There's A Fly In My Urinal
Urinal stalls at JFK airport (Dylan Isabell / NPR)
This will have to be a guys-only experience, but should an urgent need send you to the men's room at Terminal Four at JFK Airport in New York, or to the men's rooms at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, or to any number of stadiums, or -- for any 10-year-old boys reading -- to more and more elementary school bathrooms all over America, you may see, right above the drain, a perfect facsimile of a house fly.
No, it's not a real fly. It's a drawing, baked into the porcelain bowl.
(Dylan Isabell / NPR)
Or it may be a peel-and-paste decal attached to the bowl.
There has been a worldwide proliferation of urinal flies, observed May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois in her new book The Earwig's Tail. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein also noted the spread in their book Nudge.
"They've been spotted in Moscow, Singapore," Thaler says. He thinks he knows why.
(Dylan Isabell / NPR)
The presence of a fly in a urinal literally changes human behavior, he thinks -- or at least the behavior of human males.
Men Like To Aim
"Apparently," Berenbaum says, in males, "there is a deep-seated instinct to aim at targets," and having a fly to aim at reduces what she politely calls "human spillage."
When flies were introduced at Schiphol Airport, spillage rates dropped 80 percent, says manager Aad Keiboom. A change like that, of course, translates into major savings in maintenance costs.
Thaler has tried to imagine how the airport made its calculations. "I'm guessing somebody went to the urinals without flies and repeatedly soaked up the ordinary spillage with a paper towel," which he then figures was carefully weighed on a scale. Then the same experiment was done at fly-emblazoned urinals, and presumably the scales reported a dramatically measurable difference in soakage.
Is This A New Idea?
However it was done, it's not exactly news that urinal targets reduce spillage. Julie Power, co-founder of a blog called Moms To Work, says she recently took a red Sharpie pen and wrote "AIM" in big letters on her home toilet bowl, and her twin boys immediately focused on the target.
Another mother reported on Thaler's blog Nudge that she tears off individual patches of toilet paper and tells her boys to "cut this in half." It apparently works. Thaler recommends Cheerios. Even though they move, or maybe because they move, Cheerios tend to focus young male minds.
Of course, the real mystery of the public urinals is: Why flies? Why not ducks or snakes or any mammals?
"Well, what do you want to pee on?" answers Doug Kempel, whose company Urinalfly sells peel-off flies for school and home bowls. Kempel is about to launch glow-in-the-dark fly decals for the adult male market because, he says, "men, evidently, hate to turn on the light at night because it blinds them," and they'd rather navigate to a soft glow in the bowl.
Kempel says while he has dabbled with a bull's-eye design, flies seem to have a special appeal.
Why a Fly?
Keiboom in Amsterdam says the original fly idea was proposed almost 20 years ago by Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff, who had served in the Dutch army in the 1960s. As a soldier he noticed that someone had put small, discrete red dots in the barracks urinals, which dramatically cut back on "misdirected flow."
Two decades later, he proposed to the airport board of directors that the dots be turned into etched flies. According to Keiboom, Van Bedoff decided that guys want to directly aim at an animal they can immobilize. The ability to use one's natural gifts and achieve victory over the foe while standing is the key, he explained. Guys, he felt, can always beat flies. That's why flies are so satisfying.
Is that the answer?
Berenbaum, the entomologist, says she's not convinced. More than a hundred years ago in Britain, bathroom bowls also sported insect images, she says. Back then, however, the favored target was not a fly, but a bee. And bees have stingers. It seems that men in the 1890s were willing to take more imaginative risks when peeing.
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SCOTT SIMON, host:
Now, for women who are listening, we have a story that will take you to some places that you're usually not allowed to go. As for men, all we can say is: this is something you know, even if you never talk about it. Breaking the silence, our science correspondent, Robert Krulwich.
ROBERT KRULWICH: May, can you hear me?
Professor MAY BERENBAUM: Hi. Yeah, can you hear me?
KRULWICH: Yeah, I can. Oh boy. Okay. My friend, Professor May Berenbaum, studies insects at the University of Illinois, and she has a friend.
Prof. BERENBAUM: My colleague, Arthur Zangerl - Z-A-N-G-E-R-L.
KRULWICH: Is this the guy who goes to Holland to study wild parsnips?
Prof. BERENBAUM: Yeah, exactly.
KRULWICH: Okay. So while Arthur was passing through the airport looking for the parsnips in Amsterdam, he saw something in the men's bathroom.
Prof. BERENBAUM: Yeah.
KRULWICH: The urinals? What is that...
Prof. BERENBAUM: That each urinal had a little figure of a fly. It looked - a very realistic fly.
KRULWICH: So it's a picture of a fly engraved into the porcelain.
Prof. BERENBAUM: Exactly. Yes. It looks very realistic.
KRULWICH: And where was it?
Prof. BERENBAUM: Just to the left, I think, of the drain.
KRULWICH: Well, why would they put a fly to the left of a drain?
Prof. BERENBAUM: I'm not an expert on urinal structures.
KRULWICH: No problem. I found an expert.
Professor RICHARD THALER (University of Chicago Business School): So, I don't remember when I saw my first fly in the urinal, but...
KRULWICH: To be fair, Richard Thaler is not really a urinal art expert; he's a professor of behavioral finance at the University of Chicago Business School.
Prof. THALER: Yes.
KRULWICH: And he's noticed that fly-bearing urinals are now showing up in more airports and more schools, in more football stadiums all over the world.
Prof. THALER: They have been spotted in Moscow and Singapore, JFK...
KRULWICH: In the new terminal in JFK.
And the reason, says May, is because when you emblazon a fly into a urinal, that fly changes human behavior. Or at any rate, the behavior of human males.
Prof. BERENBAUM: Having a target - let's see, how do we say? Reduces spillage.
KRULWICH: Spillage, yes. That's the term. And spillage in this case would mean what, in the most delicate way you can muster?
Prof. BERENBAUM: Misdirected stream?
KRULWICH: Misdirected stream, huh. Why would a fly engraving cause men to redirect their stream?
Prof. BERENBAUM: Apparently there is a deep-seated instinct to aim at targets in males.
KRULWICH: Okay, Richard, you're a male. You agree with her?
Prof. THALER: Well, sure, you know.
KRULWICH: But doesn't everybody? Certainly everybody with boys knows this. Julie Power, for example, co-founded a blog called Mothers to Work. And she has boys...
Ms. JULIE POWER (Mothers to Work): Two boys.
KRULWICH: Is misdirected stream a problem in your home?
Ms. POWER: Yes, it is a problem, Robert, I have lived with, yes.
KRULWICH: But in your blog you said you kind of have dealt with the problem, at least for a while.
Ms. POWER: What I did was I took a big - I took a red Sharpie and I wrote aim in big red letters on the toilet.
KRULWICH: You mean in the bowl?
Ms. POWER: In the bowl, on the back of the bowl.
KRULWICH: A-I-M?
Ms. POWER: A-I-M, like aim here. And then I did a big red circle around it.
KRULWICH: And will the boys aim at the circle?
Ms. POWER: Yes, they will aim, yes.
KRULWICH: So a fixed target is the key or...
Prof. THALER: Another friend of mine claims that Cheerios are really perfect. You throw one in the middle of the bowl and the boys will aim.
KRULWICH: Or for the older boys, there's the middle of the night option.
Mr. DOUG KEMPEL (Urinalfly.com): Men evidently hate to turn on the light at night because it blinds them, for whatever reason it is.
KRULWICH: That's why Doug Kempel, who runs a business called Urinalfly.com, is about to launch what he calls...
Mr. KEMPEL: Glow-in-the-dark fly.
KRULWICH: Glow-in-the-dark fly?
Mr. KEMPEL: That's right.
KRULWICH: Drawings you can paste into the toilet and because they glow, you know where to go.
Mr. KEMPEL: Yes, that's correct.
KRULWICH: But what I don't get is, why is it always a fly? I mean, why not a duck or why not a mammal?
Mr. KEMPEL: I don't know. What do you want to pee on? That's kind of the big question.
KRULWICH: Well, somebody must've decided that flies have a special attraction.
Prof. THALER: I think that the Amsterdam guy really started it. And apparently he's an economist.
Mr. AAD KEIBOOM (Deputy Director, Schiphol Airport): No, no, no.
KRULWICH: No, no, no. The man who invented etching flies into urinals was not an economist, says Aad Keiboom, deputy director at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. The guy was named Jos Van Bedoff. He was a maintenance man at the airport, and he died in the early '90s. But he got the idea when he was a kid way back in the '60s.
Mr. KEIBOOM: Yeah, when he was in the army for his military service.
KRULWICH: As a soldier, he would, as soldiers often do, go the bathroom.
Mr. KEIBOOM: Then he noticed one day that someone had made a dot in the urinal, just a small dot.
KRULWICH: But because of that dot, that bathroom was much, much cleaner. So years later he kept that thought in his head and proposed, well, not a dot but a teeny fly. The airport adopted his idea and it worked fabulously.
Prof. BERENBAUM: Eighty percent. Spillage on the men's room floor was reduced by 80 percent.
KRULWICH: Wow. Is that right?
Mr. KEIBOOM: Oh, yeah, yeah.
KRULWICH: Yeah, but why did he choose a fly? 'Cause that's your act of genius right there.
Mr. KEIBOOM: Because his idea was, and that's what he told me, that that is the animal where men would like to aim for. And if you have him, then you have him really good then he can't fly away anymore. So that's why he came up with the fly.
KRULWICH: So guys like flies because we can't beat flies. Well, says May Berenbaum, maybe, but then how do you explain that 100-plus years ago in Britain they put a very different insect into their bowls - with a stinger?
Prof. BERENBAUM: In the late 19th century, in fact, Victorian urinals often had little pictures of bees. And this is hilarious if you're an entomologist, because the scientific name, the genus name, of the honeybee is Apis.
(Soundbite of laughter)
KRULWICH: Some things just can't be explained.
Robert Krulwich, NPR News.
SIMON: If you want to see the etched flies at the JFK Airport or the fly decal, they await your inspection on our Web site, NPR.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
