Forbidden Knowledge Part 22

Oh, the horrors of the past. Although it's hard to fathom why people bothered to go on living, there was once a time when folks had no choice but to sit up straight in their chairs, fiddle with b.u.t.tons and zippers, climb stairs, hike to the outhouse, and add numbers with pencil and paper. Below, a paean to the inventions that made it easier to enjoy the simple pleasures of sinful idleness.

_01:: Velcro Isaac Newton beneath the apple tree. Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" in the bathtub. And Georges de Mestral going for a walk in the woods. The greatest discoveries often stem from mundane observations, and while gravity (Newton) and measurable density (Archimedes) are cool and everything, nothing beats the sweet music of parting Velcro. Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned home after a walk in 1948 to find c.o.c.kleburs stuck to his coat. After examining one under a microscope, he noted that c.o.c.kleburs attach to clothes and fur via thin hooks. Eureka! It took Mestral eight years to develop his product. But in the end, the twin nylon strips worked precisely like a c.o.c.klebur on a coatone strip features burrlike hooks and the other thousands of small loops to which they attach, forming an unusually strong bond.

_02:: Calculator Ah, the calculatora handy device that makes 55378008 look like a naughty word when you turn it upside down. Oh, and it also makes math cla.s.s a whole lot easier. Oddly enough, it was a 19-year-old boy named Blaise Pascal (yes, that Pascal) who invented the first mechanical adding machine. But Pascal's device was c.u.mbersome and couldn't record results, so the vast majority of people continued calculating by hand until 1892, when William Seward Burroughs patented the first commercially viable adding machine. Although Burroughs died before reaping much profit from his invention, his grandson (also William Seward Burroughs) was one sure beneficiary. The younger Burroughs became famous for writing Naked Lunch, a book that would likely have been impossible if Burroughs hadn't had all that inherited calculator money to waste on heroin.

_03:: Lay-Z-Boy In 1928, when he was a mere lad of 21, Edwin Shoemaker forever blurred the distinction between sitting up and lying down by developing the world's first reclining chair. His initial model, a wood-slat chair intended for porches, was fas.h.i.+oned out of orange crates and designed to fit the contours of the back at any angle. It took an early customer, appreciative of the concept but rather unexcited about the prospect of lying down on bare slats of wood, to suggest upholstering the chair. Shoemaker and his partner (and cousin) Edward Knabusch then held a contest to name the invention. "La-Z-Boy" beat out suggestions like "Sit 'n Snooze" and "The Slack Back." The next time someone tells you an active lifestyle is the key to long life, reply with this tidbit: The man who invented the recliner lazed his way up to the ripe old age of 91.

_04:: The Toilet Contrary to popular belief, we do not have Thomas c.r.a.pper to thank for the conveniences of the flus.h.i.+ng toilet (more on him in a moment). Toilets with drainage systems date to 2500 BCE, but Sir John Harrington invented the first "water closet" around 1596 (it was also used by his G.o.dmother, Queen Elizabeth I). However, toilets never caught on until Alexander c.u.mmings invented the "Strap," which featured a sliding valve between the bowl and the sewage trap. As for Mr. c.r.a.pper (18371910), he was a plumber who sold, but did not invent, a popular type of toilet, although he did hold several plumbing-related patents. Not surprisingly, c.r.a.pper has been unfairly linked to the less-than-pleasant word "c.r.a.p." The two, however, are unrelated. In 1846, the first time "c.r.a.p" is recorded as having been used in English, little Tommy-poo was just nine years of age.

_05:: The Escalator In 1891, Jesse Reno patented the first moving staircase, paving the way for today's world, in which we choose not to use staircases, just StairMasters. Reno's invention was more of an inclined ramp than the escalator we know today; pa.s.sengers hooked into cleats on the belt and scooted up the ramp at a 25-degree angle. Fairly soon after, he built a spiral escalatorthe mere thought nauseates usin London, but it was never used by the public. Reno's first escalator, however, was widely used, albeit not practically. In a testament to how utterly unamusing amus.e.m.e.nt parks were in the 1890s, 75,000 people rode Reno's "inclined elevator" during a two-week exhibition at Coney Island in 1896. Let's be clear: The escalator was not the means by which one traveled to a ride. It was the ride itself.

