Chapter 7 — The Invention of Vita-Wonk

Wonka-Vite is a potion that makes people younger. It was too strong — some people's ages became minus numbers. One person became minus eighty-seven, meaning he had to wait eighty-seven years before he could come back. This is why Wonka needed to invent Vita-Wonk, which makes people older.

Mr Wonka asked two questions: 'What is the oldest living thing in the world?' and 'What lives longer than anything else?' These questions guided him toward collecting ingredients from the most ancient living things.

Mr Wonka says the Bristlecone pine lives the longest. It grows on the slopes of Wheeler Peak in Nevada, U.S.A. Some Bristlecone pines there are over 4,000 years old.

Mr Wonka mentions the Douglas fir, the oak, and the cedar as trees that do not live the longest — the Bristlecone pine outlives them all.

Wonka uses the word 'dendrochronologist' when stating that the Bristlecone pine's great age is a fact, telling Charlie to look the word up in the dictionary. A dendrochronologist is a scientist who studies tree rings to determine the age of trees.

Wonka collected: sap from a 4,000-year-old Bristlecone pine; toenail clippings from a 168-year-old Russian farmer called Petrovitch Gregorovitch; an egg from a 200-year-old tortoise belonging to the King of Tonga; the tail of a 51-year-old Arabian horse; the whiskers of a 36-year-old cat called Crumpets; a flea that had lived on Crumpets for 36 years; the tail of a 207-year-old Giant Rat from Tibet; the black teeth of a 97-year-old Grimalkin from a cave on Mount Popocatepetl; and the knucklebones of a 700-year-old Cattaloo from Peru.

Wonka tracked down the Whistle-Pig, the Bobolink, the Skrock, the Pollyfrog, the Giant Curlicue, the Stinging Slug, and the Venomous Squerkle. The Venomous Squerkle can spit poison right into your eye from fifty yards away.

After collecting samples from the oldest living things — sometimes just a hair, an eyebrow, or a tiny bit of jam scraped from between an animal's toes while it slept — Wonka spent a long time boiling, bubbling, mixing, and testing in his Inventing Room. In the end he produced one tiny cupful of oily black liquid.

The moment the twenty-year-old Oompa-Loompa swallowed four drops, he began wrinkling and shrivelling all over, his hair started dropping off, his teeth started falling out, and he suddenly became an old man of seventy-five.

The story is an excerpt from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl. It features the same characters — Mr Willy Wonka and Charlie — from the well-known Willy Wonka stories.

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