The Straight Dope 11/12/2004

The Straight Dope -- By Cecil Adams
http://www.straightdope.com

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THE STRAIGHT DOPE 11/12/2004

Dear Cecil:

Did 90,000 people in Chicago die of typhoid fever and cholera in 1885?
I'm asking because the Chicago Tribune Magazine, which made this claim
recently, later published a letter from a reader challenging the story.
The Tribune's reply was remarkably lame, even by their low standards:
"If it's an urban legend, it's an amazingly pervasive one." Cecil, I
know you can do better than that. What's the Straight Dope on the
typhoid and cholera outbreak of 1885? --Mark Gleaves, Westmont,
Illinois

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Cecil replies:

I'm not answering this question because you enclosed a double sawbuck,
Mark, although it was a thoughtful touch. I'm answering because of Barry
Popik.

You remember Barry: New York City parking-ticket judge by day,
relentless word bloodhound by--well, pretty much all the rest of the
time. Barry made his bones in etymological circles by establishing that
New York's nickname "the Big Apple" had been popularized by horse-racing
writer John J. Fitz Gerald, who first heard it in New Orleans on--how's
this for precision?--January 13 or 14, 1920.

Having badgered Big Apple officialdom into putting up a plaque to
commemorate his find, Barry next turned to Chicago's nickname "the Windy
City." Common but erroneous belief had it that the sobriquet was coined
circa 1890 by New York newspaper editor Charles Dana to lampoon
Chicago's logorrheic boosters. Barry established that, on the contrary,
the term was already being used in 1885 with reference to the city's
lake breezes, and he's since found instances dating from as early as
1876. Ignorance dies hard in Chicago, however. Despite Barry's tireless
efforts, the discredited Charles Dana story is still being flogged by
leading local institutions, including the Chicago Historical Society,
the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Tribune. Just a few weeks
ago I got yet another note from Barry lamenting that nobody pays any
attention to him, he gets no respect, etc.

OK, the guy can be a little dramatic. You still have to admire his
tenacity. I do my bit to eradicate ignorance too, but journalism being
the flighty business it is, I take my best shot and move on. Barry, in
contrast, hammers away till the bastards cave, no matter how long it
takes. Since he's got the Windy City thing covered, I figure the least I
can do is open a second front.

Which brings us to cholera. 

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/041112.html

STAFF REPORT

Dear Straight Dope:

I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day and noticed that he had
a fairly bad cut on his hand, but it looked kind of weird. I asked what
happened and he said that he cut it with a carpet knife accidentally and
that instead of using a band-aid or other typical first- aid-type
product, he sealed it with super glue.When I sounded surprised at this,
he told me that his doctor had told him once that super glue came about
during Vietnam as a means of quickly closing wounds on the front lines
where troops were under fire and had no time to bandage wounds in a more
traditional manner. It sounds plausible--after all it does say that it
"bonds skin instantly." Is this true or just an urban legend? --Scott
Matheson 

SDSTAFF Una replies:

As with many urban legends there's a mix of fact and fiction in what
your brother-in-law said. In contrast to most such cases, though, this
one's a lot more fact than fiction.

Super glue, Krazy glue, Eastman 910 and similar glues are all a special
type of glue called cyanoacrylates. Cyanoacrylates were invented in 1942
by Dr. Harry Coover of Kodak Laboratories during experiments to make a
special extra-clear plastic suitable for gun sights. He found they
weren't suitable for that purpose, so he set the formula aside. Six
years later he pulled it out of the drawer thinking it might be useful
as a new plastic for airplane canopies. Wrong again--but he did find
that cyanoacrylates would glue together many materials with incredible
strength and quick action, including two very expensive prisms when he
tried to test the ocular qualities of the substance. Seeing
possibilities for a new adhesive, Kodak developed "Eastman #910" (later
"Eastman 910") a few years later as the first true "super glue." In a
now-famous demonstration conducted in 1959, Dr. Coover displayed the
strength of this new product on the early television show "I've Got a
Secret," where he used a single drop placed between two steel cylinders
to lift the host of the show, Garry Moore, completely off of the ground.

The use of cyanoacrylate glues in medicine was considered fairly early
on. Eastman Kodak and Ethicon began studying whether the glues could be
used to hold human tissue together for surgery. In 1964 Eastman
submitted an application to use cyanoacrylate glues to seal wounds to
the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Soon afterward Dr.
Coover's glue did find use in Vietnam--reportedly in 1966 cyanoacrylates
were tested on-site by a specially trained surgical team, with
impressive results. 

For more, see: 
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/msuperglue.html

STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC - 04/19/1985

Dear Cecil: 

Last evening, after perusing The Straight Dope: A Compendium of Human
Knowledge over a leisurely dinner of canned soup, I spent several hours
nursing my apartment full of sick plants. My inquisitive capacities had
been piqued by your book, and naturally I fell to wondering: is it true
what mom used to tell me, that plants enjoy being talked to? My mother
taught me all I know about plant care, and I follow all her instructions
to the letter (except the talking bit, which I always thought was
crazy), yet her plants are infinitely healthier than mine. Is there any
scientific evidence that plants respond to the human voice or presence?
Do some people (like mom) give off "vibes" that plants really like while
other peoples' "auras" (my own, for instance) leave them cold? Might
this have anything to do with the fact, known the world over, that
babies always cry when held by certain people or that cats are
passionately attracted to people who are deathly allergic to them? Help,
Cecil. --Gato, Chicago 

Cecil replies:

Cecil has heard this "vibes" stuff for years, Gato, and with all due 
respect to your mother, he regards it as mush-brained bunk. I have
never come across any serious study suggesting that your phlox
will flourish if you whisper in their little ears, or whatever it is phlox 
have got. On the other hand, there's a fair amount of research indicating
that sound in general (i.e., vibes in the literal sense) can stimulate
growth. Admittedly, a lot of this research has been conducted by high
school students in New Jersey and whatnot, but hey, we gotta be 
open-minded about this. Some years ago, for starters, little Evalyn 
Horowitz won a prize for her science fair project showing that radish
seedlings exposed to ultrasonic vibrations of 50,000 cycles per second
for a month grew 89% taller than a control group. Curiously, the tall
radishes were much spindlier than their untreated cousins, which were 
stubby but sturdy. Evalyn hypothesized that the ultrasonic sound acted
somehow on auxins, which are plant hormones that encourage
elongated growth. 

For more, see:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_108.html

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