when people traded in their old cars, they didn’t bother to get new radios. And when the oil crisis eventually came to an end, drivers no longer needed CBs to find stations that had cheap gas.

By the late 1980s, sales of CB radios had dropped to less than 500,000 sets per year and all but a handful of CB manufacturers went out of business.

BORN AGAIN

Believe it or not, the advent of cell phones in the mid-1990s was actually good for the CB business: When people signed up for what they thought were cheap calling plans and got socked with hidden charges, CB sales started inching upward. People in areas without satellite coverage bought them, too. By 1998 sales of the “poor man’s cell phone” had climbed back up to 3 million radios a year.

If you like taking road trips to places where cell phones don’t always work, you’re in luck—modern CB radios are smaller and much more powerful than they were in the 1970s. They’re cheaper too: You can pay as little as $75 for a portable, battery-powered emergency radio, or $200 for one installed in your car. That makes them a much better value than they were during the CB craze.

So what are you waiting for? Get your ears on, put the pedal to the metal, and try to keep the bears from biting. We gone!

Hiya! Research shows that dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror.

RANDOM ORIGINS

You know what these are…but do you know where they came from?

T
RAVEL AGENCIES

In 1841 a Baptist missionary named Thomas Cook chartered a train to take 570 temperance campaigners from Leicester, England, to a rally in Loughborough, 11 miles away. In exchange for giving the business to the Midland Counties Railway, Cook received a percentage of the fares. The success of that trip inspired him to organize many more. Eventually he expanded beyond the temperance movement and began booking trips for people who wanted to travel for pleasure. Cook has been credited with inventing not only the travel agency, but modern tourism, as well. Today the company that bears his name is one of the world’s largest travel agencies.

FOUNTAIN PENS

In 1883 a New York insurance broker named Lewis Waterman handed his new fountain pen to a client who was about to sign a major contract. The pen not only didn’t write, it also dumped its contents onto the paperwork, ruining it. By the time Waterman returned from his office with another contract, the client had signed with someone else. Waterman vowed never to let that happen again—to him or anyone else. It took him a year to do it, but he invented the world’s first properly functioning fountain pen, which used capillary action to send a steady and reliable flow of ink from the reservoir to the “nib,” or point, of the pen.

WOOD-BURNING STOVES

If you wanted to heat your home in the mid-18th century, there was only one way: your fireplace. But because they were usually built into an exterior wall, fireplaces were inefficient—much of the heat was lost to the outside air. In 1742 Benjamin Franklin invented a freestanding metal stove that could be placed in the middle of the room, so
all
the heat radiated into the room. The “Franklin stove,” as it came to be known, remains one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous inventions. One problem: it didn’t work. For all his genius, Franklin apparently never realized that heat and smoke
rise
, which means you have to put the chimney outlet at the top of the stove. Franklin connected his at the base, and because of that the fire would not stay lit. His stove didn’t become practical until another inventor, David Rittenhouse, connected the chimney
above
the fire.

Technically, juice boxes are known as “aseptic packaging.”

GREYHOUND RACING

Greyhounds have been admired for their speed as far back as ancient Egypt and beyond; for centuries it was a common pastime to release a live rabbit in front of two greyhounds and bet on which dog would catch and kill it. That sport was known as “coursing.’ Modern greyhound racing didn’t come along until 1912, when a rabbit-loving New Jersey inventor named Owen Patrick Smith invented a mechanical rabbit, or lure, that the dogs could chase instead. The lure was connected to a system of pulleys so that, unlike live rabbits, it “ran” along a prescribed course instead of dashing in any direction. That made circular and oval-shaped dog tracks possible for the first time. Dog tracks were small enough that they could be located in urban areas, where the sport became very popular with working-class sports fans for whom horse racing was out of reach.

ROLLERBLADES

In-line skates weren’t so much invented as
re
invented: When a Belgian instrument maker named Jean Joseph Merlin attached five small metal wheels to a pair of his shoes in 1760 and created what are believed to be the world’s first roller skates, he arranged the wheels in a single line. It was difficult to turn or maintain balance with them, and in 1863 a New York inventor named James Plimpton invented the classic side-by-side “quad” skates. His design dominated the sport for more than a century. Then in 1979, Scott Olson, a minor-league hockey player, stumbled onto a pair of inline skates from the 1960s while looking for something that would allow him to train in the off season. Olson became a distributor of the skates, and when the manufacturer rejected his suggestions for improvements, he bought the patent rights to a similar skate. In 1982 he started selling Rollerblades (it’s a trademarked name). By 1994 the company was selling $260 million worth of skates a year.

Charles Curtis was the first (and only) Native American vice president (1929–1933).

HOW TO BUILD AN ATOM BOMB

Hey Mom, looking for a fun project for the kids?

U
P AND ATOM

The following article appeared in the April 1979 issue of
The Journal of Irreproducible Results
, a “science humor” magazine started by two scientists in 1955. (Many thanks to
Journal
editor Norman Sperling for allowing us to reprint it.) It was written by Bell Labs researcher Dean Radin—on a lunch break—and it’s based on sound science, even if it’s not exactly applicable in the real world.

How to Build an Atom Bomb

Worldwide controversy has been generated recently from several court decisions that have restricted popular magazines from printing articles that describe how to make an atomic bomb. The reason usually given by the courts is that national security would be compromised if such information were generally available. But, since it is commonly known that all the information is publicly available in most major metropolitan libraries, obviously the court’s position is covering up a more important factor, namely that such devices would prove too difficult for the average citizen to construct.

The rumors that have occurred as a result of widespread misinformation can be cleared up now, for our project this month is the construction of a thermonuclear device. We will see how easy it is to make a device of your very own in ten easy steps, to do with as you see fit, without annoying interference from the government.

The project will cost between $5,000 and $30,000, depending on how fancy you want the final product to be. Since last week’s column, “Let’s Make a Time Machine,” was received so well in the new step-by-step format, this column will follow the same format.

Construction Method

1. First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons-grade Plutonium at your local supplier. A nuclear power plant is not recommended, as large quantities of missing Plutonium tend to make plant engineers unhappy. We suggest that you contact your local terrorist organization, or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood.

Have you heard them all? Mozart produced over 600 musical works.

2.
Please remember that Plutonium, especially pure, refined Plutonium, is somewhat dangerous. Wash your hands with soap and warm water after handling the material, and don’t allow your children or pets to play in it or eat it. Any leftover Plutonium dust is excellent as an insect repellent. You may wish to keep the substance in a lead box if you can find one in your local junkyard, but an old coffee can will do nicely.

3.
Fashion a metal enclosure to house the device. Most common varieties of sheet metal can be bent to disguise this enclosure as, for example, a briefcase, a lunch pail, or a Buick. Do not use tinfoil.

4.
Arrange the Plutonium into two hemispherical shapes, separated by about 4 cm. Use rubber cement to contain any Plutonium dust.