Part 22 (1/2)
Oh, the horrors of the past. Although it's hard to fathom why people bothered to go on living, there was once a time when folks had no choice but to sit up straight in their chairs, fiddle with b.u.t.tons and zippers, climb stairs, hike to the outhouse, and add numbers with pencil and paper. Below, a paean to the inventions that made it easier to enjoy the simple pleasures of sinful idleness.
_01:: Velcro Isaac Newton beneath the apple tree. Archimedes shouting ”Eureka!” in the bathtub. And Georges de Mestral going for a walk in the woods. The greatest discoveries often stem from mundane observations, and while gravity (Newton) and measurable density (Archimedes) are cool and everything, nothing beats the sweet music of parting Velcro. Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned home after a walk in 1948 to find c.o.c.kleburs stuck to his coat. After examining one under a microscope, he noted that c.o.c.kleburs attach to clothes and fur via thin hooks. Eureka! It took Mestral eight years to develop his product. But in the end, the twin nylon strips worked precisely like a c.o.c.klebur on a coatone strip features burrlike hooks and the other thousands of small loops to which they attach, forming an unusually strong bond.
_02:: Calculator Ah, the calculatora handy device that makes 55378008 look like a naughty word when you turn it upside down. Oh, and it also makes math cla.s.s a whole lot easier. Oddly enough, it was a 19-year-old boy named Blaise Pascal (yes, that Pascal) who invented the first mechanical adding machine. But Pascal's device was c.u.mbersome and couldn't record results, so the vast majority of people continued calculating by hand until 1892, when William Seward Burroughs patented the first commercially viable adding machine. Although Burroughs died before reaping much profit from his invention, his grandson (also William Seward Burroughs) was one sure beneficiary. The younger Burroughs became famous for writing Naked Lunch, a book that would likely have been impossible if Burroughs hadn't had all that inherited calculator money to waste on heroin.
_03:: Lay-Z-Boy In 1928, when he was a mere lad of 21, Edwin Shoemaker forever blurred the distinction between sitting up and lying down by developing the world's first reclining chair. His initial model, a wood-slat chair intended for porches, was fas.h.i.+oned out of orange crates and designed to fit the contours of the back at any angle. It took an early customer, appreciative of the concept but rather unexcited about the prospect of lying down on bare slats of wood, to suggest upholstering the chair. Shoemaker and his partner (and cousin) Edward Knabusch then held a contest to name the invention. ”La-Z-Boy” beat out suggestions like ”Sit 'n Snooze” and ”The Slack Back.” The next time someone tells you an active lifestyle is the key to long life, reply with this tidbit: The man who invented the recliner lazed his way up to the ripe old age of 91.
_04:: The Toilet Contrary to popular belief, we do not have Thomas c.r.a.pper to thank for the conveniences of the flus.h.i.+ng toilet (more on him in a moment). Toilets with drainage systems date to 2500 BCE, but Sir John Harrington invented the first ”water closet” around 1596 (it was also used by his G.o.dmother, Queen Elizabeth I). However, toilets never caught on until Alexander c.u.mmings invented the ”Strap,” which featured a sliding valve between the bowl and the sewage trap. As for Mr. c.r.a.pper (18371910), he was a plumber who sold, but did not invent, a popular type of toilet, although he did hold several plumbing-related patents. Not surprisingly, c.r.a.pper has been unfairly linked to the less-than-pleasant word ”c.r.a.p.” The two, however, are unrelated. In 1846, the first time ”c.r.a.p” is recorded as having been used in English, little Tommy-poo was just nine years of age.
_05:: The Escalator In 1891, Jesse Reno patented the first moving staircase, paving the way for today's world, in which we choose not to use staircases, just StairMasters. Reno's invention was more of an inclined ramp than the escalator we know today; pa.s.sengers hooked into cleats on the belt and scooted up the ramp at a 25-degree angle. Fairly soon after, he built a spiral escalatorthe mere thought nauseates usin London, but it was never used by the public. Reno's first escalator, however, was widely used, albeit not practically. In a testament to how utterly unamusing amus.e.m.e.nt parks were in the 1890s, 75,000 people rode Reno's ”inclined elevator” during a two-week exhibition at Coney Island in 1896. Let's be clear: The escalator was not the means by which one traveled to a ride. It was the ride itself.
Say My Name, Say My Name:
4 Famous Cases of Plagiarism
No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where not only the thought but the words are copied. And we ought to know a thing or two about plagiarism, since we stole that previous sentence from the great Samuel Johnson (17091784), who himself was accused of it. But even by Johnson's strict definition, these folks are all guilty as sin.
_01:: Martin Luther King Jr.: I Heard a Dream (Which Subsequently Became My Dream) When writing about the Lord G.o.d Almighty, one is generally well advised not to break the seventh commandment, but Martin Luther King Jr. managed to turn out pretty well in spite of his tendency to borrow others' words without attribution. King received a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 on the strength of a dissertation comparing the theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman. In a 19891990 review, though, the university discovered that King had plagiarized about a third of his thesis from a previous student's dissertation. And although it was closer to liberal adaptation than outright plagiarism, King's seminal ”I Have a Dream” speech was, well, let's say ”inspired by” a speech that an African American preacher named Archibald Carey Jr. gave to the Republican National Convention in 1952.
_02:: Stendhal: The Politician's Plagiarist When asked by Oprah Winfrey about his favorite book during the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore cited Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a novel set in post-Napoleonic France. The book's protagonist, Julien Sorel, is an ambitious young womanizer who adopts the hypocrisy of his time in order to move up in the world. In his own time, Stendhal, whose real name was Henri Beyle, was most famous not for his novels, but for his books about art and travel. In one, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, Stendhal plagiarized extensively from two previous biographies. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of theft, Stendhal added forgery to the list of his literary crimes, manufacturing correspondence in the hopes of exonerating himself.
_03:: Alex Haley and the Roots of Roots Haley initially gained prominence for being the ”as told to” author behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then went on to publish the epic Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, supposedly a true story that traced Haley's ancestry back to an African man, Kunta Kinte. Haley won a Pulitzer the next year, and the book was made into a wildly popular miniseries (which, curiously enough, featured the PBS show Reading Rainbow's Le-Var Burton as Kinte). After the book's publication, though, Haley admitted that he made up large swaths of the Roots story and, in a further embarra.s.sment, was sued by author Harold Courlander for plagiarism. Haley acknowledged lifting (accidentally, he claimed) three paragraphs from Courlander's work and settled the suit out of court.
_04:: John Milton: In His Own Words Was the half-blind creator of Paradise Lost a plagiarist? Well, no. But William Lauder, an 18th-century scholar, sure wanted you to think so. Bitter about his professional failures, Lauder published several essays in 1747 claiming to ”prove” that Milton had stolen almost all of Paradise Lost from various 17th-century poets. One problem, though. Lauder had forged the poems, interpolating text from Paradise Lost into the original doc.u.ments. For a while, many (including the great Samuel Johnson) supported Lauder, but it soon became clear by studying extant copies of the old poems that Lauder, not Milton, was the cheat. And cheating, at least in this case, didn't pay: Exiled to the West Indies, Lauder died an impoverished shopkeeper.
Supine Successes:
4 Cats Who Lay Down on the Job
But Got Things Done Anyway
Parents and coaches have the annoying habit of urging people to get up and at 'em. Someone should remind them that the ”up” part isn't always necessary.
