Should I find myself at a fancy dinner party I cannot resist the urge to wet my finger and slide it around the rim of my wine glass. At least I would have trouble resisting the urge, if I were ever invited to such fancy dinner parties. The sound of a resonating wine glass is rather unique. If you could gather your friends around, each glass with varying amounts of liquid would produce different tones, resulting in an impromptu wine chorus. Again, I have to assume this would be a dinner party faux pas. However, at one time it was all the rage.

In 1761 the restless mind of Benjamin Franklin was attending a London concert featuring a wine glass soloist. The musician would have a large table of glasses in front of him arranged from low (empty) to high notes (nearly full of water). Franklin was an amateur musician himself (and in fact, believed full time professional musicians to be a parasite on society) so he put his engineering mind to work on solving the many practical problems of this wine glass arrangement.

First was the problem of tuning. As water evaporated, the notes from each glass would change. So he replaced the water glasses with crystal bowls. They would be permanently tuned like bells by their size and thickness. Next he collapsed the expansive table full of glass to something much more compact. All the crystal bowls were threaded on a long pole, the smaller bowls nesting inside the larger (not quite touching) to create an icicle-like arrangement.

Now the whole stack of bowls was made to rotate much like an antique foot-powered sewing machine. If a moistened finger were to rest along the edge of a bowl, the lovely tone would ease its way out with hardly any effort. It allowed for the uniquely soothing sound of the crystal glasses, with the practicality of a harpsichord keyboard. In fact, that’s what it was first called… the glassychord.

Soon after in his letters, Benjamin Franklin officially dubbed his creation the armonica, borrowing from the Italian word for harmony, and it is that name that stuck. (sometimes anglicised as “glass harmonica“)

There was nothing else that sounded like the armonica. It caught the fancy of Amadeus Mozart, who composed multiple pieces for the instrument. Alas, the only reason the armonica was largely lost to history was the matter of volume. As concert halls replaced parlours, instrument builders had to squeeze out more volume. Harpsichords became pianos, lutes turned into guitars, but the armonica could not get any louder.

According to the author of my source, there are only about a dozen armonica players in the world today. He should know. He’s one of them.

Bonus non-fact: I don’t know if it still counts as new-age hokum when we’re talking 18th century, but the sound of the glass armonica was (still is?) believed to have healing powers. One account tells how Franklin was able to cure a Polish Princess (she had “melancholia”… a.k.a. “grumpy pants”) simply by hearing him play the armonica. Of course, modern doctors would probably prescribe the banjo.

• Source: The website of William Zietler – GlassArmonica.com – to see and hear the armonica in action be sure to check out his page of videos

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Pop Rocks combine candy with explosions in your mouth. Obviously a genius idea. It first popped up in 1975 and as soon as it caught on the urban legend evolved that eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda at the same time would cause death-by-stomach-explosion.

The rumour was so widespread that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the USA (United States of America) set up a special hotline to assure concerned parents there was no danger.

The ingredients of Pop Rocks are identical to any other hard candy like lemon drops or lollipops. The magic comes with the addition of carbon dioxide. When the candy is in syrup form (heated to about 150 degrees Celsius) it is injected with pressurized carbon dioxide that bubbles through the syrup. It is then cooled so the syrup hardens trapping these bubbles, still at high pressure.

When the mixing chamber is de-pressurized, the candy shatters into small pieces and crumbs as the high-pressure bubbles try (and mostly succeed) to escape their candy confines. However, many micro-bubbles of carbon dioxide remain securely encapsulated in the candy.

These bubbles are still pressurized at 600 PSI. (pounds per square inch) For the sake of comparison, your car tire is about 32 PSI, a bike tire is 65 PSI, and the boiler of a steam locomotive is 300 PSI. The explosion is caused when you bite down on the candy and let the 600 PSI carbon dioxide escape. That’s two tiny steam engines blowing up… in your mouth!

When the process was invented and patented in 1956 the goal was to create a tablet that could instantly carbonate a drink. That didn’t work so well, but it did make for a great candy!

• Source: Pop Rocks – Wikipedia

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• The origin of the hamburger: Great sandwich or greatest sandwich ever?
• FACT: The inventor of the Graham Cracker was a health nut.
• FACT: the fork is a relative newcomer to the dining table

Speaking of hamburgers, which I was (specifically, hucking them across continents), are you aware just how close we came to going out for “tartars and fries”?

The Tartars (or Tatars) are an ethnic group found around Russia, descendants of Mongolians, who were once at the leading edge of finely chopped meat. The legacy remains in the modern day steak tartare, which is basically a mound of raw ground beef, though the fancy French restaurants make it sound more… how do you say… edible.

