Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (20 page)

Original Ending:
The original finale had Mia (Anne Hathaway) simply agreeing to fly off to the fabled European kingdom of Genovia to become a princess.

But Wait:
Director Garry Marshall's five-year-old granddaughter felt shortchanged; she wanted to see the castle. Marshall acquiesced and had Disney buy stock footage of a European castle and digitally add the flag of Genovia to it. “It cost us a penny or two,” explained Marshall, “but it made my granddaughter happy.”

There have always been women inventors…even if they've been overlooked by the history books. Here are a few you may not have heard of.

Invention:
Windshield wipers

Background:
In 1903 Anderson, an Alabaman, took a trip to New York City. One snowy afternoon she decided to tour the city by streetcar, but instead of sightseeing found herself staring at the streetcar conductor, who had to keep stopping to wipe the snow off his windshield.

On the spot, Anderson made a drawing in her sketchbook of a device consisting of a lever that “activated a swinging arm that mechanically swept off the ice and snow” from the windshield. She got her patent the following year; ten years later windshield wipers were standard equipment on automobiles.

Invention:
Sojourner Mars Rover

Background:
In 1991 Shirley, an aerospace engineer, was appointed manager of NASA's Mars Explorer Program. Her team was charged with developing the rover vehicle that would go to Mars aboard the unmanned Pathfinder spacecraft. The rover was to be about the size of a pickup truck, with rockets to blast it off the surface of Mars and back to the Pathfinder for its return to Earth. They'd already built a one-eighth-scale prototype; now they were using it to design the full-scale rover.

There was just one problem: sending a truck-sized rover to Mars and then returning it to Earth was too expensive. The craft only had a budget of $25 million. That may seem like a lot but, says Shirley, “for a planetary spacecraft it's incredibly cheap; $25 million would pay for a few commercials for the Super Bowl.”

That's when Shirley got the idea that saved the mission. “While her male colleagues were ready to scrap the whole project,
Shirley suggested that perhaps size was not that important,” Ethlie Vare writes in
Patently Female.
“Could not the prototype of the rover become the vehicle itself?”

It could and it did: On July 4, 1997, the Sojourner Rover landed on Mars and began exploring the surface. It's going to be there a while, too—the rockets that were supposed to send it home got cut from the budget.

Invention:
Potato chip bag

Background:
Before a Southern California businesswoman named Laura Scudder came along in the mid-1920s, potato chips were sold in bulk in large barrels. When you bought chips at the store, the grocer scooped them out of the barrel and into an ordinary paper bag. If you got your chips from the bottom of the barrel, they were usually broken and stale.

It was Laura Scudder who hit on the idea of taking wax paper and ironing it on three sides to make a bag, then filling it with potato chips and ironing the fourth side to make an airtight pouch that would keep the chips fresh until they were eaten. Scudder's self-serve, stay-fresh bags were instrumental in turning potato chips from an occasional treat into a snack food staple.

Invention:
Signal flare

Background:
Martha Hunt was only 14 when she eloped with a Philadelphia engineer named Benjamin Coston…and only 21 when he died bankrupt in 1848, leaving her destitute with four small children. Not long after his death she found something interesting among his possessions: a prototype for a signal flare. She hoped that if it worked, she could patent it and use it to restore her family's fortunes.

But it didn't—so Martha started over from scratch, and spent nearly 10 years perfecting a system of red, white, and green “Pyrotechnic Night Signals” that would enable naval ships to communicate by color codes over great distances at night. (Remember, this was before the invention of two-way radio.) The U.S. Navy bought hundreds of sets of flares and used them extensively during the Civil War. They are credited with helping maintain
the Union blockade of Confederate ports, and also with saving the lives of countless shipwreck victims after the war.

Invention:
Scünci

Background:
In 1987 Revson was divorced from Revlon cosmetics heir John Revson, and the divorce settlement was so bad that she had to find a job to support herself. Appearances count, so she had her hair bleached before she started applying for jobs. Big mistake—the chemicals damaged her hair to the point that “it was coming off in handfuls,” Revson remembers. She decided the only thing to do was pull her hair back into a ponytail, but it was so brittle that she couldn't use rubber bands. She came up with something better: an elastic band covered with soft fabric.

So did Revson ever get around to applying for a job? Who knows—she decided to patent her ponytail holder instead, naming it the Scünci after her Lhasa Apso puppy. Today they're better known as “scrunchies,” and at last count Revson has sold more than two billion of them.

Defendant:
John Cracken, a Texas personal injury lawyer

The Crime:
Flaunting his wealth in public

Background:
In 1991 Cracken represented a disabled widow in a lawsuit against her husband's employer, the Rock-Tenn Company. Rock-Tenn was a recycling company, and the man was killed in a bailing machine. Cracken sued for $25 million, but Rock-Tenn's case was so weak that there was talk that the jury might award as much as $60 million. Shortly before deliberations were to begin, however, some of the jurors happened to spot Cracken in the courthouse parking garage, driving a brand-new red Porsche 911.

The Sentence:
The jury awarded Cracken's client only $5 million. Why so little? One juror explained, “There was no way I'm going to buy that lawyer another fancy car.”

Sports are part of the fabric of our culture. They're part of our language, too. Here are the origins of a few common sports terms.

Meaning:
In basketball, a high pass caught in midair by a teammate who tries to stuff the ball in the basket before landing
Origin:
“Probably coined by American soldiers during World War I. It's from the French
allez
(go) plus
oop,
a French pronunciation of the English
up
. During the 1920's,
allez-oop
became
alley-oop
, commonly said upon lifting something. In the late 1950s, San Francisco 49er quarterback Y. A. Tittle invented a lob pass called the alley-oop that was thrown over the heads of defenders to his very tall receiver, R. C. Owens. By the 1970s, it had been adapted to describe the schoolyard basketball play it is today.” (From
Grand Slam, Hat Tricks & Alley-oops
, by Robert Hendrickson)

Meaning:
In golf, one stroke over par

Origin:
“
Bogey
, ‘an imaginary thing that causes fear,' gives us the
bogeyman
, who scares children, and a popular 1890 song called ‘Colonel Bogey.' In England, when you were doing exceptionally well it was said that Colonel Bogey was playing with you. When someone did well on a particular hole, they thought the Colonel was lending a hand; a player doing poorly was said to be losing to Bogey. As golf became organized, par became the standard score and a bogey became one more than the duffer's aim.” (From
Where in the Word?
, by David Muschell)

Meaning:
A very stupid play

Origin:
“The original bonehead play was made in 1908 by Fred Merkle, the New York Giants first baseman. It was the bottom of the ninth innning. There were two outs. Moose McCormick was on third and Merkle was on first. The next man up singled to center, and McCormick scored the winning run. But Merkle ran into the
dugout—he never touched second base. Johnny Evers of the Cubs got the ball and stepped on second, forcing Merkle out. The winning run was nullified and the Giants lost. The Cubs and Giants finished the season tied for first place, and the Cubs won the pennant in a play-off game. A sportswriter's reference to Merkle's blunder as a ‘bonehead play' introduced the phrase into the lexicon.” (From
Grand Slam, Hat Tricks & Alley-oops
, by Robert Hendrickson)

Meaning:
The scoring of three consecutive goals in a game—usually hockey or soccer—by the same player

Origin:
“This American phrase comes from the 19th-century tradition of awarding a new hat (or the proceeds of passing a hat) to British cricket bowlers when they bowled down three wickets with three successful balls. Although it's now mainly associated with hockey,
hat trick
has also been used for a jockey who wins three consecutive races, or a soccer player who scores three goals in one game.” (From
Southpaws & Sunday Punches
, by Christine Ammer)

Meaning:
In tennis, a bat with an oval frame, strung with nylon

Origin:
“Tennis balls were originally hit with the palm of the hand, called
raquette
, probably from the Arabic
rahat
meaning the same. As tennis evolved, gloves were used, then boards, then paddles, and finally the long-handled racket used today. All were called by the name
raquette
, which became the English word
racket
. The French still call tennis
le jeu de paume
(the palm game).” (From
Word Mysteries & Histories
, by the American Heritage Dictionary)

Meaning:
The small peg with a concave head that is placed in the ground to support a golf ball before it is struck

Origin:
“The first tees were just small handfuls of sand or dirt off which golf balls were hit. The Scottish word was first recorded in 1673 as
teaz
, but people thought this was the plural of
tee
and over the years,
tee
became the singular form. The little wooden pegs we call tees today were invented in the 1920s by William Lowell, a dentist from New Jersey.” (From
Word and Phrase Origins
, by Robert Hendrickson)

Some random bits from the BRI files.

5 Most Germ-ridden Places at Work

1.
Phone

2.
Desktop

3.
Water fountain handle

4.
Microwave door handle

5.
Keyboard

5 Movies That Feature a One-Armed Man

1.
Bad Day at Black Rock
(1955)

2.
The One-Armed Swordsman
(1967)

3.
The Fugitive
(1993)

4.
The Blade
(1995)

5.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
(1992)