The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  And that's not to mention the writers who tried to commit suicide and failed. Among them: Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky, Guy de Maupassant, Eugene O'Neill. Pretty impressive list, actually. If I plan to continue this writing thing, I better tell Julie to hide my razor blades and remove the shoelaces from my sneakers.

  I find the whole phenomenon a bit baffling. As far as jobs go, writers have a pretty sweet deal. You make your own hours, the dress code is remarkably lax. You rarely strain your back, you don't have your phone calls recorded for training purposes, and you don't have to intentionally lose to clients at golf. And the ladies like you.

  These writers need to buck up and suck up and keep the nooses off their damn necks. I haven't read about a lot of coal miners committing suicide (okay, there aren't quite as many coal miners who get write-ups in the Britannica, but you get the idea).

  Plato

  More philosophy. I get to Plato as I sit on an Acela train that's whizzing quietly and efficiently toward Philadelphia. It's Friday, and I'm with Julie--who is, thankfully, rash free--on our way to visit her brother Doug for the weekend.

  I read the fable about Plato's cave just as the train emerges from a tunnel. Weird, I think to myself. I'm coming out of a cave just as I read about coming out of a cave. Well, maybe not that weird. These coincidences happen all the time. I read the fatigue entry as I huffed away on the Stairmaster. I read about the Julian calendar while watching a miniseries about Julius Caesar. I read so damn much, these overlappings are bound to happen. If the tunnel hadn't happened, something else might have--some guy might be eating a Greek salad in the next row, or slightly less likely, drinking a glass of hemlock.

  In any case, I'm reading Plato and I have to say, I'm not impressed. His theory of forms seems absurd, even infuriating. Plato wrote about the existence of another world, apart from the physical world, a world filled with ideal forms. Somewhere, there's an ideal man, stone, shape, color, beauty, justice. Somewhere, there's the Platonic ideal of a bottle, of a chair.

  Seems like a bunch of what they used to call hogwash. Problem is, reading the Britannica is a very un-Platonic experience. Over the last 21,000 pages, I've watched everything change and evolve--men, stones, beauty, everything. How can there be an ideal form of a chair? Which of the dozens of chair styles would you choose to represent this ideal? The 18th-century ottoman? The 19th-century cockfighting chair? And what of beauty? Anyone who says that it's eternal needs to take a look at the stone cutting they show in the Britannica representing Helen of Troy, the great beauty of her day. She looked like a drag queen in need of a nose job. Today, that Helen of Troy wouldn't make it past a local Miss Broccoli pageant, much less Miss Universe. She wouldn't launch a dinghy today.

  Yes, there are a few constants among the thousands of changes. Like Planck's constant, a physical law that says that radiation emitted from atoms remains steady. And I'd like to think that "Thou shalt not kill" is a moral constant. But you won't find them in some outlandish otherworld of ideal forms.

  Likewise, I hate Plato's theory of knowledge. He resides on the knowledge-is-internal side of the spectrum. Like his teacher Socrates, Plato said that men already have all the knowledge in the world, they just need to have it drawn out of them. This, in my opinion, is more of what they used to call claptrap. I'm on the empiricist side of the knowledge debate, the side that says it all comes from the senses. I don't trust internal knowledge. Of course, there's a little rationalization going on here. I've just spent the last eight months getting knowledge through my senses. If it's true that the most important knowledge is interior, then I'm a moron.

  Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, I have to give myself credit: this is a big improvement over my interior dialogue during the Aristotle entry. Remember that one? The one that went something like: "Hey, he likes hot young girls." "Yeah, that's cool."

  plumbing

  Allow me to present Sir John Harington, another in the Britannica's continuing series of unsung heroes, and one who got his own two solid paragraphs back in the Hs. I'm stunned I haven't heard of Harington. This guy invented a device that affects my life just as much as Edison's lightbulb or the Wright brothers' airplane, something every American uses several times a day, not counting that drunken Sigma Chi pledge who repeatedly peed on my duvet cover freshman year of college. And yet I'd never seen Harington's name.

  At one point, I'd heard Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. Then I was told that was a myth--which it is--but I never learned the real identity of the man behind the can. Finally, here he is. And what a likable rascal he is.

  The first thing to strike me is that Harington is no shlub; he's the godson of Queen Elizabeth I of England and a member of her court. But as befits the father of the toilet, he wasn't exactly the most pristine courtier. In his twenties, Harington distributed among the ladies of the court a "wanton tale" from the 16th-century Italian poet Ariosto. Elizabeth was not amused. She banished her godson, imposing on him a punishment that doesn't qualify as cruel, but it sure is unusual. She ordered him to translate Ariosto's notoriously long epic poem, Orlando Furioso. Beats becoming a prison bitch, I guess.

  After doing his homework and returning to court, Harington invented the flush toilet and installed one for Queen Elizabeth in her palace. You'd think he'd get a parade. Not so much. He had the gall to write a playful book about his invention called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (a pun on "a jakes," which was Elizabethan slang for a water closet). As the Britannica says, Harington's book described his toilet "in terms more Rabelaisian than mechanical," and he was again banished from court. Exasperated--at least I would be--Harington went on a military expedition to Ireland, which finally got him knighted. A moderately happy ending for Sir John. I think Harington has my favorite resume in the Britannica--even better than Goethe's: plumber, translator, wit, army officer, royal godson, scoundrel. I don't know how history overlooked him. What does a guy have to do to get some respect? A forgotten military jaunt to Ireland gets him knighted, but revolutionizing the bathroom doesn't? And don't think Harington gets respect whenever we call the bathroom a "john." That name came about independently. We really should be calling it the Harington.

  Poe, Edgar Allan

  He married his cousin when she was thirteen. Sort of the Jerry Lee Lewis of his day but with more interest in Gothic imagery.

  pop quiz

  We're back from Philly, and my mom has sent Julie and me an e-mail. For years, my mom refused to get e-mail, saying she thought it was a waste of time, but now that she's gotten it, she's become a frighteningly enthusiastic forwarder of lawyer jokes, Jewish jokes, wacky haiku, and other things with smiley emoticons at the end of them. This e-mail is a collection of trivia called "Think you know everything? Think again." So admittedly, it's pretty relevant.

  After the Great Red Spot debacle, I've been very good recently about refraining from inserting unwanted facts into conversations with Julie. But this time I have license. Julie wants to quiz me. As I lie on the couch, my Britannica resting on my chest, she reads off her Macintosh screen.

  "All right. A dime has how many ridges around the edge?"

  "Two hundred and forty-four," I say.

  "No. A hundred and eighteen."

  "What did Al Capone's business card say he did?"

  "Phrenologist."

  "No, used furniture dealer."

  "Who invented the words 'assassination' and 'bump'?"

  "Well, Assassins were an Islamic sect. They were named for the hashish they smoked to get into a frenzied state before acts of war."

  "No. Shakespeare. What is the longest one-syllable word in the English language?"

  "Makalakamakai," I say. No doubt Alexander Woolcott would have had the exact same answer had this question been asked at the Algonquin--and had "makalakamakai" been a one-syllable word.

  "No, 'screeched.' Which winter was so cold that Niagara Falls froze over?"

  "Nineteen thirty-two," I say confidently.

  "Yes," says
Julie. She looks at me. She seems genuinely impressed, even amazed.

  "How did you know that?"

  Frankly, I guessed. Pure plucked-from-thin-air speculation. But there is no way I am going to tell Julie that. I am going to take full credit for this one.

  "I just know a lot," I say. "I know so much sometimes I don't even know how much I know."

  Powhatan

  Powhatan was an Indian tribal leader and the father of Pocahontas. I went to Camp Powhatan in Maine for three summers--and until very recently received the Pow-Wow Newsletter, keeping me apprised of such vital information as the construction of a new outhouse facility near Bunk 14--and yet somehow I was able to remain ignorant of the identity of Powhatan himself. This is a little embarrassing. I probably should have paid attention to my history textbook or at least gone to see Disney's Pocahontas. That might have helped.

  Powhatan, says the Britannica, was "a bright and energetic ruler, but he was also noted as being cruel." This is appropriate, because we campers were both energetic and cruel, as well. But mostly cruel. We were a real bunch of prepubescent schmucks. I'm thinking in particular of our treatment of Rob Blonkin, a frizzy-haired twelve-year-old from upstate New York who suffered from numerous twitches, most notably one involving excessive puckering, which immediately qualified him as our scapegoat (the original scapegoat, of course, was burdened with sins and thrown over a Jerusalem cliff).

  We developed several methods of mental torture. In one, we'd go up to Rob and say, very quickly, "Hi, Rob. How you doing, Rob? Bye, Rob"--then walk away. This would leave him sputtering in frustration, still formulating his response of "I'm fine." In another method--our most sophisticated and evil--we'd sing "All Around the Mulberry Bush" in a particularly menacing manner, which, without fail, caused Rob to burst into tears. No one knew why. It was a Pavlovian thing, I guess; we'd start by growling, "All around," and by the time we got to "Pop goes the weasel," Rob's cheeks were wet.

  I'm not proud of this behavior. Those summers were my lowest moments as a moral being. (During the school year, I was more likely to be the one sprouting tears from bullies who were making fun of my acne, of which there are fifty different types, by the way.) I don't have an excuse. Maybe I was so focused on being the smartest boy in the world. Looking back, maybe I should have tried to be the most moral boy in the world. Maybe I should have said, "Hey, instead of making Blonkin cry, let's have a bake sale and donate the money to farmers in developing countries."

  One thing is for sure: if Julie and I ever have a boy, I'm not sending him to an all-male camp. Exclusively male environments lead to trouble. The EB talks about the increased incidence of aggressive behavior in small groups of isolated men, such as polar explorers and prisoners. No doubt about that. Polar explorers, prisoners, and predominantly Jewish summer camps in Maine and Vermont. But I digress. Back to the books.

  precedent

  I've never met someone else who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. There've been a couple of people in the same ballpark, reference-book-wise. My mother-in-law, Barbara, for instance, has read almost the entire Manhattan phone book. She loves it. Thinks it should be on Oprah's book club. She tells me she started to read it when she was a kid visiting her grandparents. They were just over from the old country, spoke no English, and spent their days eating chicken fat and weeping. "So what do kids do when adults are crying?" says Barbara. "They read the phone book, of course." She says this emphatically, as if it's a perfectly logical syllogism. Who am I to question it? So ever since childhood, Barbara has devoured a few letters whenever she has some free time. "I learn some very interesting things," she says. I once asked her what exactly she's learned. "Well, I learned that a man I know who works with Spike Lee lives in the building next to yours." That kind of thing.

  And every couple of weeks or so, I run into someone who confesses to being an encyclopedia dabbler. One man told me how his mom stashed the Britannica in the kids' bathroom growing up. She was hoping to fill her children's minds while they voided other parts of their bodies. Problem was, this guy would remain seated on the toilet reading about Faulkner and flamingos and flounders for hours, while his siblings banged on the door outside and suffered bladder distress.

  But these are amateurs. I've never met anyone who's completed the alphabetical marathon that is the great EB. (Incidentally, the modern marathon gets its distance--26 miles and 385 yards--because the British Olympic committee in 1908 wanted it to go from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in London Stadium.) I've never met anyone who has attempted to read every word. I know they're out there. Or at least they were in the past. George Bernard Shaw read the complete ninth edition at the British Museum. Physicist Richard Feynman consumed an entire set. C. S. Forester--the author of Horatio Hornblower--also read the EB. And he read it twice, which I suppose makes him twice as smart as I will ever be. It's not clear whether Aldous Huxley--the author of Brave New World--read the entire thing, but he carried half-sized volumes with him on trips, calling it the best travel reading around.

  These guys were no slouches, and that made me feel good. After polishing off Z, maybe I'll come up with a revolutionary theorem in astrophysics or at the very least, write a respected nautical novel. But these names were also unsatisfying. I wanted someone living, someone with whom I could swap war stories.

  I called the Britannica headquarters and spoke to the publicist Tom Panelas. As you might expect, Tom was the smartest publicist I had ever encountered. In all my years talking to publicists for Paul Reiser and Bruce Willis and the like, I had never heard the adjective "Borgesian." Tom used it. He also knew all about Huxley's Britannica habit--and added that Huxley died on November 22, 1963--the exact same day as C.S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy. Good to know.

  Tom told me there had been other faithful readers over the years--that's what we're called, "faithful readers"--but he didn't know if any of them were still alive. (He assured me that there isn't a causal relationship. My head won't explode.) He promised to investigate further.

  A couple of days later, Tom called with an update. The only other person currently reading the entire Britannica is a guy in a small town in China. He wrote a couple of fan letters awhile back, but the letters are gone, and the EB folks have no way of contacting him. On the other hand, there's one living American who read the Britannica from A to Z decades ago, when he was a kid. His name is Michael DeBakey. As any fan of surgical breakthroughs knows, DeBakey has since gone on to become a world-famous heart doctor--he implanted the first artificial heart in 1963--and to merit his own four paragraphs in the Britannica.

  I phoned up Dr. DeBakey and was surprised when the esteemed ninety-five-year-old physician got on the line. DeBakey has a wonderful Louisiana drawl and a warm way about him. I think I'd feel comfortable having him reroute my aorta, even if he's seen a few dozen birthdays.

  "When I was a child," DeBakey says, "my parents allowed us to take one book out of the library every week. I came home one day and said there was a wonderful book at the library--but they wouldn't lend it to me. My parents said, 'What is it?' And I said, 'It's the Encyclopaedia Britannica.' So they bought a set. I was about ten or twelve years old, so it must have been 1919 or so. By the time I went to college, I had finished the whole thing. I had four siblings, and all of us would rush through our lessons so we could get to read the encyclopedia."

  I ask him, as a man who has survived the voyage from A to Z, if he has any advice for me.

  "You have a job and a family," says Dr. DeBakey. "You only have a limited amount of time. The thing you want to do is skip over the topics you aren't interested in."

  I don't want to be rude, so I jot down his wisdom and thank him. But my actual reaction is: What? I can't do that. I'm trying to achieve something here. Trying to finish something consequential--if simultaneously ludicrous--for the first time in my life. I can't run fourteen miles of marathon, and take a cab through the neighborhoods that don't appeal. I've got to be--as Alex Trebek says--curious
about things that don't interest me.

  procrastination

  I'm pissed at myself. I just spent forty-five minutes Googling my ex-girlfriends and ex-crushes. That's just information I don't need. I don't need to know that Noel Dawkins is a consultant on an indie movie called Dead Sexy. Or that Rachel Zabar still holds the record for the 1600-meter dash at the Dalton School. Or that Kathleen Murtha--probably not even the Kathleen Murtha I know--wrote a letter of recommendation for a California roofing service. This is an unhealthy addiction, this Google, a waste of my time and brain space. Those forty-five minutes could have been spent any number of ways: reading the Britannica would have been nice, or hanging out with my wife, or maybe sorting our rubber bands by size and color. As Dr. DeBakey points out, I have a limited amount of time. So that's it: No more inconsequential Googling, I tell myself. Though I know that vow will be unbroken for maybe three days, max.

  It's been a constant battle to dam the data flood that comes with being a 21st-century American. I'm trying to keep my mind relatively free from non-Britannica information, on the Sherlock Holmesian theory that there's only so much room in the mental attic. And I have made a little progress. I've cut way down on the New York Post; no more updates on Kirsten Dunst's canoodling behavior for me. I trimmed back on my New York Times consumption--only the important articles about world events; no more whimsical stories about the trend for upscale luaus.

  Proust, Marcel

  It wasn't a madeleine. In real life, Proust's memories were sparked by a rusk biscuit, which is basically another name for zweiback toast. He changed it when he wrote Remembrance of Things Past. What's wrong with zweiback? I'm just guessing, but I smell a corrupt product placement deal with the madeleine industry.

  Public school

  I was lucky enough to go to a fancy private school. But my dad--he was a pure public school kid. He took the subway every day from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Bronx Science, a public school for gifted children, mostly middle-class Jewish kids at the time.