While the recipe of ground beef, minced onions, and seasoning stayed much the same, after making it to the port town of Hamburg, Germany they started to cook it. It was from here that the Hamburg steak, as it came to be known, spread across the world in the 1800s.

Side note: the Salisbury steak is pretty much identical to a Hamburg steak, but named after Dr. James Salisbury who promoted eating meat three times a day, and limiting vegetables, fruits and starchy foods.

A little earlier, mid 1700s, it was John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, asked for some meat tucked between two pieces of bread. He just wanted to be able to eat conveniently while working or playing cards. As such, the sandwich was born.

The two met up on American soil but the exact location is hotly contested. Grasping for any claim to fame there are three US states that have legislation to decree the birth of the hamburger, or more accurately, the Hamburg steak sandwich, happened inside their borders.

The two oldest claims date to 1885, and both share the story of a food vendor at a county fair. In one case a meatball vendor squashed his product flat and served it in bread so it became more portable. It was a hit. The other story is about running out of pork for sausage patty sandwiches on a busy day, and improvising a new recipe using ground beef. That too was a hit.

The second guy also claimed to have created the word “hamburger” not based on the Hamburg steak but rather that the fateful day occurred at the fair in Hamburg, New York. To me, that sounds a little too convenient.

The meatball guy dished up his sandwiches every year and came to be known as Hamburger Charlie. He even had a song and dance routine:

Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot; onions in the middle, pickle on top. Makes your lips go flippity flop.

Another story argues the technicality that those both put a Hamburg steak between slices of bread, but the true hamburger was born when it was first placed on a bun. If you buy that, then credit is due to Grandpa Oscar Bilby of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The way his family tells the story of his first annual July 4th BBQ you’d think the man came down from the mountain with his holy grill.

Of course, Texas has its own version of the hamburger creation story, too. It probably wasn’t the first, but it did have the biggest effect when Fletch David took his sandwich on the road. The hamburger hit the big time as a favourite dish at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. And we lived fattily ever after.

• Source:  What’s Cooking in America – History of the Hamburger

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Ch-ch-ch-chia! The Chia Pet is deeply rooted in the popular culture of North America so much that it is part of the Smithsonian Institutions permanent collection. It started as an authentic bit of Mexican culture before becoming an “As Seen on TV” sensation.

It is a small animal figurine made of terra cotta pottery. You soak some chia seeds in water, and spread them over the grooved portion of the pottery where they stick long enough to take root and grow. The first official “Chia Pet” appeared on TV in 1982. It was the ram… still a best-seller.

The chia plant (salvia hispanica… a type of sage) itself has a long history and was treasured in the ancient Aztec culture. It was given as part of an annual tribute to the Aztec rulers. To this day the chia seeds are used in Mexico as a health supplement. They may be tiny (about 2 millimeters) but they are packed with goodness. Protein, dietary fibre, strong antioxidants, and the oil is a significant source of omega-3 fatty acids. Also gluten-free.

Australia was the top producer of chia crops in 2008. The herb can grow to 1 meter in height, which if left to grow wild on one of the Chia Pet Barack Obama heads, would just look… tacky!

99% of annual Chia Pet sales occur in December, as it makes the perfect gift for that special person you don’t really like a whole lot.

Bonus Fact: Joseph Enterprises Inc., the company that brings us the Chia Pet, has also brightened our lives with that modern marvel “The Clapper” for turning lamps on and off.

• Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_hispanica

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I’d like to start off by saying that a CD (compact disc) works very much like a vinyl record, but I’m afraid it would be almost as current to say a CD works much like a telegraph machine. Still, I’ll soldier on with my record analogy, since they both store music (data) in a very similar fashion.

The music on a CD is recorded onto a path (a “groove” in vinyl-speak) that spirals around the disc for about five kilometers. Opposite to a record, the spiral starts in the center of the disc and winds it’s way out. In order to keep things moving at a steady pace, the disc spins at 500 RPM when it’s reading near the center, and slowly decreases to 200 RPM as it gets to the outer edge. The stream of data on the path remains constant.

The groove on a vinyl record is analog; a series of detailed bumps wherein the larger the bump the louder the noise. On a CD, the digital data is recorded in a binary form, meaning a series of zeros and ones, either off or on. A laser beam is focused onto the track, which reflects back from the shiny aluminum surface of the disc. Reflecting back is a one… “on”. To record data, a stronger laser has burned a little pit onto the shiny surface. When the reading laser passes that pit, it does not reflect back, indicating a zero or “off”.

So the factually correct response to “Hey what do you think of this new Vanilla Ice album?” was indeed “It’s the pits“.

If you speed the process up to 44,100 of these reflection tests per second, we can start to hear the music. The binary signal of zeros and ones is read and translated back into analog music for our speakers to rock out.

