Political Minute

In the spirit of the 2008 presidential elections, I’m giving you an inside-the-beltway look at the secret lives and accomplishments of past presidents to get you geared up for November.

William Howard Taft (1909-13) was both the 27th president of the United States and the 10th chief justice of the United States, the only man to ever hold both offices.

But it was his innate curiosity and work with fluid mechanics – most notably his discovery of displacement – that history has, regrettably, forgotten.

See the man was fat. Orca fat. But Taft and all his largesse existed in a pre-modern era -- before the modern photograph, before moving pictures, even before magnetic resonance imaging. There was no way to measure BMI.

And what a BMI it must have been. Taft’s military advisors joked that Taft was "too young to fight in the Civil War and too fat to take part in the Spanish War." Even his own mother wrote in a letter, a few weeks after William was born, that the baby “is very large of his age and grows fat every day."

Prophetic.

Taft got stuck in the White House bathtub and it took four men to remove him. After that incident, a new oversized bathtub was installed that was 7 feet long and 3.5 feet wide. After it was manufactured, four men fit inside the tub for a photograph.

Author Andrew Tully recalled the bathroom for a May 1952 issue of The Plumbing News: "Our President's tub was a good seven feet long---the kind in which a man can stretch out in when he comes home from the office, all tired out from working over a hot Republican."

It was in this oversized basin – which was nicknamed the “Fountain of Time” (no lie) where Taft discovered – among other things -- that displacement occurs when an object (in this case, Taft) is immersed in a fluid, pushing water out of the way and taking its place.

He figured (correctly) that the volume of the fluid displaced could then be measured and from this, the volume of the immersed object (again, Taft) can be deduced, thus changing the landscape of junior high science forever.

Bonus: a woodcarving of the actual moment where Taft discovered displacement.



Since Taft lived in a simpler time, before photography, artists who sketched the president were able to liberally improve the president’s image, which is why he looks so ripped in this woodcarving.