Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   4

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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
1770:
 Captain Cook returns from a voyage to the South Pa-
cifi c with a unique souvenir: a tattooed Polynesian named 
Omai. He’s an overnight sensation in fad-crazy London and 
starts a tattooing trend among upper-class poseurs. Between 
passionate declarations that he is “not an animal” Omai also 
manages to introduce the word 
tattoo
 into our Western lexi-
con, from the Tahitian 
tatau,
 “to mark.”
1802:
 By now, tattooing has caught on with sailors through-
out the Royal Navy, and there are tattoo artists in almost every 
British port. Especially popular are Crucifi xion scenes, tattooed 
on the upper back to discourage fl ogging by pious superiors.
1891:
 American Samuel O’Reilly “borrows” Edison’s electric 
pen design to patent a nearly identical machine that tattoos. 
(Way to stand on the shoulders of giants, Sam.) Its basic de-
sign—moving coils, a tube, and a needle bar—is still used to 
today, so remember, kids: Th
 at’s 19th-century technology 
they’re repeatedly stabbing you with.
1919:
  Th
  e troublemaker protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short 
story “In the Penal Colony” fi nally gets the law drilled into 
him—literally—by its fatal, 12-hour inscription into his skin
.
1955:
 
Robert Mitchum makes the tattoo cool again in the 
movie 
Night of the Hunter,
 playing a sociopathic traveling 
preacher with “love” and “hate” inked on his knuckles. Popu-
lar modern variants include “rock/roll” and “love/math.”
1961:
 Hepatitis B makes the tattoo not cool again, an out-
break of which is linked to tattoo parlors in New York City. 
Parlors are outlawed in the Big Apple until 1997.
2005:
 Pop culture helps tattoos become more popular in the 
West than at any time in recorded history, with more than 39 
million North Americans sporting one. It all comes back to 
Austrian Ötzi and his 57 tattoos. It might’ve taken almost 

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6,000 years, but tattooing and the West are in love again. And 
speaking of history’s great reunions . . .
10
  Get ting Put Back Together Again: 
Great Reunions
Perhaps no reunion of the 20th century had been more hotly 
anticipated than that of East and West Germany in 1990; over-
joyed Berliners tearing down 
the wall that separated them 
has become the icon for the 
end of the Cold War. And at 
fi 
rst everything was roses. 
Families  caught  on  both  sides 
of the Iron Curtain were re-
united, and the East German 
state held the fi rst  and  only 
free elections in its history, the 
major mandate of which was 
to  dissolve  the  East  German 
state. But nearly 20 years later, 
the honeymoon is over; former 
East and West are bickering 
about what most married cou-
ples bicker about: money. High 
unemployment, the failure of 
Soviet-era industries, and un-
checked migration out of East 
Germany is costing West Ger-
many upwards of €100 billion 
in aid annually.
Republics 
Behaving Badly: