What Were Hopper Toilets?

Unlike today’s vacuum flushed train toilets, which lead to air-sealed storage containers for holding waste, toilets used to flush directly out of a hole in the bottom of the train car. These toilets were known as Hopper toilets.





While moving along in open country, flushing onto the track seemed a common sense way of disposing of waste.



However, it also made sense not to do this while the train was parked in a bustling station.





In Asia, travelers were often surprised to find that “toilets” in trains were just holes in the floor, so they could watch the tracks and ground below whiz by as they prepared to relieve themselves.



A little risky and definitely drafty.



In Depth

Derinkuyu

Chicago, like a lot of other modern cities, has a hidden secret: It's home to miles of passageways deep underground that allow commuters to get from one place to another without risking nasty weather. Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas all have their own networks of underground tunnels, as well. But there's a place in Eastern Europe that puts those forgotten passages to shame. Welcome to Derinkuyu — the underground city.







Picture this. It's 1963, and you're on a construction crew renovating a home. You bring your sledgehammer down on a soft stone wall, and it all crumbles away, revealing a large, snaking passageway so long that you can't see where it ends. This is the true story of how the undercity at Derinkuyu was (re-)discovered. While those workers knew they'd found something special, they couldn't know just how massive their discovery had been.



Stretching 250 feet (76 meters) underground with at least 18 distinct levels, Derinkuyu was a truly massive place to live. Yes, live. There was room for 20,000 people to stay here, complete with all of the necessities (and a few luxuries) — fresh water, stables, places of worship, and even wineries and oil presses. It isn't the only underground city in the area known as Cappadocia, but it's the deepest one we know of, and for many years, it was believed to be the largest as well. (Another recently discovered location may have been home to even more people.)









Derinkuyu and the other 40-ish underground cities nearby are made possible thanks to the prevalence of tuff in the area, a kind of volcanic rock that solidifies into something soft and crumbly. That makes it relatively easy to carve enormous subterranean passages — but why would you want to? The answer lies in the cities' origins.


Underground cities in the Cappadocia region

Derinkuyu isn't exactly inhospitable on the surface level (after all, that's where the people who found it were living). So why did ancient people decide to build their living quarters below the surface? Because they weren't hiding from the broiling sun or annual meteor showers. They were clearly hiding from invading forces, with massive, rolling stone doors to block off each floor should any armies breach the fortress. But who were the people of the caves, and who were they defending themselves against? The answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first.


Massive rolling door for security

The earliest known people to live in the area were the Hittites, who ruled the Turkish Peninsula from about the 17th to 13th centuries B.C.E. — well over three millennia ago. Some scholars point to artifacts with Hittite cultural elements, such as a small statue of a lion, found in the underground caves. That suggests these ancient people would have been taking refuge from invading Thracians.


Hittite warriors



If they were, it didn't work forever: A tribe of Thracians, the Phrygians, conquered the area next. It's possible that the Hittites never lived underground, however; an alternate theory says that it was the Phrygians, not the Hittites, who spawned the subterranean city. Since the construction of many of the large underground complexes is dated to some time between the 10th and 7th centuries B.C.E., and the Phrygians lived there until the 6th century B.C.E., they're generally regarded to have created the first caves. In that case, they may have been hiding from the Persian host under Cyrus the Great that eventually did take over the region.


Thracians

The Persians would have used those caves as well, as would all of the people to come after. Eventually, according to some sources, early Christians around the 2nd century C.E. took root in the caves as they fled Roman persecution. This pattern continued throughout the centuries and millennia to come — in fact, Greek Christians were still using the caves as late as 1923. It's pretty incredible, then, that the caves would have been forgotten in the 40-odd years between their last residents and their "re-discovery."


Persians on chariots

In Depth

What Were The Opium Wars?

The British had an interest in Opium in the Opium Wars or Anglo-Chinese Wars. Actually, that’s not the entire truth. They didn’t want the opium per se, they wanted the freedom to sell their opium to millions of Chinese.



That’s the great thing about addicts: They make good customers. The British weren’t the only ones to profit from the opium trade: the Americans also did, as well as the Turks and Indians.



China blockaded the British from dealing opium in Canton. The Chinese government had grown weary of watching westerners turn a profit by addicting their countrymen to the potent drug.



They seized all of the British opium in 1839 from Cantonese warehouses, refused to apologize, forbade all trade with Britain, then fired on British warships in their waters. Well, British honor wouldn’t allow this effrontery. In retaliation, the British seized Hong Kong and bombed Canton.





Finally, China agreed to pay reparations, gave Hong Kong to the British, and reopened several ports to British trade again. This 1842 agreement was called the Treaty of Nanking.


Signing the Treaty of Nanking



As for the British side of the deal, they got to continue to addict millions more of the Chinese, rake in the profits, and have access and trade with China at no extra cost.



As a result, other western countries followed suit, securing similar open and free rights to residence and trade within China’s borders.



This time period is referred to by the Chinese as “the time of unequal treaties,” as they continuously lost control over their own country to stronger western countries like Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.




In Depth

Making Bricks

The first building materials used by man were wood and stone. But the use of bricks followed soon after, even before written history, and today bricks remain one of man’s most important building materials. What is this vital building material made from? Simple earthy materials!





Many forces such as weather, glaciers, volcanoes, and chemical reactions, break up rocks in the ground, producing a kind of fine- grained earth called clay. Clay is workable when it is wet, and can be molded to any shape. A brick is made by wetting clay, pressing it into a mold, and then baking the clay in an oven until it is hard.





Today, most bricks are made by machines, which form the clay into long columns, then cut the columns into brick-sized pieces.



Most ordinary bricks are naturally red because of the iron in the clay used to make them. Adding other substances to the clay produces bricks of other colors.


Brick color schemes

One of the largest brick factories in the world can produce 16 million bricks in a week.



In Depth

Sir Isaac Newton

In 1665, the bubonic plague swept over London, England, killing tens of thousands of people. To try to stop the spread of the disease, students were sent home from universities and were not able to return for 18 months.



The time was a tragedy for England, but an amazing leap forward for the science world. In those 18 months, the laws of gravitation, motion, and optics were discovered and a new mathematical system called calculus was invented.


Gravity


Motion


Optics


Calculus

What’s even more remarkable is that this was all accomplished by one man, a 23-year-old student who had been sent home because of the plague. Isaac Newton was born on a farm outside London in 1642, the year the Italian scientist Galileo died. As a child, all he wanted to do was build models, and he became ingenious at it.


Sir Isaac Newton

By the time he was a teenager, he was building intricate windmills, water clocks, sundials, and flying lanterns. At 18, he was sent to Cambridge, where he adopted his lifelong approach to science, asking the questions that no one had yet answered.


Young Isaac Newton

Newton answered many of those questions in the months at his family’s farm, but most of the science world would not know about it for 20 years. Newton had no interest in publishing his findings. Once he had made a discovery and had used it in his own research, he was done with it. Once the world did find out, it would never be the same.



Sir Issac Newton conducted experiments with a prism and a ray of light. His work with light advanced the knowledge of optics and physics.





In Depth

The Most Highly Sold Newspaper In The World

Right now, there are more than 7,000 newspapers published around the world, and about a quarter of them are American papers. Each day, Americans buy some 61 million copies of their favorite papers!





The largest-selling paper in the United States is the New York Daily News, which sells about two million copies each day. The Wall Street Journal is second, with about 1.5 million copies sold daily.


First


Second

The Los Angeles Times is third, and the New York Times is fourth.


Third


Fourth

But of all the newspapers in the world, a Russian paper called Pravda has the largest circulation. About ten million copies of this newspaper are printed each day!


Largest circulation

Sixty years ago there were more papers in America than there are today, 2,461 compared to 1,759 today!



In Depth

Who Was The Lady That Posed For The Mona Lisa?

Although it’s known as the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting was originally titled La Gioconda.


La Gioconda

Painted on wood, it’s a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant.


Leonardo da Vinci



X-rays reveal that Leonardo sketched three different poses before settling on the final design.



The painting of Lisa has no eyebrows because it was the fashion of the time for women to shave them off.



In Depth

How Far Away Is Alaska From The Lower 48 States?

You’d have to travel across 500 miles (805 km) of Canada to get to the next closest U.S. state, Washington.



Part of Alaska is actually much closer to Russia.



Alaska’s Little Diomede Island, at the extreme western end of the Seward Peninsula, is only 2.5 miles (4 km) from Big Diomede Island, which belongs to Russia.



Almost a third of Alaska lies within the Arctic Circle, but its northernmost point, at Point Barrow, is still 1,300 miles (2,093 km) from the North Pole.



In Depth

The World’s First Zoo

The word zoo is short for zoological garden, and is a facility in which animals are displayed to the public in enclosures, and often bred.



Since ancient history, it was common for rulers to have collections of exotic animals in their castles, but that wasn’t exactly a zoo.



Same thing for the gladiator fights of ancient Rome, for which exotic animals from around the world were brought to be slaughtered for the amusement of the masses.



For today’s purpose, I’ll say a zoo is a location that displays live animals for the purpose of public viewing and, with any luck, preservation and education.



Given that, the first real zoo was probably the Imperial Menagerie in Vienna, established for the royalty in 1752 and opened to the public thirteen years later.


Imperial Menagerie, Vienna

It started a fad in Europe: the zoo at the Jardin de Plantes, Botanical Garden, of Paris opened in 1793, and the zoo of Regent’s Park, London, in 1828.


Regent’s Park, London

In the United States, sea captains began transporting wild animals for display in the Americas as early as 1721, when the first camel and African lion arrived in Boston. The first polar bear arrived in 1733, the first orangutan and tiger in 1789, the first ostrich in 1794, and the first elephant in 1796. A near-zoo consisting of a permanent exhibit of live and stuffed wild animals first opened on New York’s Wall Street in 1789, long before the bulls and bears took over the area. But the first real American zoo, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, didn’t open until 1868.


Lincoln Park Zoo – circa 1868

The Philadelphia Zoo opened in 1874; Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo opened in 1889, and the International Wildlife Conservation Park, also known as the Bronx Zoo, opened in 1899.



In Depth

Why Is Fresh Garlic Better Than Garlic Powder?

First of all, garlic powder is not a good substitute for fresh garlic because in the process of being dried and powdered, garlic loses a great deal of its volatile flavors. But as you say, emergencies are emergencies. I won’t tell anybody if you don’t.



Dried garlic was invented for the same reason as other dried spices and herbs: to preserve a perishable product. At the garlic powder factories they first break the bulbs down into cloves, smash them, and blow away the papery skins.



They then dry the naked cloves, remove any residual skin fragments. and powder the dried material. Much of our garlic powder comes from India and China, where both the raw garlic and the hand labor involved in processing it are relatively cheap.



But obviously, the fresh herb loses a lot of its “charm” in the process, so the dried and powdered product can’t hold a candle to the fresh.



Oh, did I mention that my wife is allergic to garlic?



In Depth