Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (33 page)

True or false: Ever since some caveman got the bright idea of making
tools, it's been a steady advance of ideas and innovation, from the
wheel to the automobile and beyond. False. History is much
messier than that. Many inventions have been made, lost,
and reinvented later. Here are a few examples
.

The National Museum of Iraq has a collection of clay jars made by the Parthians, who once ruled the Middle East. One jar, however, dating from about 200 B.C., is not your ordinary container.

It's just over five inches high by three inches across. The opening was once sealed with asphalt, with a narrow iron rod sticking through it. Inside the jar was a copper sheet rolled into a tube and closed at the bottom with a copper disc. The iron rod hung down in the center of the tube.

The odd jar didn't attract much attention until around 1960, when researchers discovered that if the jar was filled with an acidic liquid (vinegar or fermented grape juice), it generated a small current, between 1.5 and 2 volts. Their conclusion: the jar was an electric battery. In the acidic liquid, electrons flowed from the copper tube to the iron rod—much like the batteries invented by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta around 1800.

But what would anyone in ancient Baghdad use a battery for? The most likely explanation is that they linked a series of batteries that were used to electroplate gold onto silver. Electroplating is a way of covering the surface of one metal with another metal, creating the false appeareance of a solid gold object. It involves passing an electric current through a solution, forcing positively charged metal particles onto a negatively charged surface. Experiments have shown that electroplating can indeed be done with modern batteries just like that ancient jar.

In 1900 sponge divers found the wreck of an ancient ship 140 feet under water, near the Greek island of Antikythera. Many of the
items retrieved from it were taken to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, among them lumps of corroded bronze that looked like parts of a statue. But an archaeologist noticed some words inscribed on the metal and then found gears—and then realized it wasn't a statue, it was a machine.

Originally held together by a wooden box that fell apart when taken out of the water, the mechanism had dials on the outside and a complicated arrangement of wheels and differential gears inside. The inscription dated it between 100 B.C. and 30 A.D. and indicated that the contraption had something to do with astronomy.

A 1959
Scientific American
article compared the object to “a well-made 18th-century clock.” The “Antikythera mechanism,” it said, was a model of the solar system which, like a modern computer, “used mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.” Turned by hand, or perhaps by water power, the machine would calculate and display the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars.

The find meant that historians had to rethink their whole concept of the ancient Greek world—and their concept of when computing machines were first invented.

Domemico Salsano, an Italian clockmaker, is usually credited with inventing the seismograph in 1783. His “geo-sismometro” used an inked brush attached to a pendulum. The brush recorded earth-shaking vibrations on an ivory slab. It was sensitive enough to register quakes from 200 miles away.

But 1,500 years before that, a Chinese philosopher named Chang Hêng had already invented a device for detecting distant earthquakes. It was shaped like a big wine jar, about six feet across. On the outside were eight dragon heads with an open-mouthed toad beneath each one. Each dragon held a ball in its mouth. When a distant earthquake occurred, the dragon pointing in the direction of the quake dropped the ball into the mouth of the toad.

Nobody is sure exactly what mechanism was inside the jar, but modern seismologists assume that a pendulum was connected to the dragons. And, according to ancient records, the dragon jar worked.

We're always interested in how astronauts “take care of business” in
the weightlessness of space. Now that the International Space Station
is up and running, we figured that it's time to revisit the subject
.

As we told you on page 25, millionaire American businessman Dennis Tito made history in April 2001 when he bought his way onto the International Space Station, also known as Space Station Alpha, by paying the Russian Space Agency a cool $20 million for the privilege of becoming the world's first space tourist.

Since then, NASA has agreed to allow more such trips. So in case you're planning to take a Space Station vacation, you might like to know what to expect if you get up there and have to… use the facilities.

The toilet on Space Station Alpha has a toilet seat and a bowl, but that's where any similarity to Earth toilets ends. Since there's no gravity in the space station, they can't use water to flush the toilet—there's no way to keep it in the bowl. The toilet flushes with “air currents.” What does that mean? That's NASA's polite way of saying that you're pooping into a toilet bowl hooked up to a vacuum cleaner.

As for peeing, there's a special vacuum hose in the bathroom designed for that purpose. Everyone has to use the same hose, but each astronaut is issued their own custom-fitted “personal urine funnel” (yes, the male funnels are shaped differently from the female funnels). These special attachments help to prevent leakage into the Space Station's atmosphere and also helps to minimize the “yuck” factor associated with everyone having to pee into the same hose.

What happens next? Unlike the Space Shuttle, where the urine is collected into a storage tank and periodically vented into outer space, Space Station Alpha doesn't have that luxury. The Space Shuttle makes short trips and returns to Earth on a regular basis, so
its water tanks are refilled before each new mission. But Space Station Alpha (hopefully) is never coming back down, and the astronauts who live and work there will be in space for weeks or even months on end. Sending up fresh supplies of water every couple of months would cost a fortune, so NASA developed a different strategy: the station is designed to recycle every single drop of water possible, including sweat, including the moisture the astronauts exhale when they breathe,
and
their urine.

The Space Station toilet pumps the astro-urine into a machine called a Urine Processor, or UP (pronounced “you pee”) for short. It works kind of like the spin cycle on a washing machine: the urine enters a cylindrical drum that rotates more than 300 times a minute; this causes the liquid to spread out in a thin layer across the surface of the drum. Most of the air has already been sucked out of the drum, creating a low-pressure environment that allows the water in the urine to boil off into steam at close to room temperature. The steam is then condensed back into liquid form. Everything else in the pee—minerals and salts—is collected in a filter, and the filters are changed at least once a month.

After the UP is finished, the “water” is pumped into a “Potable Water Processor,” where it is mixed with all the other reclaimed water in the Space Station: shower water, water used when the astronauts wash their hands or brush their teeth, and moisture that's removed from the air by dehumidifiers. This waste water is pumped through a filter that removes any particles or debris. Then it's pumped through several other filters to remove any chemicals, and finally it's oxidized, or treated with oxygen, to remove any remaining chemicals and kill off any living organisms.

End result: Purified, drinkable water that is actually much cleaner than the water that comes out of your faucet at home. Really. It has almost no taste, because the water doesn't contain any dissolved minerals like tap water does on Earth. There's no smell, either. “That's easy to get rid of,” says Alan Mortimer, head of Space Life Sciences at the Canadian Space Agency. “The things that smell are easy to take out.”

In all, the system is able to recycle about 95% of the space station's water. But what about the “solids”? The poop that's collected in Space Bathroom Alpha can't be recycled. Instead, it will be stored in sealed “toilet canisters” until one of the unmanned Russian
Progress
supply ships docks at the Space Station. After the fresh supplies are unloaded, the
Progress
is filled with the poop cans (and other garbage) and then jettisoned away from the station. Gravity pulls it back into the Earth's atmosphere, where it burns up on reentry.

These flaming fireballs of space poop are a huge improvement over the original Space Shuttle toilets. Those toilets had a 14-day holding capacity and could not be emptied during a mission. As soon as they filled up, the astronauts had to either return to Earth…or improvise. And even back on Earth, the toilets were not easily emptied. They had to be removed from the shuttle and flown to Houston to be cleaned by highly trained technicians.

The International Space Station also has a shower, something the shuttle astronauts had to do without. (They had to make do with sponge baths and shampoo, originally designed for hospital patients, that didn't need to be rinsed out.)

Taking a shower in space is similar to taking one on Earth, except that in the absence of gravity, the water doesn't fall to the floor. It just floats around inside the shower stall, which is sealed to prevent the water from escaping into the rest of the Space Station. One advantage: Since the water floats around instead of going down the drain, you don't need as much to take your shower as you would on Earth. You only use about a gallon of water, and instead of moving in and out from under the shower-head, you just grab the floating globs of water and rub them on yourself. When you're finished, there's a vacuum hose attached to one wall that you use to suck up all the drops before leaving the shower.

According to surveys, 57% of Americans shower daily, 17% sing in the shower, 4% shower with the lights off, and 3% clean their pets by showering with them.

We were going to do a page of “bests”
—
but worsts are funnier. So put on a happy face and read about the worst
…

…TRAFFIC CONGESTION
A 2002 study found that traffic moved through central London at an average speed of 2.9 mph—slower than walking.

…VIEW
The Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Canada, are blanketed by heavy fog for an average of one out of every three days—often for weeks at a time.

…CROSSWORD PUZZLE ANSWER
In 1971, the London Times included this word in one of its daily puzzles:
honorificabilitudinitatibus
.

…REJECTION
When King Harald Grenske of Norway proposed marriage to Queen Sigrid Storrada of Denmark in 996, she had him executed.

…MOVIE
According to a nationwide poll conducted by the Hastings Bad Cinema Society, the worst movie of the 20th century was John Travolta's Battlefield Earth.

…VOTING “ERROR”
In the 1928 Nigerian presidential election, Charles King beat Thomas Faulkner by 600,000 votes. One problem: Nigeria only had 15,000 registered voters.

…CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
Workers spent 90 years building the Church of Corcuetos in Spain. The day after it was finally completed in 1625, it collapsed.

…TOURISTS
According to a survey by the online travel service
expedia.com
, “Britons are the rudest, meanest, and worst-behaved holidaymakers in the world.”

…HANDS IN FOOTBALL
Quarterback Warren Moon fumbled the ball 161 times during his 17-year career.

…CAR
Click and Clack, the Car
Talk
guys, polled listeners to find the lousiest make of car ever produced. The winner…er, we mean, loser: the Yugo.