Curt Long

An earlier article here covered 3-D printers, which use modified inkjet technology to create solid objects with extremely complex shapes. The printers use a variety of techniques to solidify arbitrary areas on the surface of a powdered substrate, which supports the object as it is built up layer by layer. Designers commonly use 3-D printers for prototyping things like consumer electronic products, ensuring that they will be manufacturable before expensive metal molds are created to enable mass production. I ran into an old acquaintance the day that article ran who had never heard of Interesting Thing of the Day, so I told him about the site. He asked me what that day’s topic was, and I happily described the 3-D printers. He said, “Oh yeah, I know about those. Did you know they’re also using them to ‘print’ human tissue?” Um…no, I had no idea. It turns out that the humble inkjet printer has quite a few tricks up its sleeve—including, incredibly, the capability of manufacturing living skin and other organs.

Cell Mates

Growing individual human cells is not especially difficult. Take a sample of healthy cells, provide them with the right nutrients and environment, and they will grow and multiply. When multiple tissue cells are placed in close proximity to each other, they have a tendency to fuse together. Because of this phenomenon, hospitals can “grow” new skin to be used as grafts for burn patients using the patient’s own skin cells. However, this technique does have significant limitations. In particular, the skin cannot be made very thick because there’s no way to get blood to deeper cells—the process grows a homogeneous sheet of skin without the essential network of blood vessels, not to mention pores and other minute structures.

But creating intricate solid structures layer by layer is easy for a 3-D printer. So researchers have adapted old inkjet printers to hold a suspension of human cells in one reservoir and a gel-like substrate in another. Each pass of the print head lays down a pattern of cells held in place by the gel; when the next layer is applied, the adjacent cells begin to fuse to the layer beneath. If, for example, each layer contains a circle of cells in the same location, the result will be a tube—in other words, a structure very much like a blood vessel. A printer could in fact hold different kinds of cells in an array of ink reservoirs (like those used by color printers), theoretically enabling the creation of entire organs.

It’s All Beginning to Gel

The gel that functions as the substrate for this type of tissue printing is itself quite interesting. As with the powdered material used in rapid prototyping, the gel must be removed after the rest of the structure has solidified. Called thermo-reversible gel, it has the unusual property of being solid above 32°C and turning into a liquid when cooled below 20°C. So after the cells have fused, the tissue is cooled and the liquefied gel simply drains away.

When I was studying linguistics in graduate school, the question people asked me most often was, “So how many languages can you speak?” I’d roll my eyes and say, “One, almost.” I’d then try to explain that I usually get by pretty well in English, that I can order food in a French restaurant without embarrassing myself, and that I’ve picked up a smattering of phrases in half a dozen other languages—but that’s pretty much it (unless you want to count computer languages or ancient Greek and Hebrew, of which I know just enough to mistranslate an inscription here and there). Linguists, I would say, are not necessarily polyglots; the study of linguistics is not about learning a bunch of languages but rather about understanding the nature of language generally: how the brain creates and interprets it, how children learn it, how it functions in society, how to model it computationally, that sort of thing. (At this point listeners would generally nod, try valiantly to suppress a yawn, and change the subject.)

In the course of my studies, I came across a fringe linguistic theory that is, even by the most generous standards, far from being generally accepted, or even respected. The theory is known as tagmemics; its inventor and primary proponent, the late Dr. Kenneth L. Pike, was on my thesis committee. So I got to spend some quality time getting to know the man and his theory—which, though I argued forcefully against its shortcomings, is nevertheless quite interesting. It’s the one linguistic theory that ordinary, nonacademic human beings have a reasonable chance of comprehending without months of study.

Understanding How Language Works

What’s a linguistic theory, anyway, and why do we need one? Linguists studying the way language works can observe what people say or write, but they can’t tell what’s going on in someone’s mind. To oversimplify greatly, that’s what a linguistic theory tries to figure out—the mental processing behind language. The reason for doing this varies from one linguist to the next: some are searching for the origins of a particular language or evidence that language is basically hard-wired in the brain; others want to find easier ways to learn or teach languages, or improve computer speech recognition. But whatever the motivation, a linguistic theory—a model that describes how language is put together and predicts how new words and sentences will be formed—is an essential starting point.

