Before the discovery of its comedic potential, the banana skin was considered a real public hazard. In the midth century, a man named Carl B. Frank began importing Panamanian bananas to New York City.
The fruit quickly became a popular street food throughout America, but the surge in urban migration and lack of sanitation regulation posed a major problem in cities. People often tossed their garbage into the streets, leading to a general foul stench and public waste buildup. A fresh banana peel might seem non-threatening, but a rotting banana peel was a slime-covered booby trap.
Whether or not people frequently slipped on the rotten skins, the banana peel came to symbolize poor manners. In the book Bananas: An American History , author Virginia Scott Jenkins describes how Sunday Schools warned children that an improperly discarded peel would not only definitively lead to a broken limb, but that the person with the broken limb would inevitably end up in the poorhouse due to this injury.
In , the St. During the 19th century, cities relied heavily on wild pigs that roamed the streets to dispose of rotting organic matter. This method was not wholly effective. Since the beginning of the 20th century, slipping on a banana peel has been a fixture in physical comedy. The slipping-and-falling gag is widely accepted to have originated on the Vaudeville stage.
But if you take a step, you initiate a fall. To stop it, your leading foot hits the ground with forward momentum at a strike angle of 15 degrees.
Stray banana peels have a way of sneaking up on you, though, and research suggests that taking a normal step on a substance with a CoF of less than 0. Explore the outcome of other what-if scenarios. Of course, the real danger with falling is injuring your brain, an essential organ that lives high o the ground.
If you were, say, the height of a small dog and you fell, your head would not build up enough speed to do any damage when it hit the sidewalk. No bug in the history of bugs has ever fallen to its death. The force generated by an unrestrained falling adult onto something solid is more than enough to crack a skull. The skull is stronger in the front and back, and weaker on the sides, but even if you fall onto the stronger frontal bone, a fall of six feet is enough to crack it—especially if you pitch forward.
Either way, if you cannot protect your head from a fall of six feet, your skull would fracture. Fractures are dangerous for a few reasons, but bleeding is the big one. Your brain is a blood hog, which means cracking it results in a lot of bleeding inside, putting you in immediate and deep trouble.
Bleeding inside your skull can be far more dangerous than bleeding anywhere else. If your head starts filling with blood, your brain gets squeezed.
Too much blood within your skull creates pressure that strangles the rest of your brain and chokes o and kills critical brain functions, like remembering to breathe. Of course your brain knows how fragile it is, and if you slip it works very hard to put something in the way to break your fall—hands, elbows, knees—anything but itself.
Which is why you see more bruised butts than broken heads and why banana peels are usually funny, not lethal. Bobby Leach, the English daredevil of Niagara Falls. Since , roughly fifteen people have attempted to go over Niagara Falls for the fame or the thrill see p. XXX for what happened when they did. If the peels sat there for long enough they began to rot and became even more dangerously slippery. Enough people started sliding on them that many warnings were issued about discarding bananas peels improperly.
According to the book Bananas: An American History , Sunday Schools urged kids to toss bananas in designated receptacles because a victim of the peel would get a broken limb. The situation became so dire that local governments, like those in St. Louis, had to pass laws outlawing the throwing of banana peels on public walkways.
Despite how awful it is to see someone fall, it is still pretty funny. So naturally, after seeing enough people slipping and sliding on banana peels, the situation made its way into comedy.
The potassium-loaded hazards became Vaudeville staples.
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