Made in America
I finished Bill Bryson's Made in America a couple weeks ago, and it's been sitting on my desk ever since. It's one of those books full of interesting facts, and normally I'd leave the pages dog-eared so I could find my favorite parts again, but this one came from BookCrossing, which means I'll be passing it along again. So I'm going to transcribe some of my favorite facts here. It's reallllly long and just for my own future reference, but go ahead and read if you'd like. (Carol, did you still want to read this before I send it on? If so, I guess these could be considered spoilers! Don't read! Or else, do read this Cliffs Notes version and then don't bother reading the book.)
No, there are no facts about sharks in here. That's another family joke.
Also, note that this is the British edition, which explains certain things like near the end where he refers to "sixth-form students." I didn't bother changing British usages or things like "maths." That takes too much attention away from the TV I'm watching while I mindlessly type.
p. 22 The early colonists were among the first to use the new word good-bye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled 'Godbwye.'
[It never occurred to me to wonder where "bye" came from!]
113-114 At first people were not sure what to say in response to a ringing phone. Edison thought callers should answer with a jaunty 'Ahoy!' and that was the word habitually used by the first telephone operator, one George Coy of New Haven. (Only male operators were employed at first. As so often happens with new technologies, women weren't allowed anywhere near it until the novelty had worn off.) Others said, 'Yes!' or 'What?' and many merely picked up the receiver and listened hopefully. The problem was such that magazines ran long articles explaining the etiquette of phone use.
134-135 Vermont was called generally New Connecticut until the inhabitants came up with the contrived, and inescapably nonsensical, name Vermont. If, as is apparent, their intention was to name it for the Green Mountains, they should have called it Les Monts Verts. As it is, in so far as it means anything at all, it means 'worm-mountain.'
But then quite a number of state names are, when you pause to consider them, at least faintly nonsensical. Mississippi is a curious name for a state that possesses neither the source nor the mouth of the river for which it is named and indeed only owns part of one bank. Missouri has more of the Mississippi River than Mississippi has - but then Missouri also has more of the Mississippi River than it has of the Missouri River, and yet we call it Missouri. Rhode Island is not only not an island, but is not named for anyone or anything called Rhode. Nevada is named for a chain of mountains that lies almost entirely in California. Wyoming is named for a forgotten poem, California for a mythical queen. Maine has no particular reason for being called that. Montana and Idaho are named for nothing at all.
The explanations behind all these are various. Rhode Island originally referred only to the island in Narragansett Bay on which Newport now stands... Maine comes from an archaic sense of main meaning great or principal. The Atlantic was sometimes referred to as the Main Sea - hence 'to sail the Spanish main.' The use is retained in the term mainland - and, less explicitly, in the name of the twenty-third state. Missouri is named not directly for the river, but for the Missouri Territory of which it was the most important part, and Mississippi came about more or less because no one else had taken the name. It was almost called Washington.
136 Idaho had a strange and almost mystical popularity among some Congressmen. Despite having no meaning whatever, it was suggested over and over again for thirty-one years until it was finally adopted for the forty-third state in 1890.
137 Even more improbably in their way are state nicknames. Considering how widely used these nicknames are, it is surprising that their origins are nowadays a mystery. No one knows for sure why Iowans are called Hawkeyes, why North Carolinians are Tarheels, why Kansans are Jayhawkers (there is no such bird), or why Indianans are Hoosiers. We know that Delaware has been called the Blue Hen State since at least 1840, but we don't know why.
Missouri was once widely known as the Puke State, Illinois as the Sucker State, and Montana as the Stub-Toe State - though again in each case no one seems to know why. We do know, however, the derivation of Missouri's current slogan, the Show Me State. The expression was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state's inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.
232 Milton Stavely Hershey gave the world the nickel Hershey bar in 1903. The price would stay a nickel for the next sixty-seven years, but only at a certain palpable cost to the bar's dimensions. Just in the quarter-century following World War II, the bar shrank a dozen times, until by 1970, when it was beginning to look perilously like an after-dinner mint, the bar was reinvigorated in size and the price raised accordingly.
Among the names Hershey considered for [his] new town were Ulikit, Chococoa City, and Qualitytells, but eventually he decided on Hersheykoko. For reasons lost to history, the postal authorities refused to countenance the name and he was forced to settle on the more mundane, but unquestionably apt, name of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
288 An established brand name is so valuable that only about 5 per cent of the 16,000 or so new products introduced in America each year bear all-new brand names. The others are variants on an existing product - Tide with Bleach, Tropicana Twister Light Fruit Juices and so on.
289 [Advertisers and market researchers know] that 40 per cent of all people who move to a new address will also change their brand of toothpaste, that the average supermarket shopper makes fourteen impulse decisions in each visit, that 62 per cent of shoppers will pay a premium for mayonnaise even when they think a cheaper brand is just as good, but that only 24 per cent will show the same largely irrational loyalty to frozen vegetables.
290 Because of confusion, and occasional lack of fastidiousness on the part of their owners, many dozens of products have lost their trademark protection, among them aspirin, linoleum, yo-yo, thermos, cellophane, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, lanolin, celluloid, dry ice, escalator, shredded wheat, kerosene, and zipper. All were once proudly capitalized and worth a fortune.
On 1 July 1941 the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn't much, but it was the first television commercial.
292 The New York Times Magazine reported in 1990 how an advertising copywriter had been told to come up with some impressive labels for a putative hand cream. She invented the arresting and healthful-sounding term oxygenating moisturizers, and wrote accompanying copy with references to 'tiny bubbles of oxygen that release moisture into your skin.' This done, the advertising was turned over to the company's research and development department, which was instructed to come up with a product that matched the copy.
If we fall for such commercial manipulation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. When Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced 'Extra Crispy' chicken to sell alongside its 'Original' chicken, and sold it at the same price, sales were disappointing. But when its advertising agency persuaded it to promote 'Extra Crispy' as a premium brand and put the price up, sales soared.
292-293 Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had '109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time.' When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. Never mind; sales soared. At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a 'limited edition' Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch.
297 In one of the more intriguing developments, an inventor named Louis Aime Augustin le Prince briefly excited Paris in 1890 by demonstrating a fully developed system in which moving film was projected on to a screen to the delight and astonishment of an invited audience. Shortly after this acclaimed performance, le Prince left his house on some errand and was never seen again. Another inventor in Paris, one Jean Leroy, thereupon demonstrated a rival system, again to great acclaim, and likewise mysteriously vanished.
[On page 299, there is a mention of the theater in Pittsburgh, but it does not mention our John P. by name.]
395 That the most successful commercial aircraft in history should be called after a circus elephant is an obvious oddity. People are sometimes surprised to learn that Jumbo the elephant wasn't called that because he was big, but rather that big things are called jumbo because of him. In fact, when he was given his name - it is a shortening of mumbo jumbo, a term for a West African witch-doctor, which found a separate usefulness in English as a synonym for gibberish - he was just a baby, only recently arrived at London Zoo. No one had any idea that he would grow to become the largest animal ever kept in captivity.
None the less, thanks to Barnum's tireless and inventive promotion, the name Jumbo became associated with largeness, and before long people were buying jumbo cigars, jumbo suitcases, jumbo portions of food, and eventually travelling on jumbo jets. Jumbo's American career was unfortunately short-lived. One night in September 1885, after Jumbo had been on the road for only about a year, he was being led to his specially built boxcar after an evening performance in St Thomas, Ontario, when an express train arrived unexpectedly and ploughed into him, with irreversible consequences for both elephant and train. It took 160 men to haul Jumbo off the tracks. Never one to miss a chance, Barnum had Jumbo's skin and bones separately mounted, and thereafter was able to exhibit the world's largest elephant to two audiences at once, without any of the costs of care or feeding. He made far more money out of Jumbo dead than alive.
400 [I just thought this part about post-WWII was funny:] Only two things clouded the horizon. One was the omnipresent possibility of nuclear war. The other was a phenomenon much closer to home and nearly as alarming. I refer to teenagers.
413 [And I thought this part was pretty horrifying:] Today the car has become such an integral part of American life that the maximum distance the average American is prepared to walk without getting into a car is just six hundred feet.
422 [After discussion of American students' performance compared to other nations:] While there is no doubt something in all of these considerations, it should also be noted that it is easy to give a distorted impression of educational performance. ... What almost all commentators failed to note is that secondary education in America is, for better or worse, very different from that of most other countries. To begin with, the American system does not encourage - or often even permit - sixth-form students to specialize in a core discipline like science, maths, or languages. Moreover, American high schools are open to all young people, not just those who have demonstrated academic proficiency. That England and Wales came third or fourth in all the maths tests is, it may be argued, less a testament of the far-sightedness of the British education system than to the rigorousness with which the less apt are excluded. Yet it was against high-flyers such as these that the Americans were in virtually every case being compared.
