Whether you declare “SOS” in Morse code or spell it out in seashells on a desert island, a vast majority of the world will understand that you’re in need of help. But before “SOS” was the international distress symbol, “CQD” did the job.
The signal “CQD” was derived from an earlier code, “CQ,” commonly used by telegraphers and wireless operators to address all stations at once. It was so common, in fact, that it became overused and lost the sense of urgency it was meant to convey.
As the Marconi Company became the leader in wireless telegraphy in the early 1900s, they decided a new signal was needed. They kept “CQ” for its familiarity but modified it with the extra “D” to denote distress. Though some have retroactively applied the phrase “Come Quick Danger” to the letters, Marconi himself once said that the letters weren’t meant to be an acronym: “It [CQD] is a conventional signal which was introduced originally by my company to express a state of danger or peril of a ship that sends it.”
Despite Marconi’s push for “CQD,” not all nations were on board. The British used it, but Americans kept “NC,” which meant “call for help without delay.” Meanwhile, the Germans used “SOE,” while Italians liked the unmistakable “SSSDDD.”
By 1906, delegates at the second International Radio Telegraphic Conference realized that an international signal was desperately needed, and proposed “SOS” for its ease of transmission; the pattern ”…—…” in Morse code was simple and immediately recognizable. It was officially ratified by all conference members by 1908—except for the United States, which took a bit longer to adopt the practice.
Still, it took some time for “CQD” to leave the vernacular. In fact, the night the Titanic went down in 1912, the wireless operators were still using it. They also tried “SOS” after junior wireless operator Harold Bride joked to senior operator Jack Phillips that it might be his last chance to use the new distress call. Sadly, it was—Phillips went down with the ship. Not long after that, the U.S. adopted “SOS” as its official distress signal.
Though “CQD” is long gone, “CQ” is still popular with ham radio operators—and it’s still used to establish contact, just as British operators used it more than a century ago.
In many cities, getting caught peeing in public can saddle you with a hefty fine, or even land you in court. But there are simply not enough public restrooms to accommodate the needs of bar hoppers, the homeless, and people with weak bladders. Some cities have attempted to rectify this problem with free-standing bathrooms, while others have installed retractable urinals that rise up from the ground at night. (Amsterdam has a version that’s made for women to use, too.)
Paris is dealing with the perils of stray pee in a more attractive way, as Co.Design reports. Uritrottoir, a public urinal created by the Nantes-based design studio Faltazi, is a flower bed urinal that creates compost out of men’s pee. The city has bought two of the urinals so far, with plans to purchase more if they prove effective.
The flower boxes sit on top of a compost bin filled with hay. The urine is diverted into the straw, adding an extra source of nitrogen to the composting process. It doesn’t directly provide compost to the flowers atop the bed, though; the plants are just for a little extra class. In order to make sure that no individual Urtrottoir overflows, the bins have wireless sensors, so someone can monitor the pee levels remotely and replace the bins, transporting the golden-soaked straw to a facility outside the city. According to The New York Times, it will cost around $865 a month to pay workers to clean the two toilets and haul away the pee-straw mix.
Faltazi previously created a funnel that can be installed in hay bales at music festivals to create outdoor, compost-friendly urinals in any location. Placed on sidewalks and in secluded corners, the flower-box version gives men out and about in the city an opportunity to relieve themselves in a way that doesn’t require a city cleanup crew. The boxes come with a privacy shield much like a regular urinal would have, so passersby don’t get an eyeful. And when no one is actively adding compost materials, they just look like a nice little flower bed.
It’s a stand-up only design, though, so women will have to keep holding it for the foreseeable future.
The inside of Apollo 17’s lunar module smelled of gunpowder. It was December 1972, the last of NASA’s manned moon missions, and astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt had just finished a successful survey of the Valley of Taurus-Littrow, a spot on the southeastern “coast” of the Moon’s Sea of Serenity. They had returned to the landing module with their spacesuits caked in moondust.
