Let's Go Back Through the Listening Tube September 25-30

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Let's go back through the listening tube for this week in history.

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I'm Bob Woodley from the Listening Tube. This week in 1789, the U.S. Congress passes 12 amendments to the United States Constitution. The Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which was never ratified, the Congressional Compensation Amendment, and the 10 that are now known as the Bill of Rights. There's a lot of talk about the rights of the press now that President Trump has once again barred certain organizations from press access to the White House. Many news organizations have banded together to stick up for their banned brethren, claiming the expulsions are a violation of the First Amendment, which insists the government doesn't abridge the freedom of the press. So now a judge needs to decide if that's what happened. And so far, the judge came down on the side of the reporters, but it's only temporary. In my humble opinion, the White House should be able to keep anyone out, even if they claim to be a member of the press. There are so many ways to get information now that there's really no harm done to the public by excluding people who are not going to be objective reporters or only have an agenda to report in a negative way, regardless of whether or not the news is good. And unfortunately for the bad elements of the press corps, we have a president who remembers which ones are out for an agenda instead of informing the public. He'll gladly call them out to their faces in the Oval Office when they ask a leading question. Some people forget what it is to be a journalist and instead become antagonists. They have no place in journalism and don't deserve a spot in the Oval Office. President Trump doesn't mind tough questions, but he knows the difference between a journalist and a hack. As for the First Amendment, to abridge the press would be to condense or somehow shorten by omission. Well, those are things the writers do. The exclusion of certain members of the press doesn't stop them from doing their jobs. They simply have to find other ways to gather information from inside the White House. They all have inside sources that negate any effect of not having personal access to statements from the White House. Nobody's First Amendment rights are being violated, and I hope the court sees it that way. CNN, MS Now, and Politico are still free to write whatever they want, post whatever they want, hold panel discussions about anything they want. The only thing that's changed is the way they get their information. That's not an abridgement of the press. It's the press having to do more work in order to avoid abridging themselves. The same week in 1789, the United States Department of War first establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men. I'll bet they were early men who could fight. True patriots who were willing to serve and protect the young country and its constitution. You know, as long as they got paid for it. Just kidding. The average soldier was paid less than seven dollars a month at the time, which was considered low even back then. Today soldiers are paid much better and are provided with the most technologically advanced equipment of any soldier in the world. Being a soldier was never meant to be easy, and it isn't. If you want it to be easy, join the Air Force. Or maybe the Space Force. I don't know what basic training looks like for them. Do you do any marching or do you just float to your next class? Today's military in the United States has about 1.3 million active duty personnel, as well as more than two and a half million civilian employees. The American military is a vital part of why the United States of America has endured for 250 years. We're the origin of the acronym FAFO, which is what we need to be. This week in 1889, the first General Conference on Weights and Measures defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with 10% iridium measured at the melting point of ice. Okay. But what was it before that? I'm going to look that up.

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He's gonna look it up. He's really gonna do it. I want the truth!

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You can't handle the truth. The first definition of a meter was one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole passing through Paris, France. So maybe creating something consistent that you can actually see is a little bit more user-friendly. They did, which was a platinum bar that was the official definition of a meter until the new and improved platinum and iridium bar, which was duplicated 29 times and sent to nations around the world to standardize the measurement. Even the technology to keep it at the correct temperature was part of the package. But that wasn't where the definition of a meter ended. There was still the search for a way to define and measure a meter that was available to anyone without the use of one of thirty bars of metal strewn about the world. According to the history of the meter, a universal way of measuring a meter's length was to measure the number of wavelengths of light involving an element called Krypton 86. Like we all have some of that lying around. Honey, I'm gonna measure for a new carpet in the living room. Go grab the Krypton 86 for me, would ya? Then, once again, in 1983, another way to establish the length of a meter was approved by the International System of Units that is equal to, according to Miriam Webster, the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one two hundred ninety-nine seven hundred ninety-two four hundred fifty-eighths of a second, or to about thirty nine point thirty seven inches. Really? They're using the speed of light to measure a distance relative to an already established distance measured in inches? And it's the fourth different way to define a meter. Well, that explains the popularity of the yardstick. This week in 1906, in the presence of the king and before a great crowd, Leonardo Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrates the invention of the telequino in the port of Bilbao, guiding a boat from the shore in what is considered the birth of the remote control. Yet for some reason we were well into the 1970s and dads were still making us kids get up and change the channel on the television. Today we can preheat our oven with our telephone. We can also give our kids a mild electric shock if they refuse to get up and change the channel on the television.

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Send email to thelistening to at outlook.com.

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This week in 1982, the Chicago Tylenol murders begin when the first of seven innocent victims dies. I was stationed in Guam at the time, and having access to a teletype machine gave me access to the latest news from the United States mainland. The initial reports came in, and it wasn't clear at first what was happening. Nobody knew at the time that there would be more victims, and that they would all have one thing in common. They took a Tylenol capsule prior to dying. Unaware of the magnitude of the event, I mentioned it during one of my radio shows and took the liberty of playing the song Aspirin Damage from Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion album. I was just trying to be funny, but soon realized that there was a real crisis happening in Chicago. It wasn't long before the Tylenol capsules were the focus of the investigation, and in the meantime, all Tylenol products were being pulled from store shelves not only in Chicago, but all over the country out of an abundance of caution. Thirty-one million bottles of Tylenol were pulled from the shelves, costing the company about a hundred million dollars. I don't recall any more tainted capsules being discovered after the recall, but the death toll was limited to the first seven victims. The whole episode led to a sea change in how consumable products are packaged. At the time, a bottle of painkillers had nothing but a screw top and some cotton between the consumer and the product. That made it easy for someone to take a product off the shelf by either purchase or theft, replace the product with poison, and then put it back on the shelf for an unsuspecting person with a headache to pick up and ultimately die. That's why packages today are so difficult to open. They're either tamper-proof or tamper evident. Companies needed to hire fleets of lawyers and packaging engineers to figure out ways to reduce or eliminate responsibility if a third party tampered with their product on its way to the consumer. The Tylenol murders had almost as much effect on the everyday lives of Americans as did the september eleventh, two thousand one terror attacks. Maybe even more so for Americans who don't regularly fly to their destinations. No one has ever been arrested or held responsible for the seven people who died from cyanide poisoning as a result of taking a Tylenol capsule. But just a few days ago, ABC News reported that authorities in Boise, Idaho may have figured out who did it. A man found dead in an Idaho church after the event in Chicago had committed suicide by cyanide. He was a doctor from Florida who went missing in 1982. He was found with a key to his home and cyanide that he had made himself. Former colleagues confirmed he was fascinated with committing the perfect crime and considered cyanide a way to kill without detection. Although he never lived in Chicago, police found a Chicago map in his home. While we may have finally figured out who poisoned seven people in Chicago in 1982, it's certainly no consolation to the families of the people who were killed. And the reaction to what happened and the steps taken to protect the public from a copycat event has had a lasting effect on American life. This week in 2009, United States President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicholas Sarkozy in a joint television appearance for a G20 summit, accuse Iran of building a secret nuclear enrichment facility. Not one of them did anything about it. Follow the listening tube at thelisteningtube.com, where you'll also find not the headlines and interviews with interesting people. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou at Infinitum.