The fact is that by most measures the American educational system is not at all bad. Almost 90 per cent of Americans finish high school and a quarter earn a college degree - proportions that put most other nations to shame. For minorities especially, improvements in recent years have been significant. ... America is educating more of its young, to a higher level, than almost any other nation in the world.
There is of course huge scope for improvement. Any nation where twenty million people can't read the back of a cornflakes box, or where almost half of all adults believe that human beings were created sometime in the past ten thousand years, clearly has its educational workload cut out for it. But the conclusion that American education is on a steep downward slope is, at the very least, unproven.
422-423 Early in 1993, Maryland discovered that it had a problem when someone noticed that the state motto - Fatti maschii, parole femine ('Manly deeds, womanly words') - was not only odd and fatuous, but also patently sexist. The difficulty was that it was embossed on a lot of expensive state stationery, and engraved on buildings and monuments, and anyway it had been around for a long time. After much debate, the state's legislators hit on an interesting compromise. Rather than change the motto, they decided to change the translation. Now when Marylanders see Fatti maschii, parole femine, they are to think, 'Strong deeds, gentle words.'
430 There is no reason to suppose that America is any more threatened by immigration today than it was a century ago. To begin with, only 6 per cent of Americans are foreign born, a considerably smaller proportion than in Britain, France, Germany or most other developed countries. Immigration is for the most part concentrated in a few urban centres. Though some residents in those cities may find it vexing that their waitress or taxi-driver does not always speak colloquial English with the assurance of a native-born American, it is also no accident that those cities where immigration is most profound are almost always far more vibrant than those places where it is not.
Nor is it any accident that immigrants are a disproportionate presence in many of those industries - pharmaceuticals, medical research, entertainment, the computer industry - that are most vital to America's continued prosperity. A third of the engineers in California's silicon valley, for instance, were born in Asia. As one observer has put it: 'America will win because our Asians will beat their Asians.'
[I definitely wonder how much these stats have changed since this book was published, considering how big the immigration debate issue is in this election season. But I love this last paragraph - the last in the book, actually.]
If history is anything to go by, then three things about America's immigrants are as certain today as they ever were: that they will learn English, that they will become Americans, and that the country will be richer for it. And if that is not a good thing, I don't know what is.
My only real problem with this book was that it was published in 1994, so throughout the whole last section about "today," I wondered how much of it was still true almost 15 years later. Especially the parts about immigration (as I noted) and education.
No, there are no facts about sharks in here. That's another family joke.
Also, note that this is the British edition, which explains certain things like near the end where he refers to "sixth-form students." I didn't bother changing British usages or things like "maths." That takes too much attention away from the TV I'm watching while I mindlessly type.
p. 22 The early colonists were among the first to use the new word good-bye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled 'Godbwye.'
[It never occurred to me to wonder where "bye" came from!]
113-114 At first people were not sure what to say in response to a ringing phone. Edison thought callers should answer with a jaunty 'Ahoy!' and that was the word habitually used by the first telephone operator, one George Coy of New Haven. (Only male operators were employed at first. As so often happens with new technologies, women weren't allowed anywhere near it until the novelty had worn off.) Others said, 'Yes!' or 'What?' and many merely picked up the receiver and listened hopefully. The problem was such that magazines ran long articles explaining the etiquette of phone use.
134-135 Vermont was called generally New Connecticut until the inhabitants came up with the contrived, and inescapably nonsensical, name Vermont. If, as is apparent, their intention was to name it for the Green Mountains, they should have called it Les Monts Verts. As it is, in so far as it means anything at all, it means 'worm-mountain.'
But then quite a number of state names are, when you pause to consider them, at least faintly nonsensical. Mississippi is a curious name for a state that possesses neither the source nor the mouth of the river for which it is named and indeed only owns part of one bank. Missouri has more of the Mississippi River than Mississippi has - but then Missouri also has more of the Mississippi River than it has of the Missouri River, and yet we call it Missouri. Rhode Island is not only not an island, but is not named for anyone or anything called Rhode. Nevada is named for a chain of mountains that lies almost entirely in California. Wyoming is named for a forgotten poem, California for a mythical queen. Maine has no particular reason for being called that. Montana and Idaho are named for nothing at all.
