Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® by Michael Brunsfeld Read Free Book Online Page A

Norwegian man was convicted of drunken driving—on a lawnmower—near the town of Haugesund. According to newspaper reports, police did not notice anything erratic about the man’s driving, they just administered an alcohol test as part of a random spot-check of “motorists.” The test revealed that the man had consumed the equivalent of three beers, well over the legal limit in Norway. He was convicted of driving under the influence, fined $795, and sentenced to 24 days in jail. But a court later suspended the sentence after concluding that “the lawnmower’s top speed of 6 mph was too slow to be dangerous.”
    • On a Saturday morning in July 1996, Rickey Worthley of Belton, Missouri, woke up his 17-year-old son Michael at 6 a.m. and told him to mow the lawn. When Michael told his father that 6 a.m. was too early to mow the lawn and that he wanted to sleep a few hours longer, Worthley dragged the mower into Michael’s room, fired it up, and started mowing the carpet. Michael called the cops on pop; they arrested Worthley and charged him with assault. Injured party: the carpet.
    Armadillos can walk underwater in order to cross rivers.

FIRSTS
    Ever wonder where the first movie theater opened? Or when the lawn mower was invented? Here are the stories of when and how several things we take for granted came were created, from
The Book of Firsts,
by Patrick Robertson.
T HE FIRST MOVIE THEATER
    Date: June 26, 1896
    Background: The first permanent movie theater was the 400-seat Vitascope Hall in New Orleans. Admission was 10 cents. Patrons were allowed to look in the projection room and see the Edison Vitascope projector for another 10 cents. Most of the films shown there were short scenic items, including the first English film to be released in America, Robert Paul’s
Waves Off Dover. A
major attraction was the film
The Kiss,
which introduced sex to the American screen.
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE WITH ELECTRIC LIGHTS
    Date: December 1882
    Background: The first electrically illuminated Christmas tree was installed in the New York City home of Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps were manufactured in nine-socket sets by the Edison General Electric Co. in 1901. Each socket took a miniature 2-candlepower carbon-filament lamp operating on 32 volts.
THE FIRST DEPARTMENT STORE
    Date: 1848
    Background: Alexander Turney Stewart opened the Marble Dry Goods Palace on Broadway in New York City. Stewart had been a schoolmaster in Ireland before he emigrated in 1823 and set up his own business. At the time of its erection the Marble Dry Goods Palace was the largest shop in the world, extending the whole length of a city block. By 1876, the year of his death, Stewart’s company had annual sales of $70 million, and his personal fortune was estimated at $80 million. He was never known to have given away any of his vast wealth.
    In 1960 Joyce Haber, Hollywood gossip columnist, coined the phrase “A-list party.”

CAMERA OBSCURA
    Uncle John has an interesting chicken-and-egg question for you: What came first, the camera or the film? If you think they were invented at about the same time, this story will surprise you.
P ICTURE THIS
    The ancient principle of the camera is child’s play. Hard to believe? Here’s a simple experiment you can try at home: Cover the windows of a room with black construction paper or aluminum foil until absolutely no light is let in. Turn out the lights. Then poke a tiny hole in the paper or foil, so that a single pinprick of light enters the room and strikes the wall opposite the windows. What do you see?
    If you do it just right, when the light enters the “dark room”
(camera obscura
in Latin) and hits the wall, it will form a faint upside-down image of the view outside the window. This simple phenomenon is the basis upon which the science of photography is built.
    One of the first people to make note of such an image was a Chinese scholar