Say My Name, Say My Name:

4 Famous Cases of Plagiarism

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where not only the thought but the words are copied. And we ought to know a thing or two about plagiarism, since we stole that previous sentence from the great Samuel Johnson (17091784), who himself was accused of it. But even by Johnson's strict definition, these folks are all guilty as sin.

_01:: Martin Luther King Jr.: I Heard a Dream (Which Subsequently Became My Dream) When writing about the Lord G.o.d Almighty, one is generally well advised not to break the seventh commandment, but Martin Luther King Jr. managed to turn out pretty well in spite of his tendency to borrow others' words without attribution. King received a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 on the strength of a dissertation comparing the theologians Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Weiman. In a 19891990 review, though, the university discovered that King had plagiarized about a third of his thesis from a previous student's dissertation. And although it was closer to liberal adaptation than outright plagiarism, King's seminal "I Have a Dream" speech was, well, let's say "inspired by" a speech that an African American preacher named Archibald Carey Jr. gave to the Republican National Convention in 1952.

_02:: Stendhal: The Politician's Plagiarist When asked by Oprah Winfrey about his favorite book during the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore cited Stendhal's The Red and the Black, a novel set in post-Napoleonic France. The book's protagonist, Julien Sorel, is an ambitious young womanizer who adopts the hypocrisy of his time in order to move up in the world. In his own time, Stendhal, whose real name was Henri Beyle, was most famous not for his novels, but for his books about art and travel. In one, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio, Stendhal plagiarized extensively from two previous biographies. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of theft, Stendhal added forgery to the list of his literary crimes, manufacturing correspondence in the hopes of exonerating himself.

_03:: Alex Haley and the Roots of Roots Haley initially gained prominence for being the "as told to" author behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then went on to publish the epic Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, supposedly a true story that traced Haley's ancestry back to an African man, Kunta Kinte. Haley won a Pulitzer the next year, and the book was made into a wildly popular miniseries (which, curiously enough, featured the PBS show Reading Rainbow's Le-Var Burton as Kinte). After the book's publication, though, Haley admitted that he made up large swaths of the Roots story and, in a further embarra.s.sment, was sued by author Harold Courlander for plagiarism. Haley acknowledged lifting (accidentally, he claimed) three paragraphs from Courlander's work and settled the suit out of court.

_04:: John Milton: In His Own Words Was the half-blind creator of Paradise Lost a plagiarist? Well, no. But William Lauder, an 18th-century scholar, sure wanted you to think so. Bitter about his professional failures, Lauder published several essays in 1747 claiming to "prove" that Milton had stolen almost all of Paradise Lost from various 17th-century poets. One problem, though. Lauder had forged the poems, interpolating text from Paradise Lost into the original doc.u.ments. For a while, many (including the great Samuel Johnson) supported Lauder, but it soon became clear by studying extant copies of the old poems that Lauder, not Milton, was the cheat. And cheating, at least in this case, didn't pay: Exiled to the West Indies, Lauder died an impoverished shopkeeper.

Supine Successes:

4 Cats Who Lay Down on the Job

But Got Things Done Anyway

Parents and coaches have the annoying habit of urging people to get up and at 'em. Someone should remind them that the "up" part isn't always necessary.

_01:: Florence Nightingale: Don't Just Do Something, Lie There As a hero of the Crimean War, nurse Florence Nightingale revolutionized the care of wounded and ill soldiers. And she's been remembered by British soldiers in the Crimea as the tireless "Lady with the Lamp," for patrolling field hospitals all through the night. It's no wonder, then, that Nightingale returned from the Crimea to London in 1856 with enough clout to lobby Queen Victoria for improvements in military living conditions. The next year, however, the 37-year-old health-care advocate lay down and seldom again got up. Doctors who examined her found her perfectly healthy, with no apparent physical reason for her sudden unwillingness to rise. Living as an invalid for the last 53 years of her life, Nightingale remained inert yet rarely indulged in idleness. She supervised fund-raising, advocated better training for nurses and midwives, received official visitors, took care of correspondence, and oversaw substantial projectssuch as founding a London nursing schoolall from the comfort of her couch.

