The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  Jack Parsons’ pioneering work, however, would soon help turn rocket science into reality. He was born in Los Angeles in 1914, the son of a wealthy and well-connected family living in a sprawling mansion on Pasadena’s Millionaire Row. His father deserted the family early on and Parsons had a lonely childhood, spoilt by his mother. Bullied at school, he buried himself in science-fiction magazines. It was through sci-fi mags that Parsons discovered his passion in life (or one of them, at least) – explosives. Juvenile experiments with homemade rockets shattered the peace of leafy Pasadena and he was expelled from high school after blowing up the school toilets.

  Although Parsons had little formal education beyond high school, his self-taught knowledge of combustible chemicals got him a job at Halifax Explosives Co. Photographs of him around this time show a tall, slim, handsome youth with a fondness for ripped jeans and T-shirts; he is sometimes referred to as the “James Dean of American rocketry”, although, in fact, he looked much more like a younger version of the man he would one day work for – Howard Hughes.

  At twenty-one, in spite of what he described in his own words in his diary as a “dangerous attachment” to his mother, Parsons met a girl called Helen at a church dance and, after a brief courtship, they were married. His fascination for rocketry, meanwhile, was noticed by Robert Goddard and, at the age of twenty-two, Parsons was invited to become a member of the three-man California Institute of Technology’s rocket research group. They were known as “The Suicide Squad” because of the alarming explosions they caused on campus. When the USA joined the Second World War, the military called upon Parsons and his crew to see if their rockets could propel planes into the air in places without adequate runways. Their successes went far beyond the original brief, developing a fuel source that would burn long enough and with sufficient thrust to reach outer space.

  After the war, Parsons and his friends from the Suicide Squad founded Aerojet Corp., now the world’s largest rocket producer and manufacturer of solid-fuel boosters for space shuttles. Their chief consultant was Caltech’s colourful professor of astronomy, Fritz Zwicky.

  A star in the field of cosmology, Zwicky was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant astronomers. He coined the term “supernova” to describe exploding stars whose cores collapsed to form small, ultra-dense neutron stars. More controversially, he also noticed that galaxies were spinning so rapidly that logically they should fly apart. Something was keeping them together, but what? It was nothing that the eye could see. Zwicky reasoned that there must be some invisible matter that was providing just enough gravity to hold it all together. And so the concept of dark matter was born. The cosmological world thought that Zwicky had lost his marbles. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when astronomers returned to the idea to explain the same phenomenon they were observing in other galaxies, that he turned out to be right.

  Zwicky fell out with just about everyone he ever worked with. He once threatened to kill his closest collaborator Walter Baade and accused him of being a Nazi – which Baade never was. In the end, Baade was so scared of Zwicky that he refused to be left alone in the same room as him. Zwicky’s aggressive behaviour and explosive temper were legendary. A fitness fanatic, he was in the habit of dropping to the floor midconversation to demonstrate his one-arm push-up. He was known to accost unfamiliar students in the astronomy building at Caltech and ask, “Who the hell are you?”18

  Clearly, Zwicky was not a man to be crossed, but Jack Parsons did it anyway. When Zwicky ordered a batch of chemicals Parsons had not personally recommended, he retaliated by simply blowing the batch up, almost taking half the company with it. Zwicky was, in any case, deeply unimpressed by Parsons and his “Buck Rogers”-style rocket propulsion, believing he was wasting his time on a scientifically invalid subject. Rockets, Zwicky said, could never, ever operate in deep space because they required an atmosphere to push against to provide thrust. As evidence to the contrary mounted, the mighty Zwicky was forced to recant.

  Parsons was described as “slightly crazy” by his colleagues, a slight understatement as it turned out. Before each rocket test, he routinely invoked Pan, the horned god of fertility, although his eccentricities extended far beyond the odd pagan chant. While busy inventing the rocket fuel that made the space age possible and almost killing his work colleagues in the process, he was enjoying a bohemian double life. His home, a vast mansion in Pasadena, was regularly full of assorted lodgers and hangers-on. He had placed local adverts offering accommodation, specifying that only musicians, artists, atheists and anarchists need apply. There were rumours of strange goings-on, including black magic and orgies. One visitor wrote that “two women in diaphanous gowns would dance around a pot of fire surrounded by coffins topped with candles . . .”

  One night in 1942, police called investigating reports that a pregnant woman was jumping naked through a fire in the back yard. Parsons, at his charming best, convinced the officers of his position as a respectable scientist and the matter was dropped. Soon afterwards, a sixteen-year-old boy reported P arsons to the police claiming the scientist’s followers had forcibly sodomized him during a “Black Mass”. The police didn’t believe him. Parsons’ “cult”, they reported back, was merely “an organization dedicated to religious and philosophical speculation, with respectable members such as a Pasadena bank president, doctors, lawyers and Hollywood actors”.