In the 1930s, Pike began studying phonology—the rules that govern how sounds are combined into words. Some sounds are regarded as the same by native speakers of a given language, even though they are objectively, or phonetically, different. Linguists use the term phoneme to describe a sound that speakers intuitively regard as being unique and meaningful in a language: thus two sounds may be phonetically different but phonemically the same. For example, in English there’s a sound we call “schwa”—a sort of neutral vowel sound that substitutes for other vowel sounds when it’s in an unstressed syllable. We don’t need to use the schwa symbol when spelling words that include it; we know intuitively and automatically when another sound—like “a,” “e,” or “u”—should be shortened into a schwa. So because it is simply a variant that occurs in very well-defined situations, schwa would not be a phoneme in English. On the other hand, there’s no rule that could predict when “k” would be used versus “d,” so both the “k” sound and the “d” sound must be phonemes in English. Finding the phonemes—the meaningful units of sounds in a language—is a basic part of the analysis of any language.

Etic and Emic

What Pike wondered was whether there might be something analogous to the phoneme in grammar—that is, at the level of words. To take a fairly trivial example, consider a pair of synonyms, such as “aid” and “assist.” Pike would say that even though these two terms are objectively different, the fact that they can be used and understood in the same way in a given context makes them equivalent at the level of grammar. He used the terms “etic” (as in phonetic) and “emic” (as in phonemic) to describe objective and subjective units of meaning, respectively. Thus, in this example, “aid” and “assist” are etically different but emically the same. Pike originally called the minimal grammatical unit of (emic) meaning a grameme but later changed the term to tagmeme, which he felt was more generic.

A tagmeme is basically a composite of form and meaning, a “unit-in-context.” Where many other linguists only wanted to study the objective form of language (that is, its “etic” aspect), Pike felt that the interesting thing was how language actually functions for users in real life—its “emic” aspect. So the tagmeme, as Pike’s fundamental unit of language, is described in terms of four features (or “cells”)—slot (where the unit can appear), class (what type of unit it is), role (how the unit functions), and cohesion (how the unit relates to other units). Pike found that the very same structures that appeared on lower levels also appeared on higher levels—as sounds formed words, words formed sentences, and sentences formed discourse, Pike used tagmemes to describe these larger and larger units. And he begin to think: if the etic/emic distinction applies to all levels of language, perhaps it was an even more basic, more general principle that could explain a great many other things too.

Beyond Grammar

In his monumental (and very, very heavy) book Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, Pike claimed that the same kinds of structures, rules, and procedures found in phonology apply not only to grammar and discourse, but in fact to all of human behavior. He analyzed events such as football games and church services using his tagmemic system, with the rather lofty goal of proving that all human behavior is basically linguistic.

Of course, the fact that a football game and a sentence can be described using the same methodology and structures, while very interesting, doesn’t really prove that a football game is linguistic. And most linguists seemed to feel that as a descriptive model, tagmemics was not as rigorous or objective as other models, so it didn’t lend itself well to serious scientific inquiry. But from Pike’s point of view, looking at language as an objective formal system was missing the point; behavior that is fundamentally subjective can only be understood and described meaningfully if the observer allows context to play a role at every level.

People who want to make fun of the Canadian dialect of English invariably start with one of its two most idiosyncratic features. The pronunciation of the diphthong “ou,” of course, is one of them—in words like out and about, Americans exaggerate both the gliding and rounding of the vowels so that it sounds like the “ow” in power, whereas the stereotypical Canadian pronunciation is closer to oat and a boat. I know lots of Canadians who protest this characterization, pointing out that Americans butcher the language much more egregiously. They may say, “Every dialect of English has its faults, eh?” This is the second oft-ridiculed peculiarity of Canadian English: turning a statement into a question by adding the word “eh” at the end, which means, approximately, “Isn’t that so?”

Needless to say, not all Canadians fit the stereotype—my wife, for example, rarely uses “eh,” just as I avoid most of the influences of Pittsburghese. Some of her family members from Saskatchewan, on the other hand, say “hey” instead of “eh,” and there are many other regional variations of English within Canada, just as there are within other English-speaking countries. But whether or not one uses “eh” (or “hey”), every English speaker knows dozens of ways to add a word or a phrase to the end of a statement so that it becomes a yes/no question. Questions formed in this way are called tag questions.

You’re It (Aren’t You?)

