Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader Read Online Free PDF Page A

Roman historian Pliny the Elder, Cleopatra once bet her lover Marc Antony that she could spend the equivalent of over $3 million in “one evening’s entertainment.” He didn’t believe it.
    The Winner: Cleopatra. Here’s how she supposedly did it:
    There were dancers garbed in specially-made costumes of gold and rare feathers; there were jugglers and performing elephants; there were a thousand maid-servants attending to the couple’s every need; and there was a seemingly endless banquet of indescribable splendor. At the end of the evening, Cleopatra proposed to toast her lover with a vessel of vinegar. But first she dropped her exquisite pearl earrings, each worth a small kingdom, into the cup and watched them dissolve. Then she raised the sour cocktail of untold value to her lips and drank it down.
    Truth or Legend? It’s possible, but not likely. Pearls are “largely carbonate, and will dissolve in a mild acidic solution such as vinegar.” But it would take at least a few hours, and the vinegar would have to be so strong you could hardly drink it. However, if Cleo crushed the pearls first, they would have dissolved immediately.
    THE SECRET WORD IS...
    The Wager: In 1780, James Daly, manager of a theater in Dublin, Ireland, bet that he could coin a word that would become the talk of the town overnight—even though it had no meaning. Daly’s boast seemed so preposterous that everyone within earshot took him up on it.
    Daly immediately paid an army of children to run around town and write a single word in chalk on walls, streets, billboards, etc.
     
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    The wild turkey is the only bird with a beard.
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    The Winner: Daly. The next morning, Dubliners were asking what this strange word meant...and why it was written everywhere they looked. People speculated that it was “indecent,” but no one knewfor sure. The word was quiz. According to the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins:
    At first it became synonymous with ‘practical joke’—for that was what Daly had played on the citizenry. Gradually it came to mean making fun of a person by verbal bantering. In time, it came to mean what ‘quiz’ means today—a question asked of a person in order to learn the extent of his knowledge.
    Truth or Legend? No one knows. The tale has never been authenticated, and as far as most lexicographers are concerned, the definitive origin of the word quiz is still unknown.
    THE FIRST MOVIE?
    The Wager: In 1872, Leland Stanford, former governor of California, railroad tycoon, and dabbler in horses, bet newspaperman Frederick MacCrellish’that for a fraction of a second, a trotter has all four feet off the ground simultaneously. The bet was for anywhere from nothing to $50,000 (depending on who tells the story). To settle the question, Stanford hired English photographer Eadward J. Muy-bridge to photograph one of his prime racers, Occidental, in motion. There was one problem: photographic technology in 1872 was still too primitive to capture the desired image. The bet was left unsettled and all parties moved on.
    The Winner: Stanford. Five years later, Stanford was still burning to know whether he was right. This time, using the latest technology, Muybridge was able to take a picture that showed all four of Occidental’s feet off the ground at once. Fascinated with the results of the new photographic technology, Stanford told Muybridge to spare no expense and buy state-of-the-art photographic equipment for another test. In 1878, with the new equipment in hand, Muybridge set up a battery of 24 cameras alongside Stanford’s private track, and by precisely timing the exposures, successfully captured every position in a horse’s stride. This approach to rapid-motion photography paved the way for development of the movie camera.
    Truth or Legend? The story about the photo is true, but it probably didn’t happen as part of a bet for two reasons. Stanford wasn’t a betting man, and, in 1872, MacCrellish was using the