  In fact, Parsons had long since immersed himself in the philosophy of the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. “The Beast”, as Crowley was known to his mother, was born into a wealthy brewing family and spent his early years combating boredom by dabbling in his two favourite activities – mysticism and sex. He later combined the two when he discovered “mystic sodomy”, one of the many dubious practices Crowley advocated for self-improvement. In 1941, Parsons joined the California branch of the Crowley cult. They were quick to latch on to the wealthy young scientist as a potential saviour for their movement and invited him to become their leader. He accepted and, styling himself “The Antichrist”, began donating most of his salary to the upkeep of his lodge brethren.

  By this time, Parsons had left his wife Helen and was having an affair with her eighteen-year-old sister Betty. Visitors to Parsons’ home, meanwhile, included the young sci-fi pulp writer and fellow Crowley enthusiast L. Ron Hubbard, for whom the Scientology movement was still just a twinkle in his eye. Parsons was mesmerized by Hubbard, especially by his extensive knowledge of Crowley’s writings. Hubbard moved in with Parsons and the two became close.

  While pursuing some more material scientific pursuits, Parsons at this time was apparently trying to create a “Moon Child”, a magic being conjured via mystic ritual who would usher in a new age of liberty and signal the end of the Christian era. This involved something called “magical masturbation”, apparently carried out in front of Hubbard.

  Unfortunately, Parsons was rather useless as a magus. After a couple more failed attempts to communicate with the whore of Babylon, he and Hubbard decided to embark on a more business-based venture – Allied Enterprises – buying boats on the East Coast for resale in California. Parsons went off the idea when Hubbard took off for Florida with his girlfriend Betty and most of his money, supposedly to buy some boats. It was the last Parsons saw of Betty or his money,19 although he remained mysteriously devoted to Hubbard. A month later, Betty and Hubbard were married. When the Sunday Times published an article in 1969 exposing the connection between Hubbard, Parsons and the bisexual drug addict Crowley, the Church of Scientology was keen to explain a “misunderstanding”. Their founder, they explained, had, in fact, been sent by US Naval Intelligence to infiltrate Parsons’ evil black magic cult and “rescue” a girl.

  Not surprisingly, Parsons’ professional reputation suffered; nor did he escape the attentions of one J. Edgar Hoover. From the early 1940s, he was watched by the FBI, initially because of suspected communist affiliations. It was only much later that they got wind of his occultist activities. You can imagi
ne how much shelf space an FBI file on a communist occultist alone would occupy, but yet another FBI file on Parsons was opened in 1951, this time for alleged espionage. He was caught stealing classified documents from his then employer Hughes Aircraft and passing them to the newfound state of Israel. In fact, Parsons was probably only looking for a new job, but the implication was that he was part of a covert effort to help Israel build a nuclear weapon. He was lucky to escape prosecution for treason and was stripped of his security clearance. Flat broke, the scientist who once dreamed of blasting Man into outer space was reduced to working as a petrol pump attendant, supplemented by stints on Hollywood B-movies as a special-effects expert.

  Parsons didn’t live to see his fuel invention take Man to the Moon. While working at home in his backyard laboratory, he accidentally blew himself up. The police found the residue of the highly combustible explosive fulminate of mercury in a litter bin, together with shards of a tin can. Parsons had been mixing the chemical in a coffee tin when he accidentally dropped it in the bin. From the blast marks on his body, it looked as though he’d tried to catch the tin before it made impact with a hard surface. The resulting small explosion ignited other chemicals in the laboratory causing a devastating blast. His distraught mother Ruth took her own life a few hours later.

  According to Parsons’ biographer John Carter in Sex and Rockets, the Occult World of Jack Parsons, there was another interesting item found by police investigators on the Parsons property after his death – a small black box. It contained a film, showing Jack Parsons having sex with his dog and his mother.

  Most Prolific Inventor of Things that Should Never Have Got Off the Drawing Board

  Thomas Midgley Jnr was a born inventor who, over the course of his career, came to hold more than 100 patents. But the world would have been a safer place if Thomas Midgley Jnr hadn’t been born at all.

  He had an uncanny knack for developing solutions that seemed all right at the time. Take leaded petrol, for example; that was one of his. In 1916, he was hired to work in the laboratory of the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company on automotive research. One of his first assignments was to find a solution to engine “knock”, a destructive phenomenon that occurred in internal combustion engines, characterized by an annoying “ping” sound, accompanied by overheating, jerky motion and sluggish response. Leaded petrol had many benefits – increased engine horsepower, greater safety, reliability and speed. Unfortunately, leaded petrol also turned out to be a major air pollutant. By the 1970s, millions of city dwellers had greatly elevated levels of highly toxic lead in their blood. Thanks to Midgley, children all over the world had lower IQs because their brains were poisoned by lead.

  But that wasn’t the half of it. A decade later, the well-meaning Midgley had another bright idea. Refrigeration at that time was often an appallingly risky business. Fridges used dangerous gases that were flammable, unstable and could leak. In 1929, a leaky refrigerator at a hospital in Ohio killed more than a hundred people. Midgley discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were an almost perfect substance for refrigerators, air-conditioners and aerosols. In 1931, he demonstrated just how safe CFCs were by filling his lungs with the vapour and exhaling it to extinguish a candle. He was lauded as a genius. It was only much later that CFCs were found to destroy the ozone layer. The chlorofluorocarbons that had cooled the world and chilled its food were also destroying its protection against the Sun’s rays.