_02:: Mark Twain: "A Pretty Good Gospel"

"Whenever I've got some work to do I go to bed," said the 69-year-old Mark Twain in 1905. In an interview with the New York Times, he explained: "I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis. Suppose your bronchitis lasts six weeks. The first two you can't do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don't mind staying in bed." At his mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, the writerwhose real name was Samuel Clemensran a rubber hose from the gas chandelier in his bedroom to a gas lamp on his bedside table so that he would have enough light to write by. "Work in bed is a pretty good gospel," he told the Times. Of course, this is also coming from the man who said, "Whenever I feel the urge to exercise I lie down until the feeling pa.s.ses away."

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist THOMAS MORGAN AND HIS FLY PLATE.

Thomas Hunt Morgan, the n.o.bel Prizewinning geneticist whose research with fruit flies established the role of the chromosome in inheritance, was a meticulous thinker, but he was unspeakably sloppy about everything else. So, how sloppy was he? Morgan once wore a length of string as a belt and often sported shoes and s.h.i.+rts with holes in them. In his Columbia University laboratory, which smelled of fermented bananas (food for the insects), Morgan's staff threw discarded fruit flies into a jar of oil that they called "the morgue." Their boss, by contrast, simply smashed his flies against the white porcelain plate he used for counting them. He would leave the acc.u.mulating mess for days, even weeks, until someoneoften the wife of one of his graduate studentsfelt compelled to wash the plate. Need more? His mail, which was usually unopened, lay in a ma.s.sive pile that cluttered his lab table workstation until somebody else threw it away.

_03:: Winston Churchill: We Will Fight Them from the Bedroom Britain's cigar-chomping prime minister during World War II conducted considerable state business from his bed. Tucked under the covers, the people's PM would dictate letters, telegrams, and speechesincluding his famous "Battle of Britain Speech" of 1940to his secretaries until the early hours of the morning. He worked so late that secretaries were given sleeping quarters in the official residence, 10 Downing Street, so that one would always be on hand. In the morning, Churchill breakfasted and read the newspaper in bed, then would dictate again, to a secretary sitting on the end of his bed. If he had no meetings scheduled, he stayed in bed, working all the while, until noon. Then he would rise, bathe, and go to the House of Commons.

_04:: Hugh Hefner: All Play Is All Work Given the subject matter of Playboy magazine, publisher Hugh Hefner could have claimed the most enjoyable hours spent in the revolving circular bed of his mansion as work time. Nice work if you can get it. That's not what got him on this list, however. Especially in the swingin' 1960s, when his home and headquarters was the 70-room Playboy Mansion on Chicago's Gold Coast, the workaholic's office wear was always silk pajamas, and it wasn't unusual for him to sprawl across that hedonistic bed along with stacks of photos to select from or copy to be reviewed for the next issue. In 1971, Hefner ditched midwestern winters in favor of southern California, where he brought his style of relaxed labor to a Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills.

Touch of Evil Xaviera Hollander, famous prost.i.tute and author of The Happy Hooker, still makes her living in the sack, kinda. She owns a bed-and-breakfast in Amsterdam.

Hooked on Tonics:

5 Artists Who Bowed to Beer Pressure

Asked to give advice to aspiring writers, novelist William Styron once said, "You ought not to drink; you ought to write." The advice is a lot easier given than followed.

_01:: Patrick Branwell Bronte: Black Sheep in a Snowy Flock As a boy, Patrick Branwell Bronte (called Branwell) created an elaborate imaginary world with his big sister Charlotte. Including younger sisters Emily and Anne, the Bronte children of Haworth, Yorks.h.i.+re, spun fantasies that fueled the girls' later careers as novelists. Branwell wrote, too, but never published anything beyond a few poems in local newspapers. A gifted musician and artist, he opened a portrait studio, hoping to thrive as a painter. Lacking commissions, though, he spent more time in pubs than at the easel. Fired from the few jobs he triedeither for incompetence or (in the case of one tutoring position) questionable behavior toward his employer's wifeBranwell Bronte took to drinking more and to opium. By many accounts as promising a creative force as his sisters were, Branwell died a failure at 31.

_02:: F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Sodden Side of Paradise Famed novelist (and the guy responsible for plenty of required high school reading) F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in L.A. in 1940, believing himself a failure. Aside from his first book, 1920's This Side of Paradise, his works had not sold well. That included the critically well received The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald did, however, earn good money writing stories for magazines, but had not saved any. His glamorous marriage had gone adrift upon a sea of alcohol and, in wife Zelda's case, insanity. Although an alcoholic, Fitzgerald typically wrote sober, before his first c.o.c.ktail of the day. Free of alcoholism, however, he would likely have completed many more novels and may even have been able to hold his family together. When he died, Fitzgerald was writing a novel, The Last Tyc.o.o.n, and it was going welllargely because he was staying away from the bottle. Too bad he never finished the book. After he died, scholars placed Fitzgerald among the best American novelists.

_03:: John Barrymore: Good Night, Sweet (Hiccup!) Prince Decades before granddaughter Drew appeared on the scene, matinee idol John Barrymore was the most celebrated member of a show business dynasty, along with brother Lionel, a character actor, and sister Ethel, a leading lady of the stage. The three grew up as theater royalty, since parents Maurice Barrymore and Georgiana Drew were 19th-century stars. John took after his famous father, and the resemblance extended to their drinkinga trait that killed them both. When drunk, John made public scenes. He flew into screaming rages. He urinated in public. And the effects played into his career. In his final decade, Johnonce considered the greatest actor of his time for roles such as Hamletwas reduced to taking degrading parts in trashy films. His mind was so riddled by booze that he couldn't remember his lines and he often had to read them from a blackboard off camera. A tragic ending for the brilliant talent, he died in 1942 at the age of 60.

Touch of Evil Original KISS drummer Peter Criss won an out-of-court settlement after the Star depicted him as a homeless drunk living under a Santa Monica bridge in 1991. The person photographed wasn't Criss but a look-alike alcoholic.

_04:: Dylan Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle..."

Precocious Welshman Dylan Thomas caught the attention of the London literary world when he was only 20 with the publication of his first book, 18 Poems, in 1934. The Celtic rhythms of his English verse, and their themesgnawing at elusive love and inevitable deathcame across as startlingly full of feeling. Thomas, who had quit school at 16 to become a newspaper reporter, was a writer for the rest of his 39 years, producing poetry, prose, and drama, but he was also a heavy drinker. Constantly in debt to the Inland Revenue (Britain's counterpart to the IRS) and frequently broke, Thomas used alcohol for solace and inspiration. When away from wife Caitlin on a visit to London or on a speaking tour of U.S. universities, the poet was almost certain to get roaring drunk. It was on just such a trip that he died in New York, in 1953, of acute alcohol poisoning.

_05:: Charles Bukowski: When Life Inebriates Art Some artists lose precious years of their productive life to the bottle. Bukowski, on the other hand, drank as he wrote and wrote as he drank. The prolific Los Angeles poet, who also wrote short stories (collected in the volume Notes of a Dirty Old Man) and novels (such as Post Office), wrote about drunks, prost.i.tutes, and down-and-outers. His frequent main character, the hard-drinking and often pathetic Henry Chinaski, was a thinly veiled portrayal of Bukowski himself. The violence and graphic frankness in his work flowed from a dissolute life that Bukowski embraced, exposed, mocked, andin an odd wayromanticized. His one screenplay, for the 1987 movie Barfly, was a love story featuring alcoholics on skid row.

If I Had a Hammock:

5 Lazily Designed Landmarks

Attention do-it-yourselfers: You aren't the only ones to ever screw up a project. And you can take comfort in the fact that, most likely, your botched projects aren't on public display. Here are five high-profile screwups that don't have the luxury of anonymity.

_01:: Don't Lean on Me: Pisa's Towering Problems The best known of the world's landmark blunders, the famed Leaning Tower is actually a series of blunders. Begun by Bonanno Pisano (whose name, ironically, means "A good year in Pisa") in 1174, the tower started leaning almost immediately, due to the incredibly poor soil conditions beneath it. Only three floors were completed before Pisa's frequent wars halted construction for 94 years. Then, by the time construction resumed in 1272, the lean was considerable. Of course, rather than demolis.h.i.+ng it and starting over (preferably on more stable ground), the builders decided to correct for the lean by building the rest of the tower at a compensatory angle. Which is why, today, the tower doesn't just lean. It actually curves.