The explanations behind all these are various. Rhode Island originally referred only to the island in Narragansett Bay on which Newport now stands... Maine comes from an archaic sense of main meaning great or principal. The Atlantic was sometimes referred to as the Main Sea - hence 'to sail the Spanish main.' The use is retained in the term mainland - and, less explicitly, in the name of the twenty-third state. Missouri is named not directly for the river, but for the Missouri Territory of which it was the most important part, and Mississippi came about more or less because no one else had taken the name. It was almost called Washington.
136 Idaho had a strange and almost mystical popularity among some Congressmen. Despite having no meaning whatever, it was suggested over and over again for thirty-one years until it was finally adopted for the forty-third state in 1890.
137 Even more improbably in their way are state nicknames. Considering how widely used these nicknames are, it is surprising that their origins are nowadays a mystery. No one knows for sure why Iowans are called Hawkeyes, why North Carolinians are Tarheels, why Kansans are Jayhawkers (there is no such bird), or why Indianans are Hoosiers. We know that Delaware has been called the Blue Hen State since at least 1840, but we don't know why.
Missouri was once widely known as the Puke State, Illinois as the Sucker State, and Montana as the Stub-Toe State - though again in each case no one seems to know why. We do know, however, the derivation of Missouri's current slogan, the Show Me State. The expression was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state's inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.
232 Milton Stavely Hershey gave the world the nickel Hershey bar in 1903. The price would stay a nickel for the next sixty-seven years, but only at a certain palpable cost to the bar's dimensions. Just in the quarter-century following World War II, the bar shrank a dozen times, until by 1970, when it was beginning to look perilously like an after-dinner mint, the bar was reinvigorated in size and the price raised accordingly.
Among the names Hershey considered for [his] new town were Ulikit, Chococoa City, and Qualitytells, but eventually he decided on Hersheykoko. For reasons lost to history, the postal authorities refused to countenance the name and he was forced to settle on the more mundane, but unquestionably apt, name of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
288 An established brand name is so valuable that only about 5 per cent of the 16,000 or so new products introduced in America each year bear all-new brand names. The others are variants on an existing product - Tide with Bleach, Tropicana Twister Light Fruit Juices and so on.
289 [Advertisers and market researchers know] that 40 per cent of all people who move to a new address will also change their brand of toothpaste, that the average supermarket shopper makes fourteen impulse decisions in each visit, that 62 per cent of shoppers will pay a premium for mayonnaise even when they think a cheaper brand is just as good, but that only 24 per cent will show the same largely irrational loyalty to frozen vegetables.
290 Because of confusion, and occasional lack of fastidiousness on the part of their owners, many dozens of products have lost their trademark protection, among them aspirin, linoleum, yo-yo, thermos, cellophane, milk of magnesia, mimeograph, lanolin, celluloid, dry ice, escalator, shredded wheat, kerosene, and zipper. All were once proudly capitalized and worth a fortune.
On 1 July 1941 the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn't much, but it was the first television commercial.
292 The New York Times Magazine reported in 1990 how an advertising copywriter had been told to come up with some impressive labels for a putative hand cream. She invented the arresting and healthful-sounding term oxygenating moisturizers, and wrote accompanying copy with references to 'tiny bubbles of oxygen that release moisture into your skin.' This done, the advertising was turned over to the company's research and development department, which was instructed to come up with a product that matched the copy.
If we fall for such commercial manipulation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. When Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced 'Extra Crispy' chicken to sell alongside its 'Original' chicken, and sold it at the same price, sales were disappointing. But when its advertising agency persuaded it to promote 'Extra Crispy' as a premium brand and put the price up, sales soared.
292-293 Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had '109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time.' When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. Never mind; sales soared. At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a 'limited edition' Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch.
297 In one of the more intriguing developments, an inventor named Louis Aime Augustin le Prince briefly excited Paris in 1890 by demonstrating a fully developed system in which moving film was projected on to a screen to the delight and astonishment of an invited audience. Shortly after this acclaimed performance, le Prince left his house on some errand and was never seen again. Another inventor in Paris, one Jean Leroy, thereupon demonstrated a rival system, again to great acclaim, and likewise mysteriously vanished.
[On page 299, there is a mention of the theater in Pittsburgh, but it does not mention our John P. by name.]
395 That the most successful commercial aircraft in history should be called after a circus elephant is an obvious oddity. People are sometimes surprised to learn that Jumbo the elephant wasn't called that because he was big, but rather that big things are called jumbo because of him. In fact, when he was given his name - it is a shortening of mumbo jumbo, a term for a West African witch-doctor, which found a separate usefulness in English as a synonym for gibberish - he was just a baby, only recently arrived at London Zoo. No one had any idea that he would grow to become the largest animal ever kept in captivity.
None the less, thanks to Barnum's tireless and inventive promotion, the name Jumbo became associated with largeness, and before long people were buying jumbo cigars, jumbo suitcases, jumbo portions of food, and eventually travelling on jumbo jets. Jumbo's American career was unfortunately short-lived. One night in September 1885, after Jumbo had been on the road for only about a year, he was being led to his specially built boxcar after an evening performance in St Thomas, Ontario, when an express train arrived unexpectedly and ploughed into him, with irreversible consequences for both elephant and train. It took 160 men to haul Jumbo off the tracks. Never one to miss a chance, Barnum had Jumbo's skin and bones separately mounted, and thereafter was able to exhibit the world's largest elephant to two audiences at once, without any of the costs of care or feeding. He made far more money out of Jumbo dead than alive.
400 [I just thought this part about post-WWII was funny:] Only two things clouded the horizon. One was the omnipresent possibility of nuclear war. The other was a phenomenon much closer to home and nearly as alarming. I refer to teenagers.
413 [And I thought this part was pretty horrifying:] Today the car has become such an integral part of American life that the maximum distance the average American is prepared to walk without getting into a car is just six hundred feet.
422 [After discussion of American students' performance compared to other nations:] While there is no doubt something in all of these considerations, it should also be noted that it is easy to give a distorted impression of educational performance. ... What almost all commentators failed to note is that secondary education in America is, for better or worse, very different from that of most other countries. To begin with, the American system does not encourage - or often even permit - sixth-form students to specialize in a core discipline like science, maths, or languages. Moreover, American high schools are open to all young people, not just those who have demonstrated academic proficiency. That England and Wales came third or fourth in all the maths tests is, it may be argued, less a testament of the far-sightedness of the British education system than to the rigorousness with which the less apt are excluded. Yet it was against high-flyers such as these that the Americans were in virtually every case being compared.
The fact is that by most measures the American educational system is not at all bad. Almost 90 per cent of Americans finish high school and a quarter earn a college degree - proportions that put most other nations to shame. For minorities especially, improvements in recent years have been significant. ... America is educating more of its young, to a higher level, than almost any other nation in the world.
There is of course huge scope for improvement. Any nation where twenty million people can't read the back of a cornflakes box, or where almost half of all adults believe that human beings were created sometime in the past ten thousand years, clearly has its educational workload cut out for it. But the conclusion that American education is on a steep downward slope is, at the very least, unproven.
422-423 Early in 1993, Maryland discovered that it had a problem when someone noticed that the state motto - Fatti maschii, parole femine ('Manly deeds, womanly words') - was not only odd and fatuous, but also patently sexist. The difficulty was that it was embossed on a lot of expensive state stationery, and engraved on buildings and monuments, and anyway it had been around for a long time. After much debate, the state's legislators hit on an interesting compromise. Rather than change the motto, they decided to change the translation. Now when Marylanders see Fatti maschii, parole femine, they are to think, 'Strong deeds, gentle words.'
430 There is no reason to suppose that America is any more threatened by immigration today than it was a century ago. To begin with, only 6 per cent of Americans are foreign born, a considerably smaller proportion than in Britain, France, Germany or most other developed countries. Immigration is for the most part concentrated in a few urban centres. Though some residents in those cities may find it vexing that their waitress or taxi-driver does not always speak colloquial English with the assurance of a native-born American, it is also no accident that those cities where immigration is most profound are almost always far more vibrant than those places where it is not.
Nor is it any accident that immigrants are a disproportionate presence in many of those industries - pharmaceuticals, medical research, entertainment, the computer industry - that are most vital to America's continued prosperity. A third of the engineers in California's silicon valley, for instance, were born in Asia. As one observer has put it: 'America will win because our Asians will beat their Asians.'
[I definitely wonder how much these stats have changed since this book was published, considering how big the immigration debate issue is in this election season. But I love this last paragraph - the last in the book, actually.]
If history is anything to go by, then three things about America's immigrants are as certain today as they ever were: that they will learn English, that they will become Americans, and that the country will be richer for it. And if that is not a good thing, I don't know what is.
My only real problem with this book was that it was published in 1994, so throughout the whole last section about "today," I wondered how much of it was still true almost 15 years later. Especially the parts about immigration (as I noted) and education.