Read Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Both of Gross’s wartime inventions later found peaceful uses. Just before the war ended, Ewell K. Jett, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, asked for a demonstration of the Joan-Eleanor radios. He was so impressed with the idea of portable radio communications that he created the Citizens Radio Service Frequency Band in 1946. After the war Al Gross founded a company that manufactured the first radios approved by the FCC for use on the “citizen’s band”—the first CB radios. (He was the first person to receive a CB license.)
President Herbert Hoover owned a dog named King Tut.
THE OTHER RADIO
It took a little longer for the bomb-detonator radio to find a peacetime application. That idea came to Gross after he spent time in the hospital and got tired of hearing doctors and nurses being paged over a loud intercom. He reworked his radio so that when it received a radio signal, it would make a beeping sound, alerting the wearer that he was being paged—the world’s first wireless pager.
Gross patented the pager in 1949 and the following year set up a paging system in New York City’s Jewish Hospital, certain that the medical world would be quick to embrace it. He was wrong: Doctors worried that beeping pagers would frighten patients during working hours, and disrupt golf games and other leisure activities during their off-hours. And nurses balked at having to wear the bulky receivers on their uniforms. Gross eventually put the pager aside and moved on to other projects; in the meantime, an outside company licensed the technology and used it to make the first automatic garage door openers.
AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Throughout the 1950s, Gross made repeated attempts to interest AT&T in his radios. The technology, he explained, would free telephones from having to be connected to the wall. People could make calls from anywhere in their homes or offices. But the phone company wasn’t interested in cordless phones. He explained how CBs could be integrated into the telephone system, so that people would be able to make phone calls outdoors or even from their cars. The phone company wasn’t interested in cellular phones either. Gross explained that his hospital pagers could be integrated into the system, too, so that people could reach someone even if they weren’t near a phone, just by dialing a special number for the pager. Again the phone company said no.
Spread the news: August 2 is National Mustard Day.
What could he do? In those days AT&T had a monopoly on phone lines in America, so if they weren’t interested, that was pretty much the end of the story. Gross couldn’t get other companies to bite because they were afraid that AT&T would sue to stop them from using alien equipment on its phone system. Reluctantly, Gross gave up on the phone company and focused his attention on other things.
About the only person who showed an early interest in Gross’s ideas was Chester Gould, the cartoonist who wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip. During a visit to Gross’s workshop in 1947, Gould saw a demonstration of a wireless microphone that could be worn on the wrist; the following year Dick Tracy started wearing his famous two-way wrist TV.
SIGNING OFF
If Al Gross had an unlucky number, it must have been 17, because his patents were only good for 17 years. After that, anyone could use his inventions without paying him a penny. His last radio patent expired in 1971—just in time for him to miss out on the communications revolution that his inventions made possible. The first successful consumer pager was introduced by Motorola in 1974; 20 years later, 61 million people around the world owned pagers. Their popularity only began to decline after the next invention based on Gross’s patents, the cellular phone, became affordable enough for the general public. And cordless phones now outnumber corded phones. But he didn’t make a penny off of that one, either.
After a lifetime of work, Gross had made more than enough money to retire, but he never did. He preferred to keep on tinkering, and spent his last years designing missile systems at an Arizona company called Orbital Sciences Corp. He kept on working until shortly before his death from cancer in 2000 at the age of 82, and somehow he managed not to be bitter about having missed out on the electronics boom. “I was born 35 years too soon,” he liked to joke. Indeed, the sight of so many pagers, cordless phones, and cell phones in use thrilled him. “It makes me feel good,” he said, “like I’ve had a part in the world.”
Yet he never did get a cell phone of his own. “I go to the office and my wife calls me on the phone there,” he told a reporter in 1998. “Why do I need one?”
Leonardo da Vinci invented an alarm clock that woke him by rubbing his feet.
Some more of our favorite expressions from the golden age of CB radio
.
Tin can:
a CB radio.
Kojak with a Kodak:
a State trooper with a radar gun. (Kojak was a 1970s TV detective.)
Breaker, breaker:
What you say when you need to interrupt routine conversation to say something important, like when there’s a Kojak with a Kodak up ahead.
Come on:
I’m done talking and am waiting for your reply.
Put the hammer down:
Step on the gas pedal; floor it.
Hammer lane:
fast lane or passing lane.
Sandwich lane:
middle lane.
Granny lane:
slow lane.
Dream weaver:
a sleepy driver who’s weaving in and out of their lane of traffic.
Roller skate:
a car.
Pregnant roller skate:
a Volkswagen Beetle.
Barbershop:
a low overpass.
Draggin’ wagon:
a tow truck.
Pickle park:
a highway rest stop.
Good buddy:
Used to mean “friend”; now it means “homosexual.”
Good neighbor:
What you call your good buddies now that “good buddy” means homosexual.
Got your ears on?:
Are you listening?
Seat cover:
a good-looking woman in a vehicle.
Bumper sticker:
a car that’s following
way
too close.
Hole in the wall:
a tunnel.
Bird dog:
radar detector.
Bear bait:
a reckless trucker who’s driving fast without a bird dog to spot the Kojaks with the Kodaks.
We gone:
Bye-bye!
Buzzards are legally classified as songbirds in Ohio.
Kudos to the cops who caught these clever crooks
.
B
AR CODES TO PRISON STRIPES
Twin brothers Justin and Nicholas Chitwood were arrested after a year-long investigation into their bar-code swapping scheme at Target stores all over Wisconsin. The two men would cover up the bar codes on items that cost about $150 with fake codes that put their cost at less than $10, buy them, and then sell them on eBay. They sold about $15,000 worth of items before they were caught. “The photocopying and sticking the new UPC sticker over the old ones is unique,” said Detective Barry Waddell. “I’ve never seen this before.” The two were charged with conspiracy, theft, and computer crime, and face 28 years in prison.
FOOL PIGEONS
Police in the state of West Bengal, India, uncovered a bizarre robbery scheme when truck drivers reported being robbed of their cargo…after seeing ghosts. Drivers reported that they’d seen strange lights flying around their trucks while driving on remote highways. The sight disturbed them so much that they stopped their trucks and fled. On returning, they’d find the trucks empty. An investigation took the mystery out of the story: A gang of highway bandits was creating the “ghosts” with trained pigeons. They strapped battery-operated red lamps to the birds and released them before approaching trucks. “In the darkness of the night, all the drivers see are red lights flying all around,” said a police official. “And being superstitious, most of them flee, leaving their consignments at the mercy of bandits.” Undercover officers patrolling the highways caught several of the bandits (and their pigeons).
FISH STORY
In April 2006, someone reported to Fish and Wildlife officers that they’d found something odd at Lake Barkley in Kentucky: a basket containing five live bass, tied to a dock just below the waterline. That aroused the suspicion of the officers, who knew that a fishing tournament was scheduled at the lake that weekend. So they marked the fishes’ fins and watched the site. Sure enough, on Saturday morning a boat pulled up, retrieved the stashed fish, and left. The boat belonged to two Kentuckians—Dwayne Nesmith, 43, and Brian Thomas, 31—who were registered in the tournament. The officers posed as staff and were at the weigh-in when Nesmith and Thomas dropped off the marked fish. They didn’t win anything (they were just ounces shy of earning prize money), so when the officers identified themselves the two could only be charged with misdemeanors. But an investigation revealed that Nesmith and Thomas had entered other tournaments as well—and had been uncannily lucky in them, netting thousands of dollars in prizes and even winning a $30,000 boat. The fishy fishing buddies were charged with 10 felony counts of theft and face several years in prison.
Loony law: In Wilbur, Washington, you can be fined for riding an ugly horse.
YOU ARE FEELING VERRRRY GENEROUS
Police in the Eastern European nation of Moldova reported in 2005 that they were on the lookout for a robber who hypnotized bank clerks. The hypno-thief was identified as 49-year-old Vladimir Kozak, a trained hypnotist from Russia. Police said Kozak would start a conversation with a teller, make eye contact, and put the teller into a hypnotic trance. He would then have the teller hand over all the money in the till. Kozak’s total haul: nearly $40,000 (one clerk in the city of Chisinau reportedly handed over more than $12,000). Police put wanted posters with Kozak’s face around the nation…but warned bank clerks not to make eye contact with it.
* * *
SOME REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD PUNS
• A fisherman accidentally got some vinegar in his ear, and now suffers from pickled hearing.
• The king of an African country issued a royal decree: “No one may kill any wild animals.” The decree was honored, but soon there were too many lions and tigers in the kingdom. The people revolted, and the king was removed from power. It was the first known instance of a reign being called on account of game.
How about you? 30% of Americans over the age of 55 do not have a will.
Critics agree: The 2005 sci-fi movie
A Sound of Thunder
was one of the year’s worst. Why? In addition to the laughable dialogue and cheesy special effects, there was that poofy white wig worn by British actor Ben Kingsley
.
“The usually-bald actor has been given a thick thatch so white it almost glows in the dark. Now that’s scary.”
—
Movie Mom’s Review
“Ben Kingsley sports a white wig that looks like a lump of cotton candy perched on his head.”
—
CNN
“It’s 2055. Ben Kingsley has grown a head of ‘Man from Glad’ hair and presides over Time Safari, Inc.”
—
Toronto Star
“They keep going back to the same spot and shooting the same poor dinosaur, allowing director Peter Hyams to use the same sequence over and over, thereby saving money to pay for Kingsley’s snowy-white Chia Pet head.”
—
The Arizona Republic
“Kingsley is forced to wear an outrageous wig that makes it appear he has a massive White Persian cat perched atop his head.”
—
Variety
“Someone has also apparently gone back to the 20th century to retrieve a truckload of double-breasted chalk-stripe suits and—to judge from Mr. Kingsley’s white pompadour—Jack Valenti’s hair.”
—
The New York Times
“Ben Kingsley pits his hairdo against Edward Burns’ space suit.”
—
Roger Ebert
“Perhaps the saddest thing is watching an actor of Ben Kingsley’s caliber try and say his lines without being embarrassed. This is made even harder for Kingsley with the ridiculous wig he’s forced to wear. Did these guys lose a bet or something?”
“I’m talkin’ pure white Cesar Romero Joker-style hair.”
“Ben Kingsley has scary hair. It’s tall and white and exceedingly strange, like Donald Trump’s collided with Siegfried Fischbacher.”
—
USA Today
Surely you can’t be serious: In the 19th century, Shirley was a popular name for boys.
It turns out there’s a lot more to flags than stars and stripes
.
A
NATOMY OF A FLAG
There are more than 200 countries in the world, and all of them have flags. Most national flags are rectangular; two—the Vatican and Switzerland—are square. The flag of Nepal is the only one that doesn’t have square corners: it has a “double pennant” shape that looks like one triangle on top of another.
• Modern flags are divided into four quarters, or
cantons
. These cantons are numbered clockwise from the top left, which is known as the first canton. On the American flag, the white stars against the blue background are in the first canton.
• It’s so common for special symbols to be placed in the first canton that it alone is sometimes referred to as the canton, with the rest of the flag being called the
field
or
ground
.