  Midgley never knew how much havoc he had wreaked with leaded petrol and CFCs because he died long before anyone else realized it. There was at least poetic justice in his death. In 1940, he contracted polio which left him wheelchair-bound. Finally – and fatally – he devised a contraption comprising ropes and pulleys that allowed him to hoist himself out of bed without assistance. On the morning of 2 November 1944, his wife found him lifeless, having strangled himself with his final invention.

  ___________________

  1 See “Least Comprehensible Scientific Paper”.

  2 They are impregnated by insects, allegedly.

  3 This was the age of the polymath. In his spare time, Wren experimented on the effects of injecting various liquids into the bloodstream of dogs and once wrote to Hooke boasting that had cured his wife’s thrush by hanging a bag of live boglice around her neck. The Wrens also had a confusing family tradition of naming sons after their fathers. In Christopher Wren’s case, it was even more confusing because he was actually the second son of Christopher Wren senior; he had an older brother, also called Christopher.

  4 Bill Bryson notes in A Short History of Everything that this was like saying you’ve found a cure for cancer but had forgotten where you put the formula.

  5 It has been claimed that Duillier was Newton’s gay lover, but there is really no evidence to prove it one way or the other.

  6 Winner of the Edinburgh Fringe Best Joke 1873.

  7 Damien, with his freshly broken leg, explained to the king that the hen feathers in his winged contraption had apparently been so strongly attracted to the dung below that it had caused him to crash.

  8 Which is a pity because it might have come in useful later for his job as Master of the Mint.

  9 He did not officially relinquish his position as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge until 1701, but by then he had long stopped giving lectures and rarely even visited the university, although he continued to draw the very substantial salary of £1,500 per annum.

  10 And he would have been very surprised to find that he is largely remembered for giving his mispronounced surname to a fat American rock ’n’ roll singer.

  11 Hoyle believed that the “big bang” theory was complete nonsense and was ready to argue with anyone who said otherwise. When he first came up with “big bang” during a radio talk on the BBC, it was a flippant remark intended to mock the theory; he clung stubbornly to his belief that the universe had always been there to his death. Unfortunately for Hoyle, he had created such a memorable sound bite that everyone thought he created the original theory himself – to Hoyle’s eternal annoyance.

  12 Except in France, where Blondlot’s discredited science refuses to go away. The idea persists that a glowing “biofield” surrounds the human body and French clinics will offer you a healthier life through N-rays.

  13 His first weather forecast which was printed in The Times on 1 August 1861, noted: “General weather probable during the next two days.”

  14 Even in Darwin’s day, evolutionary theory was not entirely new. The idea that species can adapt and change over the course of time had been put forward by several people before – including Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus. Seventy years before Darwin finally got around to writing On the Origin of Species, an aristocratic Scot, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, published a six-volume treatise called Of the Origin and Progress of Language, the first work to suggest that mankind is descended from apes. He believed that the human tailbone was a vestige of our ape ancestry and spent his life convinced that babies were born with tails and that there was a universal conspiracy of silence among midwives who cut them off at birth.

  15 It was neither Darwin nor Wallace who were the first to coin the phrase ”survival of the fittest”. It was first used by the English biologist Herbert Spencer, who was, ironically, a raging hypochondriac.

  16 He left his wife Cecila in Dublin in 1820 and began a relationship with a married woman, Anne Boursiquot, who had a child rumoured to be Lardner’s. Just in case anyone was in any doubt, she named her son Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot.

  17 Later Herschel sent another letter to Nature giving full credit to Faulds for his original discovery, but this disclaimer went largely unnoticed and, by this time, Galton had already usurped Faulds’ place in history.

  18 In another career-limiting move he referred to his fellow astronomers at Mount Wilson and Paloma as “spherical bastards”. Why spherical, he was asked? “Because they are bastards any way you look at them.” Some of his work methods didn�
��t do much to varnish his reputation either, including the time Zwicky persuaded the night assistant at the observatory to fire a cannon out of the dome slit in the direction the telescope was pointing to see if that improved the viewing.

  19 Hubbard used the money he defrauded from Parsons to publish his book Dianetics, the basis for the Scientology movement.

  3

  Who Dares Loses: Business Blunders, Bankrupts and Brand Disasters

  In which Mr Edison invents a concrete piano; a man tries to grow tea in Sweden; Mr Ratner’s punchline fails; fear of masturbation shapes the modern breakfast table; and Mr Goodyear gets into a spot of bother with his rubber vest.

  Most Flawed Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

  For reasons unknown, in 1669 a Hamburg merchant called Hennig Brand became convinced that he could turn human urine into gold. He collected a small lake of the stuff – between fifty and sixty bucketfuls in all – each bucket taking at least a fortnight to fill. He then allowed the urine to stand and putrefy until, in his own words, it “bred worms”. Ignoring the protests of his wife, he then boiled it down into a waxy residue, and left it in his cellar for several months until it had fermented and turned black. Brand then heated the black fermented urine and distilled it into a large beaker.