_02:: That Sinking Feeling: The Story of Folsom Library The goof-ups in the construction of the Folsom Library at upstate New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst.i.tute are made even more ironic by the fact that they occurred at an engineering school. The library's floors were originally intended to bow upward slightly, so the weight of the books would level them. Unfortunately, the construction crews were a little foggy on this concept and built them nice and level. Like floors should be, d.a.m.n it! Once the books were added, though, the floors developed a p.r.o.nounced sag. RPI legend also has it that the contractor hired to design the foundation did so without knowing the building was a library, so he didn't account for the weight of the books. The resulting wimpiness of the foundation causes Folsom Library to sink about one inch every year. It's one of several buildings on campus that are sinking, sagging, or moving, phenomena the students refer to generally as "sliding down the hill into Troy."

Lies Your Mother Told You DON'T THROW RICE (THROW b.u.t.tERFLIES?) Under the sway of the widespread but ridiculous myth that wedding rice poses a threat to birds, thousands of newlyweds have sought out rice alternatives, with questionable results. One of the more popular, ostensibly eco-friendly solutions is b.u.t.terflies: They're pretty, they're totally natural, and they'll make youa terrorist? So say the generally genial folks at the North American b.u.t.terfly a.s.sociation, who argued in 1999 that releasing b.u.t.terflies into the wild amounted to "environmental terrorism." Nonnative b.u.t.terflies can cause a host of problemsintroducing new parasites to native populations, interbreeding, and messing up migratory patterns. Some lepidopterologists (yes, there's a word for b.u.t.terfly scientists) have even expressed concern that the growing popularity of b.u.t.terfly releases has led to overharvesting of wild monarchs, the world's most popular b.u.t.terfly species. Popular alternatives for true environmentalists include bubbles and rose petals. Or, you know, rice also works.

Touch of Evil Less than three years after appearing on the "state quarters" series, the New Hamps.h.i.+re natural rock formation known as the "Old Man of the Mountain" crumbled. Of course, the same force that originally crafted the site was to blame for its collapse: Mother Nature.

_03:: Foul Ballpark: Houston's Disastrous Dome OK, for its time it was pretty amazing. But the Houston Astrodome had some major problems when it first opened in 1965. Proclaimed a masterpiece of engineering and "the Eighth Wonder of the World," its original roof was made of clear Lucite panels. All of which sounds fine, but actually caused such a bad glare that outfielders routinely lost sight of the ball. So the roof panels were painted to block out the sun. Also not a bad idea, except that it caused the gra.s.s on the field to die almost immediately (its life may have been prolonged by the notoriously leaky roof, which let in so much rain during a game on July 30, 1972, that ushers handed out plastic rain s.h.i.+elds). What to do? Officials replaced the gra.s.s with a new invention: a green carpet called AstroTurf, an abomination that can be blamed for enough wrenched ankles, torn anterior cruciate ligaments, and "turf toes" to fill a Hall of Fame. Texas tidbit: When the stadium was originally proposed, the team was called the Houston Colt .45s. The groundbreaking was performed by city commissioners firing real Colt .45 pistols at the ground (they used blanks).

_04:: Tacoma Narrows Bridge Is Falling Down Motorists noticed movement of Was.h.i.+ngton's Tacoma Narrows Bridge on windy days almost immediately after it opened, quickly dubbing it "Galloping Gertie." But it would take a degree in structural engineering to understand precisely what went wrong on November 7, 1940. That's the day old Gertie shook herself to pieces and crashed into Puget Sound. But it can be summed up (kinda) by saying that strong winds induced vibrations in the bridge's rigid steel side girders that started out as vertical oscillations and then became torsional nodes. Got that? In short, it twisted itself to smithereens. At the worst extremity of the twisting motion, the sidewalk on one side of the bridge was 28 feet higher than on the other. Remarkably, there was only one casualty in the collapse: a three-legged, paralyzed black spaniel named Tubby, who was stranded in a car when his owner, Leonard Coatsworth, fled the bridge. Tubby's death earned Coatsworth $364.40 in compensation from the Was.h.i.+ngton State Toll Bridge Authority. Not too shabby; he only got $450 for the car.

