Imponderables Read online

  Direction

  Thought Process

  up-right

  visually remembered images

  up-left

  visually constructing [new] images

  straight-right

  auditory remembered sounds or words

  straight-left

  auditory constructed [new] sounds or

  words

  down-right

  auditory sounds or words (often what is

  called an “inner dialog”)

  down-left

  kinesthetic feelings (which can include

  smell or taste)

  There is one more type of movement, or better, nonmovement. You may ask someone a question and he will look straight ahead with no movement and with eyes glazed and defocused. This means that he is visually accessing information.

  Try this on your friends. It works. There are more exceptions and complications, and this is an admittedly simplistic summary of the neurolinguists' methodology. For example, if you ask someone to describe his first bicycle, you would expect an upward-right movement as the person tries to remember how the bike looked. If, however, the person imagines the bike as sitting in the bowling alley where you are now sitting, the eyes might move up-left, as your friend is constructing a new image with an old object. The best way to find out is to ask your friend how he tried to conjure up the answer.

  Neurolinguistics is still a new and largely untested field, but it is fascinating. Most of the information in this chapter was borrowed from the work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder. If you'd like to learn more about the subject, we'd recommend their book frogs into Princes (sic).

  To get back to the original Imponderable—why do people tend to look up when thinking? The answer seems to be, and it is confirmed by our experiments with friends, that most of us, a good part of the time, try to answer questions by visualizing the answers.

  Why do records spin at 33 1/3, 45, and 78 R.P.M.?

  It sounds like some kind of Polish joke, but until Emile Berliner developed the gramophone and disc recording at the end of the nineteenth century, artists had to assemble and re-create their performance every time they wanted to issue a record.

  Many professional musicians weren't willing to make records before the gramophone—they couldn't afford the time or money wasted immortalizing performances that they could be rewarded handsomely for in concert. Most of the earliest records were experiments performed by amateurs—the aural equivalent of home movies. Consumers bought records at first not to hear their favorite performers, but to listen to the novelty of the human voice or musical instruments come through a box in their living room.

  Berliner's gramophone proved vastly superior to its predecessors, and not only because the gramophone produced more faithful fidelity. More importantly, gramophone records were dubbed from a master disc. With the master, any number of copies of one performance could be replicated, the performers were free to spend most of their working time in front of an audience, and assembly line-like efficiency was assured in the recording industry.

  The early Berliner gramophone came in three models, the cheapest of which, the Seven-Inch Hand Gramophone, sold for a little over ten dollars, much less than the earlier cylinder phonographs. Berliner wanted to have records spin at one hundred revolutions per minute, but found he couldn't get enough music on each disc. He experimented with 40 R.P.M., but the sound was awful, so he compromised at 70 R.P.M., which quickly became the industry standard and stayed so until the 1920s.

  Of course, these early gramophones were hand-cranked, so 70 R.P.M. was a suggested speed, a target. The deftness and durability of the owner's wrist determined whether that speed was attained and sustained.

  In 1925, a synchronous motor was attached to turntables, allowing for uniform speed and rendering the hand crank obsolete. These motors turned at 3600 revolutions per minute. With the 46:1 reduction gear standard on gramophones, the resulting speed was a little more than 78.26 R.P.M.s. The 78 was born. These gear ratios, not any grand design or theoretical benefit, were responsible for the numbers 33 1/3, 45, and 78.

  Long-play records were invented in the 1920s by Bell Laboratories but weren't aimed at the consumer market. LPs were used as sound for motion pictures, and later by Muzak and its competitors for background music. Long-play records were a boon for “live” radio programs, enabling them to be heard at the same time in different time zones (actually, the masters were replayed separately for each time zone).

  But early LPs played more music than 78's not only because they played at a lesser speed, but because they were bigger in size. Columbia Records engineer Dr. Peter Goldmark created the breakthrough necessary to propel the LP into prominence—the microgroove, which allowed a much thinner stylus to track more music on less disc. One LP (rather than five 78's) could capture a whole symphony with superior fidelity. Goldmark's streamlined phonograph, with its magnetic pickup, eliminated the need to gather energy from the vibrating needle undulating on the (now obsolete) larger grooves. The vibrating needle, a necessity on the original Gramophone, was a major reason why records spun at 70 and 78 R.P.M. in their infancy. With microgrooves and magnetic pickup, it was no longer true that (as is still true with audio tape) the faster the speed, the better the fidelity.

  Although Columbia offered its new system to RCA, its major competitor (at a price, of course), General Sarnoff countered with his own system, the 45 R.P.M. record and phonograph, also employing microgrooves. But since the 45 was seven inches in diameter, rather than the LP's twelve inches, the 45 didn't offer more than four or five minutes of music.

  Another Imponderable about the record industry—why do 45 R.P.M.s have a big hole, necessitating different equipment than the LP?—is quickly answered by this war between the RCA and Columbia systems. The big hole and the different speed were introduced to force consumers to buy RCA hardware. There was and is nothing mystically perfect about the 45 R.P.M. speed, nothing advantageous about the big hole save its greater convenience for automatic record changers. What was perfect about the 45 was that no other record player could reproduce the work of RCA's formidable roster of artists. RCA was gambling that consumers would buy new, incompatible hardware in order to listen to the right software.

  The original RCA 45 R.P.M. record player couldn't play either 33 or 78 R.P.M. records, and at first, no other machines could play RCA's 45's. Consumers responded to the 45/LP battle by not buying many of the new microgroove records or their players. Similar consumer bewilderment about incompatible hardware stifled the early growth of videotapes and video recorders.

  In 1950, RCA capitulated and produced its own microgroove LPs; Columbia soon issued 45's. Both formats prospered because the two discs weren't direct competitors. The 45's were perfect for popular songs, their price was right, and their size suited the jukebox industry (the only reason 45's still retain the big hole in the 1980s is so that they won't render current jukeboxes obsolete). LPs were the perfect vehicle for long symphonic works and operas, and their length led to popular works created specifically for the form (e.g., rock concept albums such as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and greatest-hits collections).

  All three of the dominant playing speeds for records were not predesigned—they were the byproducts of then current technology and marketing necessities. If inventors like Emile Berliner and Dr. Goldmark ran the music industry today, all records would probably play at 33 1/3 R.P.M. There is no logical reason why we need more than one speed today.

  A sharp-eyed reader, James D. Gibbs, a physics teacher and hi-fi and stereo enthusiast, wrote us to argue that the selection of 33 R.P.M., unlike the other speeds, wasn't totally arbitrary. He's right.

  The original patent for the 33 R.P.M. noted that a minimum satisfactory linear velocity of the record groove as it moves past the stylus is necessary to produce good sound. Obviously, though, the slower the velocity, the longer the recording time. The combination of the microgroove and the slow R.P.M. enabled the LP
to play for approximately 11 minutes, to correspond to the running time of a 1000-foot roll of film. When LPs hit the consumer market, their greater capacity without sacrifice of good fidelity proved to be irresistible.

  Why do women wear such uncomfortable shoes?

  One of the world's great Imponderables is why women are willing to subject their feet to the torture of pointy-toed high-heeled shoes. As with most great Imponderables, this is a mystery precisely because the answer is difficult to nail down. We tried our best. We contacted shoe manufacturers and designers, fashion consultants and academics. Almost as one, they had a one-word answer to the question—vanity.

  Imponderables finds this answer a tad simplistic and condescending. Many women will go to great pains to hide the length and girth of their feet in too-small shoes, but surely there must be a better explanation for a phenomenon that has existed in Western culture for over a thousand years. After all, other uncomfortable fashion imperatives, like bustles and girdles, which became popular on waves of vanity, have bitten the dust while excruciating shoes have stayed the course. What gives?

  Whenever Imponderables wants to get answers of considerably more than one word, we turn to psychology, which never fails to supply useful quotes on any conceivable subject. And a very eminent psychologist, Lawrence Langner, ruminated about this very Imponderable in his book The Importance of Wearing Clothes. Langner's thesis, to put it simply, is that primitive culture was obsessed with the actual exhibition of genitals. Clothes became one of the main ways in which a more “civilized” culture could sublimate this primitive drive. Garments became, for the wearer, a symbolization of the genitals. The farther away the clothing was from the actual genitals, the more unconscious the symbolization became. For example, cod pieces, while covering up male genitalia, obviously drew attention to the very organs they were designed to conceal. Langner argues that the feet, because they are so far from the genitals, are the perfect part of the body for genital displacement.

  Langner cites several examples to show how consistently irrational shoe design has been. In the Middle Ages, a long-toed shoe or boot called the pontaine was all the rage. It was the shape of a phallus, with a snouted toe, and sometimes extended twelve full inches beyond the foot. Although it caused an outrage from pious types, it was the height of fashion. In the fourteenth century, pontaines were made even more elaborate, elongated into animal shapes, such as a bird's claw or an eagle's beak. Some were even in the shape of a phallus. Pope Urban V and Charles V of France issued proclamations decrying the shoes but were incapable of stopping the fad.

  To this day, despite some women's insecurities about having big feet, sleek, long, pointed high-heeled shoes are considered sexy, immodest, aggressive, and provocative. Langner believed that a high-heeled shoe “…enables a woman to increase height and make her feel more attractive and sexually more interesting.” In pornographic movies, it is not uncommon for female characters to peel off all of their clothes at will—but you couldn't pry away their spiked high heels with a crowbar. There may be a small audience of foot fetishists, but these shoes remain on the porn queens primarily because they have become a symbol of lasciviousness.

  Chinese women have traditionally worn sandals wide at the toes (after all, the girth of the toe area is one of the widest of any part of the foot), but Western women seem to resist common sense. As J. C. Flugel says in his book The Psychology of Clothes, “…there is still manifest a desire for a greater pointedness than is warranted by the shape of the foot, and in which objections to the unnatural shape have become almost entirely rationalized as motives of hygiene.”

  So maybe Langner's thesis makes some sense. It is not clear why a woman would want to walk around with a phallic symbol on her foot. But then it isn't clear why a woman would want to walk around with those excruciating shoes on her feet either.