In one of my first graduate linguistics courses in grammar, we studied English tag questions at great length, because they nicely illustrate a simple, rule-based grammatical transformation. The simplest way to make a tag question in English is to repeat the verb, negate it, and then repeat the subject. For example, “He is smart” becomes “He is smart, isn’t he?” If the verb is already negative, you just make it positive. “It won’t rain” becomes “It won’t rain, will it?” In most cases, if a sentence doesn’t use a “be” verb, tag questions are created using a form of the verb “do”: “This scarf matches my hat, doesn’t it?” Depending on the verb and the context, there are numerous other variations, along with special exceptions to the rules. Every student in elementary school is taught that when speaking of yourself, you must use the awkward-sounding “Aren’t I?” to form a tag question unless you’re willing to phrase it as “Am I not?”

Beyond these basic kinds of tag questions, though, there are many other ways of achieving the same (or very similar) result. “Don’t you think?” is very common, as are “Right?” and “OK?” and sometimes even “Huh?” In certain parts of the U.S., Canada, and England, “Isn’t it?” is shortened to “innit?” and used as an all-purpose tag question, even where the verb doesn’t seem to match, as in “This shirt costs a lot of money, innit?” But if you think of “innit?” as short for “isn’t it so?” you have a nice parallel to the all-purpose French tag question, which also shows up in English. “This foie gras is splendid, n’est-ce pas?” And oddly enough, “yes” and “no” can often be used interchangeably to form tag questions. “We’re having fun, yes?” means about the same as “We’re having fun, no?”

Tag Questions Have Many Uses (Don’t They?)

What I have always found most interesting about tag questions is their many and varied uses. Ostensibly they are questions that seek agreement or disagreement with whatever the original statement was, but more often than not, they are used for reasons other than gathering information. In some regional dialects of English, tag questions occur quite frequently—every few sentences or so—with the net effect of softening the overall impact of the speaker’s statements. In other words, tag questions can make speech sound more polite or deferential by implicitly suggesting, “I could be wrong about this; what do you think?” This is also one of the functions of the Canadian “eh”—just as a Canadian will often say “Sorry!” if you step on his toes, frequent use of “eh” can serve the social purpose of limiting one’s impression of self-importance.

Very often, tag questions are used mainly as a tool to move conversations along, to involve other participants. A tag question can invite feedback—anything from a nod to a “Yeah, sure,” to a lengthy response. But with very few exceptions, tag questions that expect a response are looking for a positive response: an agreement with the speaker’s original statement before it became a question. They say: “I believe such-and-such. Do you agree?” So tag questions can exert a subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) pressure on the listener to respond positively, like a preacher who makes a string of bold statements followed by “Amen?” It would be unexpected, to say the least, for a member of the congregation to shout out “Not really!” So just as tag questions can be used as a means of expressing courtesy, they can also be misused as a way of controlling a conversation, inducing guilt, or expressing passive aggression. Hence the infamous “You’d never leave me, would you?” It’s not easy for someone to respond, “Oh, sure I would!”

The first couple of times I visited Saskatchewan, where my wife’s family lives, it was winter. Temperatures hovered around –40°, making holiday shopping along the streets of downtown Saskatoon a challenge. Even bundled to the gills, we could barely stand to be outside for more than a few minutes. Morgen assured me that during the summer (or “mosquito season,” as it is affectionately known), the prairies of southern Saskatchewan took on an entirely different look and were quite hospitable to humans. But I was thinking, this is why they invented malls. Malls are good. Let’s go to the mall! We went to the mall.

Moosey in the Sky with Diamonds

I like to kid my wife about Saskatchewan: the monotonous flatness of the landscape, the dearth of trees, the nasty winter weather, the fact that the province’s slogan, “Land of Living Skies,” suggests there’s not much interesting about the land itself. Morgen, in turn, can kid me about western Pennsylvania (where I grew up), which has its own peculiarities. But even though Pennsylvania has no shortage of oddly named towns, Saskatchewan’s legendary town of Moose Jaw takes the cake. Although everyone in Canada has heard of Moose Jaw, it’s known more for its silly name than for any other characteristic. Which is a shame, because if you dig a little bit, you can find all sorts of interesting things in Moose Jaw.

Moose Jaw, located just west of the provincial capital of Regina in south-central Saskatchewan, most likely got its name from a Cree word meaning “warm breezes” via folk etymology—though there are several other theories too, including one that the river running through town was thought to be shaped like a moose’s jawbone. Warm breezes or not, Moose Jaw (like the rest of Saskatchewan) gets plenty cold in the winter. In the early 1900s, when the town was beginning to undergo significant growth, most of the larger buildings were heated by steam, with coal-powered boilers located in the basements. The engineers who kept the heating equipment running didn’t like having to go upstairs and outside in the cold repeatedly to move from building to building, so they arranged for the creation of a series of tunnels linking the basements to provide easier access. Over a number of years, the tunnels expanded and interconnected, becoming a large network.

