Curt Long

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.