Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Read Free Book Online Page A

the lobby be used for this purpose.”
    —Colon restaurant
    “All vegetables in this establishment have been washed in water especially passed by the management.”
    —Sri Lanka restaurant
    “Gentlemen’s throats cut with nice sharp razors.”
    —Zanzibar barbershop
    “Very smart! Almost pansy!”
    —Budapest shop
    “Swimming is forbidden in the absence of the savior.”
    —French swimming pool
    “Dresses for street walking.”
    —Paris dress shop
    “Go away.”
    —Barcelona travel agency
     
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    Victorians believed if you put a silver coin under your pillow on Valentine’s Day eve, your true love would propose to you by the end of the year.
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MADE IN FRANCE
    This started out as a “Random Origins” page...until we noticed that everything on the page was invented by French people. Ooh La-La!
    D RY CLEANING
    In 1825, the maid of a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Jolly knocked over a camphene (distilled turpentine) lamp on a table, spilling the camphene all over the table cloth. The harder she rubbed the tablecloth to get up the camphene, the cleaner and brighter it became. Jolly, who made a living dying fabrics, added fabric cleaning to his business. By the mid-1850s there were thousands of dry cleaners (the process used no water) all over France.
    NON-STICK FRYING PANS
    Teflon or polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) was discovered by the Du Pont company in 1938. Teflon pans were invented in the mid-1950s by an engineer named Mark Gregoire, who got the idea from something his wife said to him as he was leaving to go fishing. Gregoire used PTFE to keep his fishing line from sticking, and his wife complained that there was nothing like PTFE to keep her pots and pans from sticking. He founded the Tefal company to make Teflon coated pans in 1955. Today, more than 75% of U.S. kitchens contain at least one non-stick pan.
    STETHOSCOPES
    In 1816, a French pathologist named René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec happened to walk through the courtyard of the Louvre as some kids hunched over two ends of some long pieces of wood. When the kids at one end tapped the wood with a small pin, the kids at the other end could hear it as it travelled through the wood. Laënned wondered if the same principle could be used to study diseases of the heart. That afternoon he rolled up a piece of paper into a narrow tube and placed it on the chest of a man suffering from heart disease. He called it a “stethoscope,” from stethos , the Greek word for “chest.”

FLY ME TO THE MOON
    Want to go to the moon? During the late 1960s, in one of the more unusual business promotions in airline history, Pan American World Airways began taking reservations for a commercial moon flight scheduled to depart in the year 2000. Of course, it never happened. In fact, today, there’s no moon flight...and no Pan Am. This selection is from our book Uncle John’s Indispensable Guide to the Year 2000.
    B RIGHT IDEA
    On December 21, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr., and Williams Anders—lifted off from Cape Kennedy. Their flight was covered extensively on TV, and the world was captivated by the spectacular images of space they beamed back.
    During one of Apollo 8’s transmission blackouts, two executives at Pan Am (then one of America’s premier airlines) decided on a whim to call ABC-TV. They announced that the airline was now accepting reservations for flights to the moon—which would begin by the year 2000.
    SURPRISE SUCCESS
    The next day, the New York Times reported that Pan Am had been deluged by inquiries. What began as a practical joke quickly turned into a publicity bonanza. Pan Am established the “First Moon Flights Club” and began sending out reservation confirmations.
    Unbelievably, when Pan Am began running TV and radio ads with the tag line “Who ever heard of an airline with a waiting list for the moon?”, TWA announced they would accept reservations, too.
    DETAILS, DETAILS
    In 1969, one Pan Am official