_05:: Putting Your Hanc.o.c.k Where You Shouldn't: Boston's Most Notorious Building The tallest structure in New England, Boston's John Hanc.o.c.k Tower is a s.h.i.+mmering geometric tower of 10,000 squares of reflective gla.s.s. Designed by I. M. Pei, the world-famous architect who created the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the controversial addition to the Louvre, and many other structures, this Bean-town creation was unfortunately snakebit from the start. After completion in 1976, the building became a menace as pressure differentials and poor securing techniques caused its huge gla.s.s panels to routinely pop out and plummet the 62 stories to Clarendon Street below. The high Boston winds caused an inordinate amount of swaying. And the tower's weight caused nearby buildings, including a historic hotel and church, to sink and suffer structural damage. Eventually, all 10,000 gla.s.s panels had to be replaced to correct the sway. During the process, it earned the nickname "Plywood Place."

"Fortunate Son":

4 World Leaders Who Accomplished

Absolutely Nothing

Inept people in positions of power? So many to choose from, so little s.p.a.ce. Ah, well. Here are four to get you started.

_01:: Commodus (161192 CE) Commodus has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst Roman emperorsand that's saying something. He was cruel, s.a.d.i.s.tic, vicious, and crazier than an outhouse rat (perhaps that's all par for the course). He also renamed Rome, as well as days of the week, after himself, thought of himself as the reincarnation of the demiG.o.d Hercules, dressed in lion skins, and killed hundreds of animals and people in the gladiator arena in rigged fights. Need more? Commodus was so swept up in the Hercules/gladiator thing that he let others run the empire, until they showed too much competence. Then he'd have 'em killed. As for his own life, Commodus was strangled by a wrestler while taking a bath. In his wake came a long line of really lame emperors, and one not-so-lame movie, as 2000's Gladiator was very loosely based on the Commodus administration.

_02:: Pope John XII (937964) There were a lot of bad popes in the Middle Ages, but this guy, whose birth name was Octavian, was a pip. As Daddy's little boy (and son of the secular ruler of Rome), John XII was given the keys to the pope-dom at just 18. But things didn't exactly start off on the right foot. After a disastrous military expedition against a rebellious lord in the Papal States, John XII settled for less ambitious pursuits. In the eight years to follow, John XII was guilty of rape, fornication, looting the church treasury, and gambling. After being briefly (and rightly) deposed, John struck back at his deposers with even more unholy behavior...by killing some and mutilating others. Good Catholics can be comforted in knowing that he died with almost as little grace as he lived: John's less-than-saintly life was ended in 964 by an enraged husband, who caught his wife being given more than just the sacrament. John's reign accomplished only one thing: it ensured the pope's office would become politically trivial during the rest of the Middle Ages.

_03:: Edward II (12841327) Lazy and incompetent, Eddie II got to be king of England only because his three older brothers all died. Quite an honor indeed! Taking the throne in 1307, Edward abandoned his father's efforts to work through the n.o.bility to get things done. Instead, he chose to irritate them by conferring power to a guy from France who was his best friend and possibly his lover (not the best decision). Edward also had his royal rump handed to him by the Scots, who were fighting under Robert the Bruce at the time. But that isn't the worst of it. Edward finally agreed to a set of limits on his authority imposed by English n.o.bles, but reneged. His disaffected wife, a French princess, then invaded England with her new boyfriend. Ever incompetent, Edward was deposed, imprisoned, and eventually murdered. A tough end, even for a nincomp.o.o.p.

_04:: James Buchanan (17911868) Whenever there is talk of America's worst presidents, Buchanan's name is almost sure to come up. Which is too bad, even if warranted, because old James had one of the best political pedigrees. When elected in 1856, Buchanan had been a legislator, congressman, U.S. senator, minister to Russia and Great Britain, and secretary of state. Unfortunately, he was also a Northerner with Southern sympathies at a time when America was rife with sectional tensions, thus pleasing no one. Thoroughly incompetent in the post, President Buchanan cleverly confronted the tensions over slavery by doing nothing. Of course, the economic depression triggered by a bank panic didn't really help matters. It's no wonder Buchanan didn't run for reelection on the Democratic ticket. One good thing did result from his incompetence, though. Buchanan's paralysis caused a split in his party, which helped ensure the election of a Republican candidate in 1860: a fellow by the name of Lincoln.

Touch of Evil Before his death, George V predicted that once his son took the throne, he would "ruin himself in 12 months." He was wrong, however, as Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson two months before the full year was up.

The Inconvenience of Fact-checking: