QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  That’s providing it doesn’t smash on impact. Astonishingly, nobody really knows why and how glass shatters. The Third International Workshop on the Flow and Fracture of Advanced Glasses, a conference held in 2005 involving scores of scientists from all over the world, failed to reach agreement.

  Many of the unique qualities of glass are a result of its not being a normal solid, but an amorphous (or ‘shapeless’) solid. Molten glass solidifies so quickly that its molecules don’t have time to settle into a regular crystalline lattice. This is because glass contains small amounts of soda (sodium carbonate) and lime (calcium oxide) that interfere with the structure of the silica (silicon dioxide) atoms as they cool. Without these additions, the silica would cool more slowly. This would form chemically neat and regular – but much less useful – quartz.

  Some scientists think that given enough time – maybe billions of years – glass molecules will eventually follow suit and fall into line to form a true solid.

  For now, though, they’re like cars in a traffic jam – they want to make orderly patterns but can’t because their neighbours are blocking the route. The visible result of this underlying chaos is smooth, transparent, mysterious glass.

  What’s the most economical speed for driving a car?

  For many years car manufacturers told motorists that the optimum driving speed for fuel efficiency was about 88.5 kilometres per hour (55 miles per hour). But it’s much slower than that.

  A fuel-efficiency study carried out in 2008 by What Car? magazine tested five cars of various sizes. It found that all of them did best at below 64 kilometres per hour (40 miles per hour), while two of the models reached optimum efficiency at speeds below 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour).

  On average, a car uses almost 40 per cent more fuel at 112 kilometres per hour (70 miles per hour) than it does at 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour). It’s a simple rule, the report concluded: ‘The slower you go with the vehicle running smoothly, the less fuel you will use.’

  It’s not only driving fast that wastes money. Modern cars are quieter than ever. This gives the impression that the car is running smoothly when it’s not, so drivers don’t change gear as often as they should. Cruising at 64 kilometres per hour (40 miles per hour) in sixth gear uses 20 per cent less fuel than doing the same journey in fourth.

  Air-conditioning can also cut fuel efficiency – by up to a mile a gallon or 1.6 kilometres per 4.54 litres. If you try to get round this by opening the window, you’ll use more petrol battling the impaired aerodynamics. Even having the car radio on increases fuel costs.

  During the recent football World Cup many England supporters drove around with flags of St George flying from their windows. In 2006 tests at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at Manchester University found that two flags flapping from a medium-sized car travelling at an average of 48 kilometres per hour (30 miles per hour) creates enough wind-resistance to use an extra litre of fuel per hour.

  In the USA almost three billion dollars’ worth of fuel each year is wasted lugging overweight drivers around. Americans are pumping 938 million (US) gallons more gas a year than they were in 1960. Between 1960 and 2002 the weight of the average US citizen increased by 11 kilograms (24 pounds). Combining these figures, in 2006, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign worked out that, with gasoline prices at $3 a gallon, transporting all this extra fat about by road cost the country $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.

  There are other advantages of driving at the right speed. The Energy Research Centre says that, if every UK motorist obeyed the 70 miles per hour speed limit, the saving in CO2 pollution would be equivalent to removing 3 million Ford Focuses from the nation’s roads.

  What happens if you leave a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight?

  It won’t dissolve.

  Not only do we know this is untrue, we know the person who first made the spurious claim.

  In 1950 Professor Clive McCay of Cornell University told a select committee of the US House of Representatives that high levels of sugar and phosphoric acid in Coca-Cola caused tooth decay. In order to add a bit of drama to his testimony, he went further – claiming that a tooth left in a glass of Coke would begin to dissolve after two days.

  It doesn’t: as anyone who tries it on a lost tooth can discover for themselves. Even if McCay were correct, nobody holds Coca-Cola in their mouth for two days. The average can of soft drink contains about seven teaspoons of sugar, so it does cause tooth decay – but it does so gradually, not in a matter of hours.

  Apart from sugar, the other troublesome ingredient in fizzy drinks is phosphoric acid. This stops the drinks going flat and adds a tangy flavour. It’s also used in fertilisers, in detergents and in shipyards to remove rust from aircraft carriers. But it still doesn’t ‘rot your teeth overnight’. A 2006 study by the American Academy of General Dentistry on the effect of soft drinks on tooth enamel found that high concentrations of citric acid were much more damaging than phosphoric acid. So go easy on the orange juice.

  Phosphoric acid also inhibits the digestive acids in the stomach, reducing the absorption of calcium. This means that a serious fizzy drink habit can lead to calcium deficiency, weakening teeth and bones (though not ‘dissolving’ them).

  An occasional glass of Coke is unlikely to do anyone much harm. Coca-Cola was originally marketed as a health drink, growing out of the mid-nineteenth-century European obsession with ‘tonic’ wine: alcoholic beverages enhanced by herbal infusions. These often included coca, the South American plant extract better known as the source of cocaine.

  In 1863 Pope Leo XIII awarded a medal to the Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani (1838–1914) for inventing Vin Mariani, the first coca-based wine. Millions of Europeans enjoyed it, including the Pope himself, Queen Victoria, Thomas Edison, Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Verne and Henrik Ibsen.

  John Stith Pemberton (1831–88) of Atlanta, Georgia, soon produced an American version – Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. In imitation of their European counterparts, the city’s intellectual smart set took it to their hearts. But, in 1885, local prohibition laws compelled Pemberton to produce a non-alcoholic version. He pepped it up with the inclusion of caffeine-rich kola nuts from Africa and Coca-Cola was born.

  Coca leaves are still used to flavour Coca-Cola – but only after they’ve had all the cocaine chemically extracted.

  ANDY HAMILTON My mum used to say to me, because I used to drink a lot of Coke when I was in my early teens: ‘You shouldn’t drink Coke because it stains the inside of your stomach.’

  HUGH DENNIS But how do you know that’s not true?

  ANDY No, you don’t, but you kind of think, well, if I ever see the inside of my stomach, it’s probably going to be a bit late to worry about what colour it is.

  PHILL JUPITUS I can’t wait, Andy. I mean I don’t like to talk about a friend’s death, but at your post mortem: ‘Look at this! Terrible stained intestines.’

  What happens if you cover a beautiful woman from head to toe in gold paint?

  She won’t die of suffocation.

  Many people believe that we ‘breathe through our skin’, so that anything that blocks all our pores causes rapid asphyxiation. It’s not true. We breathe only through our nose and mouth. The pores have nothing to do with it. If they did, scuba diving would be fatal.

  Covering a person in gold paint might eventually kill them, if it was left on long enough. They would die from over heating, since their paint-clogged pores would be unable to sweat, which is the human body’s chief means of temperature regulation. It would be a very slow and unpleasant way to go.

  In the 1964 film of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel, Goldfinger, the actress playing the part of the woman murdered by means of body-paint was Shirley Eaton. She published her autobiography in 2000, despite the still persistent myth that she died of skin suffocation during filming. The producers of the film were as taken in by the idea of pore asphyxiation as thei
r audience. Not only was a doctor on standby while Eaton shot her scene, but a 6-inch patch of skin was left unpainted on her stomach, to allow her skin to ‘breathe’.

  Human skin has about two million pores – about 700 per 6.5 square centimetres (1 square inch), each servicing a sweat gland. The skin is our largest organ, weighing an average of 2.7 kilograms (6 pounds) and covering 1.67 square metres (18 square feet). As well as the pores, a single square inch of skin contains around 4 metres (13 feet) of blood vessels, 1,300 nerve cells and 100 oil glands. Skin cells are constantly being replaced: in an average lifetime, we each get through 900 complete skins.

  There is one mammal that does breathe through its skin. In 1998 scientists rediscovered the Julia Creek dunnart (Sminthopsis douglasi) – an Australian marsupial mouse 12 centimetres (5 inches) long, named after the area in Queensland where it lives, from which it was thought to have gone extinct twenty years earlier.

  Julia Creek dunnarts are unusually undeveloped at birth; their gestation period is just twelve days, and the newborn is slightly larger than a grain of rice. As a result, they can’t immediately use their lungs, so they exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide through their skin instead: something previously thought impossible for a mammal. Researchers realised this after being puzzled by the fact that the newborn babies were neither breathing nor dying.

  Being so tiny, the baby dunnart doesn’t need much oxygen and, protected by its mother’s pouch, can afford to have extremely thin, permeable skin. Indeed, its skin is so thin that its internal organs are visible. By the age of three weeks, however, it is getting half its oxygen from its lungs, and it gradually switches over completely to the conventional mammalian method of breathing.

  ROB BRYDON Do you know how he got the job, Sean Connery? He went for the audition and then he walked away and the producers watched him out of the window and they said he walked like a panther. Which, when you think about it, would be on all fours, and would make him look like a ruddy lunatic. Not the sort of man you want botching up the schedule on an expensive film. Oh, look at him, he’s doing it again. Sean, please get up.

  What colour was Frankenstein?

  Frankenstein wasn’t green, nor was the monster he created. The monster was yellow in the original book and black and white in the film.

  James Whale’s movie Frankenstein (1931) was adapted from the novel written by Mary Shelley in 1818. In the book, the hero, Victor Frankenstein, isn’t a doctor but an idealistic young Swiss student, fascinated by science and alchemy. His obsession leads him to create life from inanimate matter, resulting in a ‘creature’ nearly 2½ metres (8 feet) tall made from the body parts of corpses. In the novel, the way Frankenstein brings him to life is barely described, but in the movie a lightning bolt animates the monster. The spectacular electrical effects were achieved using a Tesla coil built by the brilliant Serbian inventor of AC current, Nikola Tesla (1856–1943). He was then seventy-five years old.

  In both the movie and the novel Frankenstein’s reaction to his creation is ‘horror and disgust’. Here is Mary Shelley’s version:

  His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

  It was to convey this ‘corpse-like’ effect that Jack Pierce, the make-up artist at Universal Studios, created the famous flat-headed, bolt-through-the-neck version of the monster, as played by Boris Karloff. Though the movie was shot in black and white, all the promotional posters showed him as green.

  The film was a huge critical and commercial success, taking $53,000 (about $750,000 today) in just one New York cinema in its first week and leading to a string of sequels. When Frankenstein was adapted into comic book form in the early 1940s, the monster was depicted as green-skinned. This convention continued in the mid-1960s with the TV show The Munsters. Though the series was also made in black and white, all the publicity material shows Herman Munster (a comical parody of Boris Karloff) with lurid green skin.

  Mary Shelley’s creature was very different from the lumbering, inarticulate portrayal made famous by Karloff. He was agile, fast and could talk, albeit in a rather old-fashioned, ponderous way (he’d educated himself by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost). Like a tragic parody of Adam, the first man, he refuses to eat meat and lives on ‘acorns and berries’. He is driven to revenge and murder by Frankenstein’s rejection of him, and by the loneliness and sense of shame he feels because of his hideous appearance. His last act is to trudge to the North Pole and burn himself on a funeral pyre to erase all traces of his existence.

  Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was written when Mary Shelley was only eighteen years old, and became an immediate sensation. As well as being a landmark in gothic fiction, many now consider it the first science fiction novel.

  What colour were Dorothy’s shoes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

  They were silver, not ruby.

  L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the best-selling book for children in the USA for two years after its publication in 1900. Since translated into more than forty languages, it created one of the most successful publishing franchises of all time: Baum produced a series of thirteen sequels set in the land of Oz and many more were published after his death. He also wrote the script for a musical version, which ran almost continuously on Broadway between 1903 and 1904, and was the first adaptation to use the shortened title, The Wizard of Oz.

  Under the new name, in 1939 MGM took the famous book and the famous musical and turned them into an even more famous film, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. In 2009 it was named the ‘most watched’ film of all time by the US Library of Congress. Although it did well at the box office, its huge budget meant it made only a small profit and it was beaten to the Best Picture Oscar by that year’s other blockbuster, Gone with the Wind. But the immortality of The Wizard of Oz was assured by its annual Christmas screening on US television, which began in 1956. It’s the most repeated movie on TV of all time.

  Dorothy’s slippers were changed to red in the film because the producer, Mervyn LeRoy, wanted them to stand out. The Wizard of Oz was only the second film made in Technicolor and the new process made some colours easier to render than others. It took the art department over a week to come up with a yellow for the Yellow Brick Road that didn’t look green on screen.

  The new technology made the six-month shoot hazardous for the actors. The lights heated the set to a stifling 38 °C and eventually caused a fire in which Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) was badly burned. The cast had to eat liquidised food through straws because their thick colour face make-up was so toxic. The original Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen, nearly died from inhaling the aluminium powder it contained and had to leave the film.

  Lyman Frank Baum died in 1919, long before his book made it to the screen, although he ended his days in Hollywood as a film producer. This was the last in a long line of careers – as a breeder of fancy poultry, a newspaper editor, a theatrical impresario, the proprietor of a general store, a travelling salesman and a writer of over fifty books, many under female pseudonyms such as Edith van Dyne and Laura Metcalf. In 1900, the same year he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he also brought out The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors, which listed the many marketing advantages of using shop-window mannequins.

  But it is Oz he will be remembered for and, despite all attempts at interpreting his novel as a political allegory or a feminist tract, it is best read the way he intended, as a home-grown American version of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen that he had loved as a child.

  How do you know if something’s radioactive?

  No, it doesn’t glow in the dark.

  Radioactiv
ity isn’t detectable as visible light. If it were, the whole earth would glow in the dark, as well as every plant and animal on it. Rocks, soil and living tissue all contain traces of radioactive material.

  Radioactivity is not the same as radiation. Radiation is the means by which energy – radio waves, light, heat and X-rays – travels in space. These are all made of photons that spread out (or ‘radiate’) in waves moving at the speed of light. Though they are all made of the same stuff and travel at the same speed, their waves have different distances between the peaks and troughs, graded along a scale known as the electromagnetic spectrum. At one end are low-frequency waves (with long wavelengths) like radio waves; at the other, high-frequency waves with short wavelengths like X-rays. In the middle is ‘visible light’, the narrow band of electromagnetic energy that we can see.

  All radiation is harmful if we’re exposed to too much of it for too long. Sunshine – a mix of wavelengths from infrared (heat), through visible light, to ultraviolet – causes sunburn. At the high-frequency end of the spectrum, the energy is so intense it can knock electrons out of orbit, giving a previously neutral atom a positive electric charge. This charged atom is called an ion (Greek for ‘going’). One ion creates another in a rapid chain reaction. This can cause terrible damage by changing the molecules in our cells, causing skin ‘burns’, cancerous tumours and mutations in our DNA.