Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (78 page)

The original inventor had managed to sell a few V-Toners, but Reynolds's advertising campaign, which marketed it as a “gym-in-a-bag,” was a dud. Even though the product was an old dog, he still thought it had potential. Looking for new investors and new ideas, he found Bieler, who agreed to give it a shot.

Bieler took home the commercials that Reynolds had already made and watched them to figure out what had gone wrong. They weren't bad, but they weren't great, either. Bieler decided to make some changes.

• Rather than pitch it as an all-in-one, gym-in-a-bag product, he decided to emphasize one particular benefit: the fact that women could use it to tone and improve the appearance of their hips and thighs. (He also thought that video footage of sexy women exercising their thighs would make for compelling television.)

• The product's new name: ThighMaster.

• Its new spokesperson: Suzanne Somers. Somers was a familar face who would get the channel-surfers to stop and pay attention. He wanted someone in her mid-forties, the same age as the customers he was targeting. Somers was famous for her role as Chrissy on the TV show
Three's Company.
She was written out of the show in 1980 over a pay dispute, and since then her TV career had been struggling. Her sitcom
She's the Sheriff
had failed miserably, and by 1986 it was questionable whether she would ever get another shot at primetime again. Still, for Bieler's purposes she was the right age, the viewers knew who she was, and she was in great shape. She was perfect, and she took the job.

Two measures are used to gauge the success of an infomercial: 1) the number of broadcasting markets in which it earns more money than it costs to put the infomercial on the air, and 2) how well it works in different time slots. “ThighMaster was a colossal hit by both definitions,” Bieler says. “It worked everywhere. All the time.” ThighMasters started out selling at a rate of 2,000 units a week, then grew to 7,500 a week. But Bieler wanted more.

Bieler knew from his research that only a fraction of viewers who see an infomercial will actually want to buy the product, and only 20% of these willing buyers will actually order the product over the phone. The rest—80%—wait until the product arrives in retail stores…and if it never arrives, they never buy.

Bieler wanted that 80%, so he took his infomercial profits and set up a nationwide sales force that would help to place the ThighMaster in stores like Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target. The job was made easier by the fact that infomercial viewers all over the country were walking into retailers asking to purchase Thigh-Masters, only to go home empty-handed…and disappointed. When the salespeople came knocking, the retailers jumped at the chance to stock ThighMasters.

Sales soared again—this time to 75,000 units per week. The product broke sales records at Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, and Woolworths, and in the process it became a cultural phenomenon: David Letterman and Jay Leno joked about it in their monologues, and it began popping up as a pop-culture reference in movies and sitcoms. Suzanne Sommers became a popular guest on talk shows again; even President George H. W. Bush joked to reporters that his chubby press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, should use the Thigh-Master.

In its first two years in business, Bieler's company sold more than $100 million worth of ThighMasters, an unprecedented success.

• So where's Bieler now? In 1993 he had a falling-out with his business partner and left Ovation forever.

• Where's Suzanne Somers now? She never did get another hit TV series, but she's done very well with infomercials for products like the Torso Track and the Facemaster.

• And where's Ovation now? It's gone. In 1995 the company, which launched one of the most successful infomercial products in history, closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy. How did
that
happen? Your guess is as good as ours…or Bieler's.

“I don't know,” he laments. “I wish I did.”

Uncle John recently learned that dominoes were invented in 12th-century China. What he found most interesting is that they were first used for fortune telling, not gaming. So he did some research and put together these basic tips for fortune telling with dominoes. (First tip: don't try this in the bathroom.)

Sort through a standard set of dominoes and remove any pieces with no dots. Then spread the rest face down on a table.

Next, draw three dominoes with your left hand and turn them face up. If two people are telling their fortunes, take turns drawing the dominoes. It's also a good idea to make a wish.

Here are what the numbers on your draw represent:

Now combine the numbers on each domino to tell your fortune. Drawing a six-one, for example, means you'll have good luck when you travel. Warning: Two specific dominoes are unlucky: four-two (expect a disappointment) and three-one (temporary bad news).

“Double” dominoes have special meanings:

Six-six:
You're getting married or (if you're already married) will have very good luck at a wedding.

Five-five:
You'll get a promotion at work or a new job.

Four-four:
Money will come to you from a surprising source.

Three-three:
You'll have a “new and important” love affair.

Two-two:
You'll make new friends and have fun with them.

One-one:
You'll visit a place you've never been before.

Ben Franklin is famous for the maxim “A penny saved is a penny earned.” But for Ben, that was a lot easier in death than it had been in life.

For all his preaching about the importance of frugality, Franklin never practiced it. As U.S. ambassador to France in the late 1700s, he was living in Paris at taxpayer expense. And that expense ran to an astonishing $12,000 per year, including a collection of more than 1,000 bottles of the finest French wines and lavish gifts of carpets, fine china, and other luxuries that he sent to friends and loved ones back home. Spending money wisely, Franklin admitted in 1782, was “a virtue I never could acquire myself.”

…at least not while he was alive.

In 1785 a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote
The Testament of Fortunate Richard,
a parody of the folksy American optimism in Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanack.
In the parody, Fortunate Richard sets aside a small amount of money in his will with instructions that it be put to good use only after it has collected interest for 500 years.

When Franklin read the story, rather than being offended, he wrote back to Mathon de la Cour
thanking
him for the idea. Sure enough, when the 83-year-old Franklin updated his will in 1789, he left £1,000 (about $4,400) to his hometown of Boston, and another £1,000 to Philadelphia, where he'd worked as a printer and made much of his fortune. (Why British pounds? They were still the most popular currency in the United States in the 1780s.)

In the will, Franklin gave these specific instructions as to how his money should be managed over the next 200 years:

• For the first 100 years, each city was supposed to lend the
money out to apprentice tradesmen “under the age of twenty-five years,” to assist them in setting up their own businesses. (Franklin had set up his own printing business with money borrowed from two benefactors, and he wanted to repay the favor by doing the same thing for other tradesmen.)

• The loans were to be repaid over 10 years with interest and the money lent right back out again.

• Franklin estimated that after a century of earning interest, the Boston and Philadelphia funds would grow to £131,000 ($576,400) each.

• For the second 100 years, Franklin's will directed each city to spend 75% of the fund (about £100,000 or $440,000) on public works, and continue to lend out the remaining 25% as before.

Franklin estimated that over the second 100 years, the £31,000 ($136,400) in each fund would grow to £4 million at which point he wanted each city to turn over 75% of the money to its respective state—Boston to Massachusetts, and Philadelphia to Pennsylvania—to spend without restriction. Each city could keep the remaining 25% also to spend without restriction.

Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at the age of 85. That would mean that the money came due in the 1990s…so what happened to it?

Both Boston and Philadelphia accepted Franklin's money, but things didn't go as Franklin had hoped. The will specified that the money had to be lent to apprenticed tradesmen. But the apprentice system faded away during the Industrial Revolution, and tradesmen increasingly went to work for large industrial companies instead of setting up their own shops.

The number of loan applicants dropped sharply, even when the program was expanded to include tradesmen who
weren't
apprentices. And the loans they did make were seldom repaid. By 1831 the Boston fund was averaging only one new loan a year.

By the end of the first 100 years, nothing had worked out according to Franklin's plan. The Boston fund was worth only
70% of what Franklin had expected, and the funds shrank even further because politicians were dipping in it to pay for “business trips.” In 1904, 75% of the fund was used to found a trade school called the Franklin Union, now known as the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. The rest was loaned out and reinvested.

Philadelphia's fund fared even worse—it was only worth $173,000, less than half the value of the Boston fund. The city spent $133,000 on a museum called the Franklin Institute and continued lending the balance out for another 100 years, just as Franklin had instructed.

A hundred years later, in 1991, the money in the Boston fund had grown to $5 million. The Philadelphia fund wasn't as lucky: its investments had only grown to $2.2 million. Since the term of Franklin's will had expired, all the money was to be divided up and spent. What happened to it?

• After a legal fight, nearly all of the Boston funds—both the state's share and the city's—were donated to the Franklin Institute of Technology.

• The state of Pennsylvania distributed its share of the money to community foundations and gave $165,000 to the Franklin Institute Museum.

• Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode proposed spending his city's share of the money on a huge party celebrating Franklin's contributions. But so many people attacked that idea as being against the spirit of Franklin's bequest that he backed off and appointed a panel of Franklin scholars to think of something better. They set up a scholarship program for graduating Philadelphia high school graduates who want to study crafts, trades, and applied sciences.

Ultimately, Franklin got a lot of bang for his buck, and 200 years after his death, he finally proved that a penny saved really
is
a penny earned.