Down and Out in Moose Jaw

Not long after the tunnels were built, a wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in Moose Jaw. Anti-Chinese sentiment at the time made it difficult for these immigrants to live and work in public view, yet business owners valued them as a source of cheap labor. So the tunnels were expanded and used as both living quarters and workplaces. Conditions were harsh in the tunnels and pay was poor, but the workers stayed because their options for earning money in the outside world were limited.

Several years ago, the company I worked for had a big Halloween celebration. One of my coworkers decided that a group of us needed to dress up as the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. So she worked for days sewing costumes for all of us, and even brought in plastic pig noses for us to wear. For an authentic touch, she asked that we also decorate our desks with the building materials featured in the story. I got the short straw (so to speak) and ended up making a pathetic mess by scattering straw all around my desk, and the “pig” who used sticks didn’t fare much better. But our colleague with the brick “house” simply printed out a huge brick pattern on a large-format color printer and wrapped it around his desk. In life as in the story, his design was clearly the best.

It is difficult to set aside the bias that straw is an inappropriate building material, even knowing that wolves lack the lung capacity to blow down a straw house. And yet people have been building sturdy, comfortable houses out of straw bales for more than a century. This building technique has been, shall we say, a bit slow to catch on—and is not without its limitations. But using straw as a building material turns out to have some interesting merits.

If You Can’t Eat ‘Em…

Straw is what’s left over when grains like wheat, barley, or rice are harvested—basically the hollow stalks. Unlike hay, which can be used to feed animals, straw is a nearly useless agricultural byproduct. Millions of tons of straw must be burned or otherwise disposed of each year. Inconveniently, it doesn’t even decompose rapidly. Automated baling machines, invented in the 1890s, compact straw into tightly compressed blocks, so that they will at least occupy as little space as possible. Faced with a surplus of straw bales, a lack of trees, and a cold winter approaching, some settler long ago decided to stack up the bales and use them as the walls of a house. This worked surprisingly well, and after years of refinement, straw bale construction is beginning to gain respect as a mainstream technique.

Walls made of straw bales are held together and reinforced with rebar (or sometimes, wooden or bamboo stakes). In some designs, walls made entirely of straw bales support a roof; in others, a conventional wooden frame is used as the load-bearing structure while the straw bales form the exterior shell. Straw will rot if exposed to moisture, so to keep it dry, both interior and exterior surfaces are sealed with plaster, stucco, or adobe. The net effect is that walls of a finished straw bale building look just like any other wall, only a bit thicker.

Like many people, I endured four years of high-school French only to find that I lacked the ability to order a croissant in a Paris bakery without making a fool of myself. I eventually got the hang of basic conversation in French, but then found myself traveling to places where Spanish, German, or Italian (for example) were spoken, and having to start all over again with the basics (“Where’s the bathroom?” “How much does this cost?” “Where have you sent my luggage?”). As much as I enjoy and appreciate linguistic diversity, it can make travel, trade, and diplomacy challenging at times.

In some heavily multilingual areas of the world, most people learn a lingua franca—a regional trade language—in addition to their mother tongue. It stands to reason, then, that this notion could be expanded more broadly. But when someone proposes English or French, say, as a trade language, objections inevitably arise. These languages are notoriously difficult to learn, with strange spellings and lots of grammatical rules and exceptions. But more importantly, they’re loaded with historical and cultural baggage. If your country—not mentioning any names—has been a rival of English- or French-speaking nations, you will likely not jump at the chance to spend long years learning a language with such unpleasant associations. The only hope for a truly universal language would seem to be an artificial one—a language that is designed to be free from cultural biases and easy to learn. This was precisely the goal of Esperanto.

Hoping for a New Language

L. L. Zamenhof grew up in the late 1800s in Warsaw (part of Russia at that time). While still in high school he set out to design a universal artificial language that would facilitate communication within his linguistically diverse community. By the time he finished this side project ten years later, Zamenhof was a practicing ophthalmologist. In 1887, he published the first guide (in Russian) to the new language, which he called “Lingvo Internacia” (international language). Zamenhof wrote the textbook under the pseudonym “Esperanto,” meaning “a person who is hoping” in Lingvo Internacia. Fans of the language decided that “Esperanto” had a nicer ring to it, and they soon adopted it as the informal name of the language.

Esperanto was designed to be both easy to learn and culturally neutral. According to some sources, an English speaker can learn Esperanto up to five times faster than Spanish. For starters, Esperanto uses strictly phonetic spelling—a given letter always makes exactly the same sound. Second, the structure of Esperanto is very simple, with only sixteen basic grammatical rules that need to be learned—and no exceptions to the rules (such as irregular verbs). And third, Esperanto has a very small core vocabulary; new words are constructed by combining words and adding prefixes and suffixes. (Esperanto is thus an agglutinative polysynthetic language, for those who need to have such things spelled out…)

Fuller loved geometry, and he was particularly impressed by the triangle, the most stable geometrical shape. Many of his building designs involve triangles, because they provide the greatest structural integrity. He also knew that the sphere was the most efficient three-dimensional shape, enclosing the largest possible volume with the smallest surface area—meaning a dome (a partial sphere) should be a logical shape for a building. But dome-shaped buildings are notoriously awkward to construct. Fuller’s innovation was a way to create a sphere (or partial sphere) out of triangles, providing the best of both worlds. He called this shape a geodesic dome, because the pattern of triangles forms an interlocking web of geodesics. A geodesic is the shortest path between two points. This is, of course, a line in two-dimensional geometry, but on the surface of a sphere, the shortest distance between two points is an arc defined by a great circle—a circle with the same diameter as the sphere (like the equator).

The Miracle Building

If all that geometry is too much to wrap your brain around, consider the main advantage Fuller cited in his 1954 patent application for the geodesic dome: this shape, because it is self-reinforcing, requires far less building material than any other design. Conventional buildings, according to Fuller, weigh about 50 pounds (22.7kg) for each square foot (0.09 sq meter) of floor space. A geodesic dome can weigh less than 1 pound (0.5kg) for each square foot of floor space. (One of Fuller’s original geodesic domes was a metal framework lined with a sheet of heavy, flexible plastic.) The upshot of this is that you can create buildings very inexpensively, and with a minimum of equipment and labor. Geodesic domes are also stronger than conventional buildings, highly resistant to earthquakes and wind, and more energy-efficient too. What’s not to like?

Well, that’s a circular question. The main problem with a dome-shaped building is that although it encloses a large volume of space, a lot of that space is not easily usable by humans. The slope of the walls means the floor space is effectively limited (more so, the taller you are), and most furniture, having been designed for flat walls and corners, doesn’t fit well. There’s also the fact that you need a fairly large lot for a dome of any reasonable height; in urban areas, such real estate may be hard to come by. And banks are generally hesitant to provide home loans for dome builders; they’re seen as a risky investment, because there’s no way to gauge their resale value.

All these issues in no way diminish my enthusiasm for Fuller’s design, because, as he did, I feel that logic and elegance count for a lot. Plus—let’s not beat around the sphere—I think geodesic domes look very impressive, and I imagine it would be interesting to live in a space without right angles. If fortune ever smiles upon me broadly enough that I can afford to build my own home, you can be certain a dome will find its way into the design somewhere. —Joe Kissell

Ice hotels are built, naturally, entirely out of frozen water in the form of ice blocks and hard-packed snow. In some cases, blocks of ice are sawed from a river; for other parts of the building snow is compressed into wooden forms to create building blocks. The guest rooms contain beds made of a block of ice and topped with a foam mattress. You sleep in high-tech mummy-style sleeping bags covered with animal pelts; although the air temperature in the room is below freezing, your body remains toasty warm. If nature calls in the middle of the night, you can head to an adjoining heated building with conventional facilities. Outhouses would not be much fun, as the exterior temperature frequently reaches –40°.

Put It on Ice

But a classy hotel is much more than a place to sleep, and at the prices of these rooms, you’d better get much more than a sleeping bag. Although the design changes from year to year, Sweden’s Icehotel invariably includes an ice bar for vodka-based drinks (beer would freeze); even the glasses and plates are made of ice. There’s also an ice chapel for “white” weddings, an ice cinema, an ice sauna (I have yet to figure that one out), ice art galleries, and even—I am not making this up—a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre built of ice. Most guests stay only one night in an ice room; ordinary heated hotel rooms are available nearby for longer stays. Even so, the hotel has a waiting list several years long.

Sweden’s Icehotel was the first, but imitators are appearing all across the Arctic Circle. In Kangerlussuaq, Greenland you can find the more modest Hotel Igloo Village, with six adjoining igloos (four of which serve as guest rooms). If you want the igloo experience in Greenland during the summer, you can also stay at the Hotel Arctic in the town of Ilulissat, where guests enjoy all the comforts of home in melt-proof aluminum igloos. For the past five years, Québec has had its own Ice Hotel, modeled on the original Swedish Icehotel and rivaling it in size and luxury.

In 2004, the United States saw its first ice hotel—the Aurora Ice Hotel at the Chena Hot Springs Resort in Fairbanks, Alaska. During its construction, state officials cited the hotel’s owner for fire code violations and did not permit the building to open until smoke detectors and fire extinguishers had been installed in each room. (I’m not kidding. Only in America.) Although the initial structure melted in the spring of 2004, it was rebuilt for the 2005 season, this time inside a larger, refrigerated structure—with the goal of keeping it frozen and habitable year-round.

As far as I know, I’m not personally acquainted with anyone who has stayed at an ice hotel. I rather suspect—marketing hype and high prices notwithstanding—that it would be a decidedly uncomfortable experience. But then, many uncomfortable experiences are worth having, and it’s not every night you get to drink vodka out of an ice glass while watching the Northern Lights, and then sleep on a slab of ice. Sign me up! —Joe Kissell

One of my linguistics professors in grad school had a strange sense of humor that appealed to me greatly. He didn’t see a need to divide work and pleasure; exams regularly contained jokes, puns, and strange juxtapositions, and every class session was filled with laughter. When this professor needed to make up a word in an imaginary language to use as an example, he wouldn’t give it a common meaning like “mother” or “tree”; he’d instead gloss the word as “flagpole sitter,” “hubcap thief,” or something similarly odd. He constantly urged us not to take our homework too seriously and to ask annoying questions of the other professors. I think this lighthearted attitude helped us all to learn better, and it certainly brightened the classroom atmosphere.

How Near This

Class discussion had a remarkable tendency to stray from the planned lesson, though invariably it went in interesting (and linguistically useful) directions. One day, someone in the class mentioned the word metathesis, which is the phenomenon that occurs when two adjacent sounds are swapped (as in “aks” for “ask”). Without missing a beat, the professor said, “Oh yes, this reminds me of spoonerisms,” and proceeded to recite, rapidly and perfectly, the tale of the Mion and the Louse. We were stunned and delighted by his brilliant display of linguistic prowess. It’s not easy to make mistakes like that on purpose.

A spoonerism is like metathesis but instead of affecting adjacent sounds within a single word, it’s spread out across two or more words (sometimes with intervening words)—for example “hat rack” becomes “rat hack”; “light a fire” becomes “fight a liar.” Some spoonerisms instead transpose vowel sounds (“I fool like a feel” instead of “I feel like a fool”). Because mistakes like this are involuntary slips of the tongue, they don’t always result in real words (you might say “key tup” for “tea cup,” for instance), but the funniest and most memorable spoonerisms change the meaning of a sentence completely (as in “I’m biting a rook” in place of “I’m writing a book.”)

Having written several articles based on the theme “Throwing Down the Goblet,” I found myself wondering about trophies. Lots of major sporting competitions award the winning team a trophy in the shape of a cup (or, if you prefer, a bowl, chalice, or goblet)—the Stanley Cup, the America’s Cup, the World Cup, and so on. Trophy cups are also found quite often in collegiate sports, and Harry Potter fans will of course remember the House Cup as the highly coveted award for the house that has accumulated the most points during a given term. Often, though not always, tradition dictates that a single trophy cup be passed from one winning team to the next. In individual competitions, by contrast, trophy cups are much less common; designs are based more often on a human (or angelic) figure of some kind.

The Salad Fork of Victory

When you’re rooting for your team to win, say, the World Cup, it’s probably not especially important to you what the actual token of victory is shaped like. The important thing, most competitors and fans would agree, is simply to win—and to have some commemorative token. A cube or sphere or an inscribed toaster oven could just as easily serve this purpose, though without a doubt, larger, more elaborate, and costlier trophies give the winner something further to brag about. All I wanted to know was, why a cup? How did a cup, of all things, come to symbolize competitive victory?

The answer has been surprisingly difficult to track down; in fact, after several hours of research I can only advance a couple of plausible theories. For many centuries, a “trophy” was simply something of one’s enemy—a piece of armor, perhaps, or occasionally a body part—that was displayed after a battle as a tangible proof of triumph. This may, of course, have been a cup on occasion, but I have not been able to find any examples of cups designed for the sole purpose of serving as trophies (in particular, for sporting events) until the mid-18th century. This means the inspiration for such a design must have appeared earlier than that.

A news article mentioned a hotel bar in New York whose drink menu includes a US$10,000 drink called “Martini on the Rock.” That works out to about $5 for the gin, vermouth, and olives—and $9,995 for the loose diamond sitting at the bottom of the glass. Patrons must order the drink three days in advance, and meet with a jeweler to pick out the perfect stone. The first person to order this drink paid a bit extra—$13,000—and instead of a loose stone, selected a 1.85-carat diamond engagement ring. (His girlfriend said yes.) Perhaps unknown to the hotel’s proprietors, this extravagant beverage has a fascinating historical precedent.

Et Tu, Cleo?

The year was 41 B.C. Mark Antony, one of the rulers of Rome, summoned Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII for an audience at Tarsus (in present-day Turkey). Antony ostensibly wanted Cleopatra to answer charges that she had aided Cassius, who had conspired with Brutus to assassinate Julius Caesar. But most people believe the real reason for the meeting was that Antony wanted Egyptian aid for an upcoming military campaign, and besides, he had the hots for Cleopatra.

Cleopatra arrived on her legendary barge, and proceeded to throw elaborate banquets for Antony and his officials for several evenings straight—nothing like a bit of wining and dining to smooth over political misunderstandings. So impressed was Antony at the lavish feasts Cleopatra had arranged that he accepted a friendly wager. Cleopatra bet Antony a large sum of money that she could host the most expensive meal in history. The next day, as the meal in question was nearing its end, Antony said that it had been terrific, but no more impressive than her other banquets—and certainly not worth the sum of money she had specified. At this, Cleopatra removed one of her pearl earrings and dropped it in a goblet of wine vinegar. Each of the pearls was so large and rare that it was extraordinarily valuable—estimates are usually expressed in extremely helpful terms such as “10,000,000 sesterces” or “100,000 gold aurei,” or “the value of 15 countries.” In any event, it was worth a fortune. The pearl dissolved in the vinegar, which Cleopatra then drank. Antony conceded defeat—the value of that single drink, let alone the banquet, had indeed been more than any meal in history.

On occasion, you may have heard it said of some wonderful gadget, “This is the greatest invention since sliced bread!” Such a comment is intended to be both a compliment and a reference to how revolutionary and world-changing the invention is. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that while people have been slicing bread for eons, pre-sliced, packaged bread has only been available since 1928, when Otto Frederick Rohwedder introduced the world’s first mechanical bread slicer in Battle Creek, Michigan. I don’t know what revolutionary invention the bread-slicer was compared to when it first appeared, but sooner or later, it all goes back to the wheel. Nobody seems to be able to come up with an older, or more important, invention than that.

Giving It a Spin

Before I began my curatorial duties here at Interesting Thing of the Day, I had never really wondered when the wheel was invented, much less why it was invented. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Everyone knows the wheel was invented to enable people to move stuff around more easily—a revolutionary alternative (so to speak) to carrying, pushing, or dragging heavy objects. Surprisingly enough, some historians and archeologists aren’t so sure about that. There is in fact a fairly good case for the hypothesis that the wheel was invented to facilitate pottery making.

The wheel was almost certainly invented in Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq. Estimates on when this may have occurred range from 5500 to 3000 B.C., with most guesses closer to a 4000 B.C. date. The oldest artifacts with drawings that depict wheeled carts date from about 3000 B.C., though for all anyone knows, the wheel was in use for centuries before these drawings were made. But there is also evidence from the very same period of time that wheels were used for pottery.

Drinking and Driving

It was around 3000 B.C. that the first goblets appeared. Clay goblets are normally made by throwing them on a wheel in two parts—first the bowl, then the stem (including the foot). This makes for a far more smooth and regular shape than could be achieved by manual coiling, and since the oldest surviving goblets bear the telltale signs of wheel manufacture, it is plausible that wheels were used for pottery before they were used for transportation. For that matter, it’s conceivable—though admittedly a wild and improbable speculation—that the wheel was invented for the express purpose of making goblets. Be that as it may, it is virtually certain that historically, the preferred way to make goblets was to throw them.