Another interesting fact for those wanting to take good care of your CDs and DVDs… the shiny side of the disc is actually better protected than the label side. There’s more plastic protecting the shinyand fragile aluminum surface. So you’re better off to set the discs shiny-side down.

• Source: http://www.copy-cd.biz/technical-area/compact-discs-explained.jsp

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Chapstick is a trade-marked brand name for lip balm, but the name has become so popular to use with any kind of lip balm that they could be in danger of losing their trade-mark. (like what happened to the Yo-Yo) The one and only Chapstick was invented in the 1870s by Dr. Charles Browne Fleet, a physician who dabbled in this sort of stuff. His original product was like a large wick-less candle wrapped in tinfoil… which wasn’t exactly a blockbuster seller. In 1912 John Morton bought the rights to the product for a whopping five dollars. His wife melted down the large pieces of the balm and formed it into smaller sticks, and its future success got underway.

Now, back to my needlessly shocking headline, how can Chapstick kill you? Strictly speaking, it can’t. Well, I suppose anything could become a choking hazard. Or if Chapstick could be fired from an air cannon at a high enough velocity… (hmm) But what I meant was some of the interesting ingredients in Chapstick. Most of it is made up of wax and oil, along with the usual suspects of any skin lotion. (vitamin E, aloe vera, etc.) One of the more interesting ingredients is Phenol… a.k.a. the Nazi Death Toxin!

Phenol is used in medicine as a germ-killing antiseptic. It even smells like “hospital”. It’s also the structural ingredient in aspirin, and had it’s debut in the manufacturing industry as a chief ingredient of Bakelite, one of the original types of plastic. Most intriguing was it’s popularity in Nazi Germany as a lethal injection. Primarily due to it’s ready availability and quick, effective results. The reason for it to be in your Chapstick is not so dastardly. It has exfoliating properties (removing dead skin) as well as some UV-protection.

Another controversial ingredient in Chapstick is oxybenzone, as found in many sunscreen products. There is some evidence to suggest that this UV absorbing compound becomes carcinogenic on the skin, which can actually cause skin cancer… which the sunscreen was trying to avoid in the first place! So you can add that to the infinite list of “_____ may cause cancer”. Yippee!

But really, the choking hazard is still the most dangerous potential of Chapstick. I’m just saying… you might not want to yawn with your eyes closed while Chapstick is nearby. Who knows what could happen?

• Source: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/ChapStick

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Penicillin remains one of the most significant medical advancements, umm, ever. Before its first use in 1940, infections from a skinned knee or a shaving cut could prove fatal. There was nothing doctors could do to fight bacteria. Until the P-bomb came along.

Alexander Fleming is credited as the one who discovered penicillin while working at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. How he got to St. Mary’s in the first place is by pure chance. His brother, already a doctor, suggested he invest his sudden inheritance in medical school. He chose to attend St. Mary’s because, earlier in his life, he had played water polo against a team from there. Later on, faced with the decision to leave St. Mary’s, he was influenced to stay by the captain of the rifle club. Fleming was a good shot, it would have been a shame to lose him.

So there he was, working in the lab studying the staphylococci bacteria. (aka: staph infection, which at the time was deadly) He was a rather messy kinda guy, and at one point came back to his lab after a long absence to find his bacteria samples ruined. There was penicillium fungus growing in his petri dishes. As he was throwing them out, he saved a couple to show a colleague, at which point he took a closer look. Where the fungi had grown, the bacteria had retreated. (cue dramatic science music)

Now, fast forward a decade through a long, slow moving process of un-exciting research. So un-exciting that the other scientists were tired of Fleming and his fungi. (apparently, he was a terribly dull lecturer who showed no passion for his work) He had managed to extract the “active ingredient” from the penicillium, which he named penicillin, but not much more. Still, had he not continued to work diligently, the medical breakthroughs would have been missed.

It was actually other researchers, first Dr. Cecil Paine, and later Dr. Howard Florey, who did the work of applying penicillin to medical testing. The first human patient, a police officer who had cut himself shaving, was a successful test… except that he died. The penicillin did stop the infection, and he did get better, but then they ran out. (they were even trying to reclaim the fungi from the man’s urine!)

Such was the problem for a few years. The medicine worked great, but they could not produce enough. Until the final random events in the story. A different sort of the penicillium fungi was found… in a grocery store… on a cantaloupe. This one produced 200 times the amount of penicillin. After some mad-science experiments with x-rays and UV light, they produced a mutation that generated 1000 times as much. That oughtta do it.

So consider that next time you’re shaving. Have you thanked a cantaloupe lately?

• Source: http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wong/BOT135/Lect21b.htm (the loooong story)

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