The men brushed themselves off and removed their helmets. Suddenly, Schmitt began having a sneezing fit. His eyes reddened. His throat itched. His sinuses clogged.
“I didn’t know I had lunar dust hay fever,” Schmitt said. Listening in, men stationed back on Earth began to bust Schmitt’s chops over the radio transmission. “It’s funny they don’t check for that,” said Joseph Allen at Mission Control. “Maybe that’s the trouble with the cheap noses, Jack.”
Schmitt, it turns out, was basically allergic to the Moon.
NASA
Of all the difficulties involved with putting a man on the Moon, “the major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust,” Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute, said in an interview with the Soil Science Society of America. The Apollo 11 astronauts griped that the “particles covered everything and a stain remained even after our best attempts to brush it off.” An Apollo 12 crew member moaned that the lunar module “had so much dust that when I took my helmet off, I was almost blinded.”
Moondust may look soft and pillowy, but it’s actually sharp and abrasive, largely the detritus of micrometeorite impacts. With no wind or moving water on the Moon’s surface, moondust never erodes. Effectively, no natural process exists on the lunar surface that can round its edges. When astronauts inhale what is essentially finely powdered glass, it becomes a huge health hazard [PDF]: The powder is so jagged that a deep breath could cause it to lodge in the lungs and pierce the alveolar sacs and ducts [PDF], resulting in a lunar version of “stone-grinder’s disease,” or silicosis, a deadly condition that commonly killed coal miners (and still kills 100 Americans a year). To complicate matters, lunar dust also contains a lot of iron—and this iron-laden dust has recently been implicated in hypertension among Apollo astronauts [PDF].
Reports of moondust misadventures from previous Apollo missions never deterred Harrison Schmitt. After all, the Harvard-educated geologist had dedicated the better part of a decade to studying the Moon’s landscape. Working for the U.S. Geological Survey’s astrogeology department, he used telescope photos to map the Moon and planets. So when the NASA asked if any scientists were interested in visiting space, Schmitt hardly hesitated. “I thought about 10 seconds and raised my hand and volunteered,” he said in a 1999 oral history project with NASA.
No astronaut knew more about lunar geology than Schmitt. Previously, every other Apollo flyboy had had a background as a military pilot. Schmitt was the first, and only, professional scientist to walk on the Moon. As a result, the press didn’t romanticize or hype the geologist astronaut. The New York Times described the 37-year-old as a “quiet, serious bachelor who does not own a television set or a stereo.” As he trained to go to the Moon, completing a 53-week flight training course and logging 2100 hours of flying time, the scientist never imagined that he would wind up being allergic to the lunar dust and rocks he had spent years studying from afar.
Schmitt in the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) during the third Apollo 17 extravehicular activity (EVA) at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. Image Credit: Getty Images
In December 1972, Schmitt landed in the Moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow, surrounded by mountains and endless stretches of moondust. During their first moonwalk, the lunar roving vehicle lost a fender. The tires spun, and the rover kicked up a cloud of dust.
The sediment got lodged in every wrinkle, fold, nook, and cranny of Schmitt’s spacesuit. The dust “gummed up the joints” of his suit so badly that he had trouble moving his arms. The powder chewed up his footwear, too. “The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack’s boot,” Taylor said.
When the astronauts returned to the lunar module, it took forever to brush the dust off. Schmitt later complained [PDF] of “a lot of irritation to my sinuses and nostrils soon after taking the helmet off … the dust really bothered my eyes and throat. I was tasting it and eating it.” The symptoms lasted for about two hours. His condition was consistent with the findings of Dr. Bill Carpentier, a NASA doctor who had evidence suggesting the dust could cause allergic responses [PDF].
Schmitt’s pesky moon allergies couldn’t stop his true grit. Thanks to his background as a geologist, Apollo 17 collected more rock samples than any other mission. One sample, the 4.2-billion-year-old hunk of rubble called “Troctolite 76535,” later helped unlock secrets of the Moon’s magnetic field [PDF].
Schmitt also discovered bright orange beads of volcanic glass on the Moon’s surface. Not only did these samples prove that the Moon was once volcanically active, they also provided evidence that it contained water. And before they packed for home, Schmitt and his fellow Apollo 17 astronauts snapped a photo of Earth. Today, it’s one of the most iconic photographs of our home: the Blue Marble.
Fifty years ago, a small group of Pittsburgh filmmakers decided to make a scary movie. Working from a shoestring budget with limited crew and a cast partly composed of amateur actors, they headed out to a Pennsylvania farmhouse and began crafting a horror classic.
Today, Night of the Living Dead is universally regarded as the king of zombie flicks, but it didn’t start out that way. What started as a weird idea for a movie about aliens went through rewrites, crucial casting decisions, and a little fire to become the film we know and love today. So, to celebrate the granddaddy of the modern zombie story, here are 10 gruesome facts about Night of the Living Dead.
1. THE ORIGINAL IDEA WAS AN ALIEN COMEDY.
In early 1967, writer/director George A. Romero, writer John A. Russo, and actor Rudy Ricci were working together at the Latent Image, their Pittsburgh-based commercial film company, when they decided it was time to try their hand at making a feature film. Though the effort eventually produced Night of the Living Dead, early concepts were very different. Russo initially thought of making a horror comedy about “hot-rodding” alien teens who would visit Earth, meet up with human teenagers, and generally cause mischief with the help of a cosmic pet called “The Mess.” The group’s budgetary constraints made this concept impossible, so Russo instead dreamed up an idea about a boy who runs away from home, only to discover a field of corpses under glass, which were rotting to the liking of alien creatures who would eventually consume them. Russo presented this idea to Romero, who latched on to the flesh-eating angle.
2. GEORGE ROMERO WAS HEAVILY INSPIRED BY I AM LEGEND.
Armed with Russo’s flesh-eating concept, Romero went to work, pairing it with a story he’d been working on that “basically ripped off” Richard Matheson’s apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend. Russo later recalled that Romero returned with “about 40 really excellent pages,” including the opening in the cemetery and the arrival at the farmhouse. Russo set to work on the rest, and Night of the Living Dead began to come to life.
3. DUANE JONES REWROTE HIS OWN DIALOGUE AS BEN.
The character of Ben was originally written as an angry, rough truck driver, with somewhat crude dialogue to reflect that. When actor Duane Jones came aboard the production, he began revising the dialogue.
“As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself,” actor/producer Karl Hardman, who played Harry Cooper, later recalled.
4. THE FAKE BLOOD WAS MADE ON A BUDGET.
Night of the Living Dead was made on a budget of less than $150,000, which meant everything from props to sets had to be created on the cheap. Since the film was shot in black and white, the crew never had to worry what color the blood was, so either red ink or chocolate syrup was used, depending on the desired effect in each shot. For the scene in which Karen Cooper (Kyra Schon) begins eating her father’s corpse, the crew’s leftover lunch was employed.
“Earlier in the day, we were eating hamburgers or meatball sandwiches, so they just smeared chocolate syrup all over it and that’s what I was biting into,” Schon said.
5. THE NUDE GHOUL CAUSED A SPECTATOR SCENE ON SET.
Reasoning that least some of the “ghouls” (Romero never referred to the creatures as zombies) would have woken up in the morgue and walked away naked, the crew opted for a single living dead extra to be nude on camera, and enlisted a local artist’s model for the job. When word spread that the production planned a nude scene during one of its night shoots, local residents apparently decided they wanted to have a look.
“The night they filmed the nude ghoul, all of Evans City found out about it. They had their lawn chairs set up around the edges of the property,” Judith Ridley, who played Judy, said. “It was funny to see the rest of the zombies trying to keep their eyes elsewhere instead of looking down at the obvious places on the nude one.”
6. THREE DIFFERENT CREW MEMBERS SET THEMSELVES ON FIRE DURING FILMING.
To add to the realism of the zombie attack scenes, both Russo and actor Bill Hinzman—who played the iconic “Cemetery Ghoul” in the opening sequence—volunteered to be set on fire. Russo was lit on fire during the scene when the survivors are throwing makeshift Molotov cocktails at the undead, while Hinzman poured lighter fluid on his suit so he could be lit during the scene in which Ben wards off the ghouls with a torch. In both cases, everything went according to plan, but one fire was started by accident.
For the scene in which Ben sets a chair on fire to distract the ghouls, crew member Gary Streiner volunteered to coat the prop with gasoline. Everything went fine for the first take, but when it came time to give it a second try, Streiner ran into trouble when he tried to add more gasoline.
“I just went over and started to pour the gas on and the liquid found a hot ember somewhere and a flame just came up into this container I’m holding in my hand,” he said. “I jumped back and all of a sudden I’m on fire!”
Hinzman came to the rescue and extinguished the flame before Streiner was seriously hurt.
7. BOTH ROMERO AND RUSSO MADE CAMEOS.
Night of the Living Dead’s co-creators make cameo appearances in the film. Russo played one of the ghouls who managed to reach into the farmhouse only to be struck with a tire iron, while Romero can be seen in the Washington D.C. sequences as a reporter.
8. JONES FOUGHT AGAINST AN ALTERNATE ENDING THAT WOULD HAVE SAVED BEN.
One of the film’s most famous elements is its grim ending, in which Ben, having survived the night, is shot by the sheriff’s zombie-hunting posse and thrown on the fire. At one point, a happier ending for the film was considered, but Jones fought it and won.
“I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way,” Jones said. “The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that, and the double jolt of the hero being black seemed like a double-barreled whammy.”
9. IT’S IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN BECAUSE OF A CREDITS ERROR.
Night of the Living Dead might be the most famous public domain movie of all time, but it was never intended to be. The Walter Reade Organization, which distributed the film, wanted to release it under the title Night of the Flesh Eaters, but lawyers representing the makers of 1964’s The Flesh Eaters threatened a lawsuit, so the title was changed to Night of the Living Dead. When the title changed, though, copyright notices were not added to the opening titles or to the end credits. Though the filmmakers have fought it in federal court, the film is still in the public domain.
10. ITS CREATORS SANCTIONED BOTH A REMAKE AND A REVISION OF THE ORIGINAL, BUT NEITHER WAS WELL RECEIVED.
In 1990, Russo, Romero, and other collaborators from the original film re-teamed to remake Night of the Living Dead, with the hope that the project would help shore up their original copyright claims. Russo produced, Romero revised the original script, and makeup effects wizard Tom Savini (who would have worked on the original film had he not been serving in Vietnam at the time) was brought in to direct. The film features a strong cast (including Tony Todd as Ben) and more sophisticated makeup effects, but failed to reach the classic status of its predecessor.
Then, in 1998, Russo, Hinzman, Hardman, and actor/producer Russ Streiner (who played Johnny) decided to revisit the film for its 30th anniversary. Inspired by the Star Wars Special Editions, Russo wrote and filmed new scenes for the project, including an origin story for the Cemetery Ghoul. The effort was not well received. As for Romero, though he wasn’t involved, he reported “no bad blood” between himself and his former collaborators.
Whether it’s a new car, a home renovation project, or a European vacation, many of us know the feeling of wanting something we can’t afford. After figuring out how much your dream purchase will cost you, this online calculator will translate that dollar amount into hours spent working.
As Business Insider reports, the calculator requires six numbers from its users: annual gross salary, top marginal federal tax rate, top marginal state and local tax rates, total hours worked per year, total hours spent commuting per year, and the cost of your expenditure.
You may not know all that information off-hand, but luckily there are plenty of resources online to help you figure it out. Annual gross salary should be easy enough to input—it’s your yearly salary before taxes are taken out. Your top marginal federal tax rate can be looked up at taxfoundation.org based on your income and marital status. Top marginal state and local tax rates vary based on your address, and these can also be found at taxfoundation.org. Add them together to get a single figure.
Next, enter the total number of hours you work per year (the standard for full-time employees is 2087 hours) and your total hours spent traveling to and from work annually (according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American spends 216.7 hours a year commuting).
Before you’re ready to submit, you need to calculate the cost of what it is you’re saving up for. With that bit of information, you can enter the data and see what the labor cost calculator comes up with.
Let’s say you’re single, live in Brooklyn, get paid $50,000 year, work full-time, and commute an average number of hours. According to the calculator, it would take you 78.79 hours to earn the money you need to take a $1000 vacation.
Long before Ronald Reagan became the 40th President of the United States, he was a popular actor appearing alongside Errol Flynn in Desperate Journey and co-starring with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan’s first film, Love Is On the Air, was released in 1937, and by 1941, a poll of movie theater owners ranked him fifth among up-and-coming movie stars. And what’s a celebrity to do but give celebrity endorsements? Enjoy these 14 vintage advertisements featuring a pre-politics Ronald Reagan.
Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman appeared in a few ads together, such as a 1941 Chesterfield cigarettes ad and the above Royal Crown Cola ad in 1947. The two met on the set of the film Brother Rat in 1938 and kindled a romance during a nine-week “Stars of Tomorrow” performance tour the next year. They married in January 1940 and starred in four movies together that year, becoming fixtures in the gossip pages of movie magazines like Modern Screen and Photoplay. Reagan and Wyman separated in 1948, divorcing in 1949, and Reagan married Nancy Davis, the future First Lady, in 1952.
“‘Pipe this!’ cries Ronald.” Apparently, Marlboro shirts feature “Soft-as-smoke fabric,” but don’t get confused: the Marlboro Shirt Company was unrelated to the Marlboro cigarette brand, which has been produced by Philip Morris since 1924. Founded in Baltimore in 1907, the clothing company still exists and now goes by the name Marlboro Originals.
The above holiday ad appeared in the December 13, 1947 issue of the Saturday Evening Post and in the January 1948 issue of Esquire.
Despite appearing in multiple Chesterfield advertisements—like this one from 1948—Reagan did not smoke cigarettes. He did smoke a pipe, writing in his autobiography, An American Life, that he took up the habit in college because he thought it looked cool: “I’d never liked cigarettes, but I was impressed by a flurry of ads in those days in which women said, ‘I like a man who smokes a pipe.’ I’d always liked the look of someone smoking a pipe, so I saved up and bought one. But I never inhaled. I just sucked in the smoke, tasted it, and blew it out—and I only did that during the offseason, when I wasn’t playing football.”
After his brother, Neil, a two- or three-packs-a-day cigarette smoker, developed laryngeal cancer in the 1960s, Reagan quit smoking his pipe and picked up a Jelly Belly habit instead.
Campbell Soup Co. purchased V8 (then styled as V-8) in 1948 and began running a series of print advertisements for the vegetable-blend juice featuring celebrities, including both Reagan and Shirley Temple.
This advertisement appeared in the February 5, 1951 issue of Life magazine, among other places. Hair tonics—lightweight, alcohol-based hair products—were popular in the ’50s and still show up in barbershops today. Men used tonics to get a crisp part and to add shine to the hair without making it greasy. And Reagan wasn’t the only celebrity singing Jeris’s praises—Kirk Douglas also endorsed the brand.
This February 1951 ad for the Cigar Institute of America suggests that Reagan’s approach to cigars was the same as his approach to pipes: smoke, just don’t inhale.
Dating to sometime during the 1950s, this advertisement for Wildroot Cream Oil is equipped with a cardboard easel and seems to have been designed to sit in the window of a barbershop, using Reagan’s glossy hair and confident grin to draw in customers. Infused with lanolin, Wildroot is an oil-based grooming product meant to serve the same purpose as a hair tonic, with added moisturizing properties.
Reagan would become a famous General Electric spokesman, but before taking on that role, he endorsed Westinghouse appliances in this April 1953 advertisement. According to the ad (he’s third from the left along the front row), his favorite Westinghouse feature was “the Laundromat’s Weigh-to-Save Door and Water Saver.” Reagan would begin working with GE the next year.
Reagan appeared in this Van Heusen campaign in 1953, and in January 1981, the company re-ran the ad with a celebratory message in Time, Newsweek, and People magazines to congratulate Reagan on the eve of his first inauguration. Then, in 1985, Andy Warhol used this same ad as a basis for his screenprint “Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan)” in his “Ads” series.
In 1954, Reagan was hired by General Electric to host General Electric Theater, a popular CBS anthology TV show that mixed dramatic stories with advertising for GE products and the modern “electric home” more generally. It ran for two seasons without a host, then introduced Reagan in the third season to give the show a more consistent voice. At a low point in his acting career, Reagan was enticed by the offer of steady work—and a starting paycheck of $125,000.
Along with his salary, GE also turned the Reagan family’s home in the Pacific Palisades into “the most electric home in the country.” In a recurring segment, the show would “check in” with the Reagans, exploring their house as the family demonstrated and praised their “electric servants,” as they called their GE appliances. The tagline for these segments was “Live Better Electrically,” the name of a multi-million dollar campaign co-sponsored by GE and Westinghouse that aimed to sell not just specific products but the idea of a home populated with appliances and reliant on electricity. Launched in 1956, the “Live Better Electrically” campaign marketed a vision of the modern American home as an “all-electric” home—catchy jingle and all.
In this advertisement in National Geographic from 1959, Reagan touts the luxury of train travel in a Union Pacific Domeliner, a special passenger car topped with a glass dome that offered panoramic views. The Domeliner had snagged another A-list endorsement a couple of years earlier—it got the full-episode treatment on I Love Lucy when Lucy, Desi, and company took a long trip on the luxury liner (which Lucy ruined when she kept pulling the emergency brake).
This advertisement appeared in 1961 when Reagan was still presenting General Electric Theater, which he hosted the show until the following year. With Reagan at the helm, GE Theater had become a top-10 show in the Nielsen ratings between 1956-’58, and celebrities like Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and the Marx Brothers all made guest-star appearances.
Sometimes baby sloths seem almost too adorable to be real. But the little muppet-faced treasures don’t just look cute—turns out they sound cute, too. We know what you’re thinking: How could you have gone your whole life without knowing what these precious creatures sound like? Well, fear not, because we have some footage of how the tiny mammals express themselves—and it’s a lot of squeaking. (Or maybe that’s you squealing?)
The sloths featured in this heart-obliterating video come from the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica. The institution rescues orphaned sloths, rehabilitates them, and gets them ready to be released back into the wild.
The Legacy of Invasion of The Body Snatchers. The 1956 movie’s “creeping paranoia and isolation” still gives us chills today.
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5 Physical Problems Doctors Fix With Glue. It beats duct tape hands down.
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15 Things You Didn’t Know AboutSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The 1938 movie changed everything for Disney.
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Demand for tiger products is threatening the wild tiger population. Even farmed tigers contribute to the problem.
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17 People Who Had The Worst Valentine’s Day Ever. Even if yours is disappointing, it should be relatively nice.
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The World’s Smallest Porpoise Inches Closer To Extinction. There Are Now Just 30 Of Them Left.
* The dead-bird detective. Pepper Trail is a criminal forensic ornithologist.
* Periodic Tableware. This was my first post at mental_floss, published ten years ago today.
This winter, consider building a snölykta in the front yard instead of a snowman. The traditional Swedish lanterns are made from dozens of individual snowballs, piled into a hollow pyramid. Stick some LED lights inside before sealing the top, and enjoy the cozy glow from the comfort of your warm home (preferably while sipping a mug of hot chocolate).
Learn how to make your own snölykta by watching the timelapse video above, created by Daniel Troger.