  Is there any difference between toffee and caramels?

  Not much. They share the same ingredients: sugars (usually including dextrose and corn syrup); milk; butter and other vegetable fats. Toffee has a higher butter and cream content than caramels.

  The major difference between the two candies is that the toffee is processed to a higher temperature than caramels. Not only does this higher temperature make toffee harder than caramel, it helps create the distinctive toffee taste.

  What's the difference in length between a size-6 shoe and a size-7 shoe?

  What's the difference in width between a size-A and a size-B shoe?

  Shoe sizes have had a less than orderly history. A size 8 today wasn't a size 8 a hundred years ago. A size 8 in France today will fit an infant in the United States. Actually, sophisticated sizing systems have been in existence for only a little over 100 years, but their antecedents have existed for centuries.

  We have always tended to base our measurements on parts of the human body. The inch was supposed to approximate the width of a thumb; the foot was the length of a man's foot; a yard was the length from the shoulder to the fingertips of an arm fully extended. Although many ancient cultures developed measurements for long distances, exact measurement of smaller units was a problem. It was easy, for example, to say that a foot should be the length of a man's foot, but which man's foot? Supposedly, Charlemagne's foot was the model for our foot, but other cultures use different feet to reflect their smaller stature.

  Imagine the problems determining lengths smaller than one foot without the aid of precise measuring instruments. Many cultures used seeds of cultivated grains to measure short distances, but most grains are no more uniform in length than men's feet. The barleycorn, however, was one exception, with its seeds of surprisingly consistent length. The Roman system of counting was based on 12, rather than 10, so it was natural for them to seek some subdivision of a foot divisible by 12. The inch became that smaller unit, and its popularity was ensured when it was found that three barleycorns placed end to end equaled one inch. There is controversy about who first decreed that a foot should equal 36 barleycorns, but whoever did (King Edward II of England issued such an order in 1324—the question is whether someone else did earlier) forever influenced shoe sizing.

  Even before the Middle Ages, some English shoemakers started to use the barleycorn standard to measure the foot, and there was a consensus that one barleycorn, or 1/3 inch, would be the logical increment separating shoe lengths; but for the most part, chaos reigned in sizing. Most people made their own crude shoes, and until the nineteenth century, those affluent enough to buy shoes had them custom-made. Early shoemakers actually had a vested interest in not making shoe sizes uniform. Once a shoemaker made a last to fit the measurement of his customer, he kept it in his possession in order to ensure that the patron came back. Since the customer absorbed the price of constructing a new last, the shoemaker usually snared repeat customers.

  There were a few false starts in developing a sophisticated sizing system for shoes, but in 1880, an American, Edwin B. Simpson, introduced the system we use today. Although it included the English increment of 1/3 inch per each full size, Simpson's system was a breakthrough in many ways:

  It introduced width sizes. (Width sizes, then and now, measure the girth of the balls of the feet.)

  It introduced proportional measurement. Up until the Simpson system, no accommodation for other measurements was made when the length of a shoe was increased. Simpson increased the size of the ball, waist, instep, and heel as overall last length increased. This adjustment made mass production of shoes possible.

  It introduced half sizes (which are 1/6 of an inch).

  It established separate sizing systems for infants', children's, men's, and women's shoes.

  Simpson's system did not meet with immediate acceptance, however, for its half sizes and width differentiations forced manufacturers to make many more models of each type of shoe and forced retailers to stock a much greater inventory. But the superiority of the system, particularly the better fit it provided for customers, forced the United States industry to adopt it
as its standard.

  How did they figure out how long a size 1 would be (a size 1 is clearly longer than 1/3 of an inch)? The genesis of children's and adult sizes is murky, but the best explanation we've seen is found in a manual called Professional Shoe Fitting (published by the National Shoe Retailers Association and written by William A. Rossi and Ross Tennant), which also supplied us with most of the technical information for this Imponderable. According to Rossi and Tennant, it is a probably a fluke that children's sizes top at 13 1/2 and then start again with an adult 1. The earliest English shoemakers used four inches as their smallest shoe size because four inches was the approximate length of the infant's foot when it was first ready for shoes, and shoemakers in pre-ruler days were used to measuring four inches by noting the span of the knuckles across the hand (try it, it still works). Then, the theory goes, they decided to end the children's sizes, somewhat arbitrarily, by adding the approximate span of a hand (nine inches) to the original four inches, and arrived at the number thirteen. In this case, of course, the added nine “inches” were actually nine one-thirds of an inch—since few adults, let alone children, have feet thirteen inches long.

  Another theory postulates that since the English adopted the Roman counting system, based on 12, rather than the metric system, shoemakers used measuring instruments with twelve markers (a 12-inch ruler actually has thirteen inch markers), shoemakers might have decided to go with 13 instead of the even 12 (remember that the English did not use half sizes at this time, and hence did not need utensils to measure half sizes). The only problem with this theory is that shoemakers weren't using inch rulers to size shoes, but rather worked in one-third or one-half inch increments.