Made In America - Bill Bryson [213]
That the most successful commercial aircraft in history should be called after a circus elephant is an obvious oddity. People are sometimes surprised to learn that Jumbo the elephant wasn’t called that because he was big, but rather that big things are called jumbo because of him. In fact, when he was given his name – it is a shortening of mumbo jumbo, a term for a West African witchdoctor, which found a separate usefulness in English as a synonym for gibberish – he was just a baby, only recently arrived at London Zoo. No one had any idea that he would grow to become the largest animal ever kept in captivity.
Most Americans became familiar with Jumbo when P. T. Barnum, the circus impresario, bought the elephant from London Zoo in 1884, a scandal that outraged millions of Britons, and began exhibiting him all over America. Barnum’s handbills depicted Jumbo as absolutely enormous – one showed a coach and horses racing through his legs, with plenty of clearance. In fact, Jumbo was nothing like that tall. Though indisputably the largest elephant ever measured, he was no more than eleven feet seven inches in height. (Barnum was seldom troubled by considerations of accuracy. One of his other lasting creations, the ‘wild man from Borneo’, was in fact a native of Paterson, New Jersey.)13
None the less, thanks to Barnum’s tireless and inventive promotion, the name Jumbo became associated with largeness, and before long people were buying jumbo cigars, jumbo suitcases, jumbo portions of food, and eventually travelling on jumbo jets. Jumbo’s American career was unfortunately short-lived. One night in September 1885, after Jumbo had been on the road for only about a year, he was being led to his specially built boxcar after an evening performance in St Thomas, Ontario, when an express train arrived unexpectedly and ploughed into him, with irreversible consequences for both elephant and train. It took 160 men to haul Jumbo off the tracks. Never one to miss a chance, Barnum had Jumbo’s skin and bones separately mounted, and thereafter was able to exhibit the world’s largest elephant to two audiences at once, without any of the costs of care or feeding. He made far more money out of Jumbo dead than alive.
New as nuclear fission and twice as powerful – that’s the new, newer, newest, all-new Bulgemobile!!
20
Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
In 1959, in one of those delvings into the future that magazines found so satisfying at the time, Newsweek presented this confident scenario for the lucky housewife of 1979: ‘Waking to cool 1970-style music from a tiny phonograph built into her pillow, the housewife yawned, flicked a bedside switch to turn on the electronic recipe-maker, then rose and stepped into her ultrasonic shower.’
Among the many things Newsweek’s soothsayer failed to foresee was that by 1979 the housewife would be an endangered species. What the world got instead were words like workaholic, drive-by shootings, crack cocaine, AIDS, repetitive stress injury, gridlock and serial killer. We’re still waiting for the ultrasonic shower.
If Newsweek surveyed the future in 1959 from a somewhat optimistic perspective, we can hardly blame it. In the 1950s life in the United States was about as good as it gets. World War II had not only ended the Great Depression and decked America with honour, but had laid the groundwork for an economic boom almost beyond conceivable proportions. Where the war had reduced much of Europe and Asia to rubble, exhausted national exchequers, destroyed industries, and left millions homeless or even