QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  Puzzled by the difference in drying times between newspaper ink and the slow-drying substance in his fountain pen, Biró and his chemist brother, György, fitted a pen with a small ball-bearing which successfully drew down the printing ink as it rotated. The biro was born.

  The pair patented the pen in Hungary in 1938, and emigrated to Argentina in 1940 to avoid the Nazis, repatenting it there in 1943. An early customer was the RAF, encouraged by the pen’s performance at high altitude. This ensured the name ‘biro’ became synonymous with the ballpoint in Britain.

  The first biros sold to the public were manufactured in 1945. At the same time, Biró licensed his pen to Frenchman Marcel Bich.

  Bich called his company BiC and, by modifying Biró’s design, set up a mass-production process that meant the pens could be sold incredibly cheaply.

  BiC remains the world’s ballpoint market-leader with annual sales of 1.38 billion euros. In 2005, they sold their 100 billionth pen. The best-selling BiC Cristal sells 14 million units a day.

  As a mark of respect to Biró, the Argentines – who call the pens birome – celebrate Argentinian Inventors Day on 29 September, his birthday.

  What do we use to write on a blackboard?

  Gypsum.

  School ‘chalk’ is not chalk. Chalk is made of calcium carbonate – as is coral, limestone, marble, the skeletons of humans and fish, the lenses of eyes, the limescale in kettles and the indigestion pills Rennies, Setlers and Tums.

  Gypsum is made of calcium sulphate. You may think it’s a picky distinction but though the two look similar they are in fact quite different and are not even made of the same chemical elements.

  Many substances that appear to be radically different are actually made of exactly the same chemical elements. Take carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Combined in different proportions, they make stuff as wildly different as testosterone, vanilla, aspirin, cholesterol, glucose, vinegar and alcohol.

  Technically known as hydrated calcium sulphate, gypsum is one of the most widely available minerals in the world. It has been mined for at least 4,000 years – the plasterwork inside the Pyramids is made of gypsum – and it is used today in a huge range of industrial processes, the commonest of which is ordinary building plaster.

  About 75 per cent of all gypsum is used for plaster and products such as plasterboard, tiles and plaster of Paris. Gypsum is a key ingredient of cement and is used in the manufacture of fertiliser, paper and textiles. A typical new American home contains more than seven tons of gypsum.

  Plaster of Paris is so called because there are large deposits of gypsum in the clay soil in and around Paris, especially in Montmartre.

  Gypsum also occurs naturally in the form of alabaster, a snow-white, translucent material used to make statues, busts and vases.

  Alabaster can be artificially dyed any colour and, if heated, can be made to resemble marble. Powdered alabaster made into a salve was traditionally believed to be a cure for bad legs. It was common for people to chip pieces off church statues to make the ointment.

  Ironically, the word gypsum comes from the Greek gypsos, meaning ‘chalk’.

  STEPHEN Why is it called ‘plaster of Paris’? Any thoughts?

  ANDY Marketing. Poncier name …

  STEPHEN They tried plaster of Brentford and it didn’t really take off …

  Where does the equals sign come from?

  Wales.

  This essential constituent of mathematics wasn’t a product of the Greeks, the Babylonians or the Arabs, but the small coastal town of Tenby in south Wales. There, in 1510, the astronomer and mathematician Robert Recorde was born. Recorde was a child prodigy who rose to prominence as Royal physician to Edward VI and Queen Mary and later as controller of the Royal Mint.

  He was also a prolific author, writing a sequence of popular maths textbooks, of which The Whetstone of Witte (1557) is the most famous. Not only did it introduce algebra to an English audience for the first time it also introduced the equals sign, =.

  Recorde’s reason for adopting two parallel lines is refreshingly to the point: ‘bicause noe 2 thynges, can be moare equalle’. It took a while to catch on: | | and ae (from the Latin ‘aequalis’) were used well into the seventeenth century.

  One Recorde invention which didn’t stick was his word describing numbers to the eighth power, e.g., 28 = 256. Zenzizenzizenzic was based on the German zenzic, a version of the Italian censo meaning ‘squared’ (so it means ‘x squared, squared and squared again’). It does, however, comfortably hold the record for the number of ‘z’s in a single word.

  Despite his facility with numbers Recorde was less good with his personal finances. Poor political judgment meant he got on the wrong side of the Earl of Pembroke who called in a debt for the then astronomical sum of £1,000. This broke Recorde and he died in the King’s Bench debtors prison in Southwark, aged forty-eight.

  What did Robert Bunsen invent?

  Many things, but not the Bunsen burner.

  Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–99) was an influential German chemist and teacher who devised or improved the design of a number of pieces of laboratory equipment still in use today. However, the item he is most famous for was actually invented by the English chemist Michael Faraday and then improved by Peter Desaga, Bunsen’s technician at the University of Heidelberg.

  Bunsen first became renowned in the scientific community for his work on arsenic. He eventually discovered the only known antidote to the poison, but not before losing his sight in one eye and almost dying of arsenic poisoning.

  He went on to produce a galvanic battery that used a carbon element instead of the much more expensive platinum. Using this he was able to isolate pure chromium, magnesium, aluminium and other metals. At the same time, he also solved the riddle of how geysers worked by building a working model in his lab.

  The need for a new style of burner grew out of his work with a young physicist called Gustav Kirchoff. Together they pioneered the technique that became known as spectroscopy. By filtering light through a prism they discovered that every element had its own signature spectrum. In order to produce this light by heating different materials, they needed a flame that was very hot but not very bright.

  Bunsen developed this new heat source using Faraday’s burner as his starting point. In the earlier model, the oxygen was added at the point of combustion, which led to a smoky, flickery flame. Bunsen conceived a burner where oxygen was mixed with gas before combustion in order to make a very hot, blue flame. He took his ideas to Desaga, who built the prototype in 1855.

  Within five years, Bunsen and Kirchoff had used the combination of their new burner and spectroscope to identify the elements caesium and rubidium. Their lab became famous, and Bunsen’s modesty and eccentricity (he never washed) brought him international renown. Mendeleev, the Russian inventor of the periodic table, was one of his many devoted pupils.

  Although he didn’t get to give his name to the burner he built, Desaga did get the rights to sell it, which his family did very successfully (and profitably) for several generations.

  Despite its iconic status, the Bunsen burner has now largely been replaced in chemistry labs by the cleaner and safer electric hot plate.

  What’s made of celluloid?

  Ping-pong balls and collar stiffeners.

  Film isn’t made of celluloid any more. The main ingredient of celluloid is cellulose nitrate; modern film is made from cellulose acetate.

  Celluloid is generally regarded as the first plastic. In technical terms, it is a thermoplastic, which means it can be moulded each time it is re-heated.

  It is made from cellulose nitrate and camphor. Cellulose occurs naturally in the cell walls of plants. Camphor comes from the camphor tree and smells distinctively of the mothballs into which it is also made.

  Celluloid was first manufactured in Birmingham, England by Alexander Parkes who patented it for use in waterproofing clothing in 1856. Another early use was as a cheap ivory substitute: for billiard bal
ls and false teeth.

  Celluloid made the movies possible because of its flexibility. Rigid glass plates don’t run through projectors. But it is both highly flammable and quick to decompose, so it is difficult to store and is now rarely used.

  It has largely been replaced by more stable plastics such as cellulose acetate (made from wood pulp) and polyethylene (a by-product of petroleum).

  Cellulose nitrate (or nitrocellulose) was invented by accident in 1846 by Christian Schönbein, the man who, six years earlier, had discovered ozone.

  Experimenting in his kitchen with nitric and sulphuric acid, he broke a bottle, wiped up the mess with his wife’s cotton apron, and put it on the stove to dry. It immediately burst into flames: Schönbein had discovered the first new explosive since gunpowder was invented by the ancient Chinese.

  The new explosive was called ‘guncotton’. It was smokeless and four times as powerful as gunpowder. Schönbein patented it at once and sold the exclusive manufacturing rights to John Hall and Sons. The next year, it blew up their factory in Faversham, Kent, killing twenty-one people.

  Lethal explosions followed in France, Russia and Germany. It was forty years before a stable use was found for cellulose nitrate when James Dewar and Frederick Abel created cordite in 1889.

  Seven years earlier, Dewar had invented the Thermos flask.

  Who invented rubber boots?

  a) Amazonian Indians

  b) The Duke of Wellington

  c) Charles Goodyear

  d) Charles Macintosh

  Amazonian Indians have been making instant gumboots since time immemorial by standing knee-deep in liquid latex until it dries.

  The boots designed for, and named after, the Duke of Wellington in 1817 were made of leather. The first rubber boots didn’t appear until 1851, the year before the Duke died.

  Rubber was a disastrous failure for clothing when first tried because it either melted all over you in hot weather or set as hard as granite in winter. The breakthrough came in 1839 when Charles Goodyear heated rubber mixed with sulphur and accidentally spilt some on the family stove.

  Goodyear’s story is inspiring and tragic by turns. He struggled in desperate poverty all his life – six of his twelve children died of malnutrition – but rubber was his obsession and he never gave up trying to improve the qualities of what he called ‘vegetable leather’.

  The process he had inadvertently discovered solved the rubber problem by giving it a stable consistency. In his excitement Goodyear shared his samples with Thomas Hancock and Charles Macintosh, who became successful British rubber merchants.

  After analysing them, they were able to reproduce the process and patented it in 1843, calling it ‘vulcanisation’ after the Roman god of fire. Goodyear sued, unsuccessfully, and not for the first time was forced to spend time in a debtor’s prison – or his ‘hotel’ as he liked to call it.

  He died, still deep in debt, although widely acclaimed for his vision and perseverance. He once wrote: ‘Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.’

  Forty years after he died, his immortality was assured when the founders of the Goodyear Rubber Company, now the world’s largest, named their business in his honour. Their turnover in 2005 was $19.7 billion.

  What Edison invention do English speakers use every day?

  The word ‘Hello’.

  The first written use of hello spelt with an ‘e’ is in a letter of Edison’s in August 1877 suggesting that the best way of starting a conversation by telephone was to say ‘hello’ because it ‘can be heard ten to twenty feet away’.

  Edison discovered this while testing Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype telephone. Bell himself preferred the rather nautical ‘Ahoy, hoy!’

  Edison used to shout ‘hello!’ into telephone receivers at Menlo Park Labs while he was working on improvements to Bell’s design. His habit spread to the rest of his co-workers and then to telephone exchanges until it became common usage. Before ‘hello’ was used, telephone operators used to say, ‘Are you there?’ or ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Are you ready to talk?’

  Once ‘hello’ became standard the operators were called ‘hello girls’.

  ‘Hullo’ was used at the time purely to express surprise. Charles Dickens used the word in this way in Oliver Twist (1839) when the Artful Dodger first notices Oliver with a ‘Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?’

  ‘Halloo’ was used to call hounds and ferrymen and was also a favourite word of Edison’s. When he first discovered how to record sound (18 July 1877) the word he shouted into the machine (the strip phonograph) was ‘Halloo’: ‘I tried the experiment, first on a strip of telegraph paper, and found that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the word “Halloo! Halloo!” into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point and heard a faint “Halloo! Halloo!” in return! I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered.’

  The earliest recorded use of delegate badges saying ‘Hello, my name is…’ was at the first telephone operators’ convention in Niagara Falls in 1880.

  STEPHEN He invented ‘hello’. H-E-double L-O. The word had existed before as ‘hullo’, H-U-double L-O, which never meant a greeting. It just meant an expression of surprise. [picks up his pen] ‘Hullo, what have we got here? Hullo, what’s this?’ We still use it in that sense.

  BILL Do we?

  STEPHEN ‘Hullo, what’s that?’ … Don’t we, Bill?

  BILL Yes, when we … when we live our life like a 1950s detective film, yes! I often go to my fridge and … ‘Hullo! We’re out of milk! I say, mother, where’s the milk?’

  STEPHEN You beast, you beast, you utter, utter beast!

  Was the first computer bug a real insect?

  Yes and no.

  First, the ‘yes’. In 1947, at Harvard University, the US Navy’s Mark II computer, housed in a large un-airconditioned room, was brought to a standstill by a moth getting itself jammed in a relay switch. The operators removed the battered corpse of the insect and taped it next to the entry in the log book before restarting the machine.

  The mechanical nature of this computer made it particularly vulnerable to insect interference. Most of the early computers, like ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania were electronic and used moth-proof vacuum tubes.

  But was this the origin of the term ‘bug’? No. Used to mean an error or fault in a piece of machinery, the word ‘bug’ dates from the nineteenth century. The OED cites a newspaper report from 1889, in which Thomas Edison ‘had been up the two previous nights searching for a bug in his phonograph’. Webster’s dictionary also gives the modern meaning of ‘bug’ in its 1934 edition.

  And regardless of what numerous books and websites say, ‘de-bugging’ was also being used before the moth brought things to a standstill at Harvard.

  This is a rather satisfying example of life imitating language: a metaphor that, literally, came to life.

  What is the most likely survivor of a nuclear war?

  Cockroaches is the wrong answer.

  Quite why so many of us persist in the belief that cockroaches are indestructible is an interesting subject in its own right.

  They have been around a lot longer than we have (about 280 million years) and are almost universally hated as hard-to-control carriers of disease. Plus, they can live for a week without their heads. But they aren’t invincible and, since the groundbreaking research of Drs Wharton and Wharton in 1959, we have known they would be one of the first insects to die in a nuclear war.

  The two scientists exposed a range of insects to varying degrees of radiation (measured in ‘rads’). Whereas a human will die at exposure to 1,000 rads, the Whartons concluded that the cockroach dies at a dose of 20,000 rads, a fruit fly dies a
t a dose of 64,000 rads, while a parasitic wasp dies at a dose of 180,000 rads.

  The king of radiation resistance is the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans which can tolerate a whopping 1.5 million rads, except when frozen, when its tolerance doubles.

  The bacterium – fondly known by its students as ‘Conan the Bacterium’ – is pink and smells of rotten cabbage. It was discovered happily growing in a can of irradiated meat.

  Since then it’s been found to occur naturally in elephant and llama dung, irradiated fish and duck meat and even in granite from Antarctica.

  Conan the Bacterium’s resistance to radiation and cold, and its ability to preserve its DNA intact under these extreme conditions, have led NASA scientists to believe it might hold the clue to finding life on Mars.

  What’s the best use for Marmite?

  Solving the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East

  No less a person than the inventor of lateral thinking himself, Edward de Bono, advised a Foreign Office committee in 2000 that the whole sorry business might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread, a known side-effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.

  The popular belief that eating Marmite will keep mosquitoes at bay has no basis in scientific fact. Sadly, the B group vitamins present in Marmite (and beer for that matter) don’t appear to have any effect on mosquito behaviour.

  Marmite, the love-it-or-hate-it spread, was invented in 1902 in Burton-on-Trent by the Marmite Food Extract Company and contains yeast extract, salt, wheatgerm extract, niacin, thiamine, spices, riboflavin and folic acid.