The Flip Side of History. Steve Silverman

      Sources

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

Preface

      During the winter of 1993, Principal Brian Howard of Chatham High School, the school where I spent my entire career as an educator, asked me to attend a seminar at the University of Albany on the teaching of authentic science research at the high school level. I never could have imagined how that one evening would change my life forever.

      As presenter Daniel Wulff detailed how the program worked, he repeatedly referenced something that I’m quite certain the majority of the audience had never heard of: the internet, specifically email, which was necessary for students to keep in touch with researchers around the world.

      It’s difficult to describe how slow and clunky the internet was to use in 1993, particularly when accessing it from the rural setting of our school district. It required painfully slow dial-up modem connections over costly long-distance telephone lines that used text-based UNIX commands. As awful as this may all seem, it was cutting edge for its day, and I was immediately hooked.

      Fast forward to the summer of 1994 and I read about a new invention called the World Wide Web. I fired off an email message to Steve Janover—instructional coordinator at the Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC), and my internet guru in those early days—questioning him about it. He told me that NERIC was testing the web out, but he wasn’t sure if it would catch on. I drove up to see him and he demonstrated the World Wide Web to me.

      Upon returning home, I immediately set to work on my first webpage: my resume. A few days later, I began to construct my first real website. I simply uploaded some interesting facts that I had shared with my close friend Jamie Keenan. This included how they placed the Ms onto M&Ms, the history of Vaseline, and other similar stories. For lack of a better title, I remembered that one of my students, Steve Lotz, had told me that I knew more useless information than anyone else. So I typed the words “Useless Information” at the top of the page, and my website was born.

      Initially, few people ever looked at what I wrote. However, everything changed over the 1997 Fourth of July holiday. Yahoo had chosen my website as their Pick of the Week, and it wasn’t long before my page began receiving more than one million views per year—an astronomical number of visitors for that time period. From that website, two compendiums of my favorite stories were published in book form: Einstein’s Refrigerator and Lindbergh’s Artificial Heart.

      With the advent of e-books, it was predicted that physical copies of books would ultimately become obsolete. As a result, I gave up on the idea of ever writing a third volume of stories and turned my attention toward a new technology: podcasting. On January 27, 2008, the Useless Information Podcast was born. I have been researching, writing, and recording new stories for the podcast ever since.

      Yet as I write this, the prediction that print books would become just a memory has still not yet happened. When I was first approached by Natasha Vera, an editor at Mango Publishing, to write this book, my initial reaction was to turn the opportunity down. I knew from working on my first two volumes that writing a book such as this was a grueling, time-consuming process I wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat. But after a couple months of discussing the idea with my wife and friends, I decided to take the plunge and write the book that you now have in your hands.

      To me, writing a non-fiction book is a scary proposition because every word is permanent. Unlike the web or a podcast, no changes can be made to a book once it has been printed. While I have thoroughly researched each story, there are sure to be errors. Hopefully they are limited to minor things such as a misspelling or an incorrect unit conversion.

      Researching long-forgotten and obscure stories can be frustratingly difficult, and questions always come up along the way. Inconsistencies in the source material were common, requiring me to make a judgement call as to what was indeed the correct fact. At other times, I was left with questions that I was unable to answer, such as when exactly someone was released from prison, or what happened after the story disappeared from the headlines. You may find yourself asking similar questions. Should you have any further information on a story, please do not hesitate to reach out and let me know.

      A few comments about conversions: The vast majority of measurements contained within this book are approximations. While 5,000 miles does equal 8,046.72 kilometers, this figure would be rounded to 8,000 kilometers for easier reading. In addition, currency values have been adjusted to 2018 values, the most recent dataset available at the time of this writing.

      I do hope that you enjoy the stories I have chosen to include. If there is any common theme that runs throughout this book, it is that each story has something a bit quirky to it. Some will make you happy, some will make you sad, and some may even make you mad—yet they