_01:: Florence Nightingale: Don't Just Do Something, Lie There As a hero of the Crimean War, nurse Florence Nightingale revolutionized the care of wounded and ill soldiers. And she's been remembered by British soldiers in the Crimea as the tireless ”Lady with the Lamp,” for patrolling field hospitals all through the night. It's no wonder, then, that Nightingale returned from the Crimea to London in 1856 with enough clout to lobby Queen Victoria for improvements in military living conditions. The next year, however, the 37-year-old health-care advocate lay down and seldom again got up. Doctors who examined her found her perfectly healthy, with no apparent physical reason for her sudden unwillingness to rise. Living as an invalid for the last 53 years of her life, Nightingale remained inert yet rarely indulged in idleness. She supervised fund-raising, advocated better training for nurses and midwives, received official visitors, took care of correspondence, and oversaw substantial projectssuch as founding a London nursing schoolall from the comfort of her couch.
_02:: Mark Twain: ”A Pretty Good Gospel”
”Whenever I've got some work to do I go to bed,” said the 69-year-old Mark Twain in 1905. In an interview with the New York Times, he explained: ”I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis. Suppose your bronchitis lasts six weeks. The first two you can't do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don't mind staying in bed.” At his mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, the writerwhose real name was Samuel Clemensran a rubber hose from the gas chandelier in his bedroom to a gas lamp on his bedside table so that he would have enough light to write by. ”Work in bed is a pretty good gospel,” he told the Times. Of course, this is also coming from the man who said, ”Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until the feeling pa.s.ses away.”
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist THOMAS MORGAN AND HIS FLY PLATE.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, the n.o.bel Prizewinning geneticist whose research with fruit flies established the role of the chromosome in inheritance, was a meticulous thinker, but he was unspeakably sloppy about everything else. So, how sloppy was he? Morgan once wore a length of string as a belt and often sported shoes and s.h.i.+rts with holes in them. In his Columbia University laboratory, which smelled of fermented bananas (food for the insects), Morgan's staff threw discarded fruit flies into a jar of oil that they called ”the morgue.” Their boss, by contrast, simply smashed his flies against the white porcelain plate he used for counting them. He would leave the acc.u.mulating mess for days, even weeks, until someoneoften the wife of one of his graduate studentsfelt compelled to wash the plate. Need more? His mail, which was usually unopened, lay in a ma.s.sive pile that cluttered his lab table workstation until somebody else threw it away.
_03:: Winston Churchill: We Will Fight Them from the Bedroom Britain's cigar-chomping prime minister during World War II conducted considerable state business from his bed. Tucked under the covers, the people's PM would dictate letters, telegrams, and speechesincluding his famous ”Battle of Britain Speech” of 1940to his secretaries until the early hours of the morning. He worked so late that secretaries were given sleeping quarters in the official residence, 10 Downing Street, so that one would always be on hand. In the morning, Churchill breakfasted and read the newspaper in bed, then would dictate again, to a secretary sitting on the end of his bed. If he had no meetings scheduled, he stayed in bed, working all the while, until noon. Then he would rise, bathe, and go to the House of Commons.
_04:: Hugh Hefner: All Play Is All Work Given the subject matter of Playboy magazine, publisher Hugh Hefner could have claimed the most enjoyable hours spent in the revolving circular bed of his mansion as work time. Nice work if you can get it. That's not what got him on this list, however. Especially in the swingin' 1960s, when his home and headquarters was the 70-room Playboy Mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast, the workaholic's office wear was always silk pajamas, and it wasn't unusual for him to sprawl across that hedonistic bed along with stacks of photos to select from or copy to be reviewed for the next issue. In 1971, Hefner ditched midwestern winters in favor of southern California, where he brought his style of relaxed labor to a Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills.
Touch of Evil Xaviera Hollander, famous prost.i.tute and author of The Happy Hooker, still makes her living in the sack, kinda. She owns a bed-and-breakfast in Amsterdam.
Hooked on Tonics:
5 Artists Who Bowed to Beer Pressure
Asked to give advice to aspiring writers, novelist William Styron once said, ”You ought not to drink; you ought to write.” The advice is a lot easier given than followed.