by Peter Gill
The Un-Funniest Number
Another early interview appeared in a science fiction publication called Fantastic Films. The interview was with Ken Bussanmas, a young (he started in his early teens) American writer with whom he had worked when Douglas Adams was, for a short while, a script editor for Dr Who. Here Douglas Adams explains (nearly everything) in comedy writers’ workshop manner:
‘If you’re a comedy writer working in numbers you use a number that’s funny like 17¾ or whatever. But I thought to myself if the major joke is the answer to life, the universe and everything and it turns out to be a number, that has got to be a strong joke. If you put a weak joke in the middle of it by saying not only is it a number but it’s 17¾ it slightly undermines it.
‘I think the point is to have complete faith in the strong joke and put the least funny number you can think of in the middle of it. What is the most ordinary, workaday number you can find? I don’t even want it to be a prime number. And I guess it mustn’t even be an odd number. There is something slightly more reassuring about even numbers. So I just wanted an ordinary, workaday number and chose forty two. It’s an unfrightening number. It’s a number you could take home and show your parents.’
The two answers above as well as being the two earliest apparently recorded, are also the fullest explanations. Mr King, our old chemistry master (so old we only had fourteen elements) used to tell form 4X (and we drank Australian lager) that the longer an exam question was, then the easier it should be for us to think up a feasible answer. A corollary of this would be that a long answer indicates a tricky question. Delivered some six and seven years post-script, Douglas Adams a) emphatically denies a Lewis Carroll connection, and b) specifically explains how a number can be considered an unfunny one (not the funniest number of later belief). Neither explanation is complete, lacking the detail needed to say why any other even, non-prime, workaday, whole number couldn’t claim to be as unfunny as forty two and as deserving of meeting your parents. Several hundred out of ten for dissembling though—the suggested re-reading of Winnie the Pooh and the meet-the-parents joke could both be considered elegant and polite means of deflecting a conversation possibly heading towards any probing supplementary question.
No. It Doesn’t Mean Anything
The Original Radio Scripts by Douglas Adams—with a faint billing for John Lloyd—had additional notes by Geoffrey Perkins, producer of all but the first episode of the radio series and a friend of Douglas Adams. The book includes comments from Douglas Adams.
Many people have asked whether the choice of forty two as the Ultimate Answer came from Lewis Carroll or perhaps from an ancient Tibetan mystical cult where it is the symbol of truth.
‘In fact it was simply chosen because it was a completely ordinary number, a number not only divisible by two but also by six and seven, in fact it’s the sort of number that you could without any fear, introduce to your parents.’ (DA)
But a learned letter in the New Scientist suggested that Deep Thought may well have been right since forty two is the atomic number of Molybedenum— a chemical that could have been vital in organic life. Even more importantly the Answer gave its number to a rock group (Level 42, not UB40).
The footnote after Fit the Sixth, the last part of the original radio series, adds:
Some would-be clever people wrote in to point out that six times nine actually equals fifty four and didn’t we know how to do elementary mathematics? Some would-be even cleverer people wrote in to point out that six times nine does indeed equal forty-two if calculated in base thirteen. (What no-one has spotted is that if you play a part of one of the episodes backwards you’ll hear Bob Dylan explaining just what’s gone wrong with Paul McCartney’s career).
Douglas Adams further dismissed this idea by saying ‘I may be a sad case but I don’t write jokes in base thirteen’. Fit the Sixth was co-authored with John Lloyd as they faced the ultimate deadline, and so the six times nine section, getting numbers from Scrabble letters on the next-to-last page might have been written at a time when the writers may just have started to consider it might be appropriate to think about having the script in the post to get to the pub before last orders.
no, No, NO. It Really Doesn’t Mean Anything
Douglas Adams, posted a mildy terse reply in 1993 from Sante Fe, New Mexico where he was working on the script for the film (and somewhere Dirk Gently was to be in the unfinished The Salmon of Doubt) as follows in an online discussion at alt.fan.douglas.adams:
‘The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a small number, and an ordinary smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’. I typed it out. End of story.’
The 42 Puzzle
The growing independent life of the forty two phenomenon interested Douglas Adams enough to develop the 42 Puzzle for publication in an illustrated edition published in 1994, the year his daughter was born and in which he had his 42nd birthday. The US edition was priced at forty two dollars and Douglas Adams explained the puzzle’s raison d’être as follows:
‘Everybody was looking for hidden meanings [my italics] and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like ‘is it significant that 6 times 9 is 42 in base 13?’. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved it. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that’s terribly significant.’
Or, ‘On My Way to Work One Morning…’
This was the last or one of the last occasions (January 2000) when Douglas Adams answered the question of forty two. Appearing on the BBC Radio Four show Book Club he said:
‘…on my way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and thinking about what the actual answer should be I eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever, a number, and a mundane one at that.’
The evidence indicates that the scene was written by a typewriter aided by Douglas Adams aided by his mother bringing cups of tea to a room in his mother and step-father’s house in darkest Dorset. So a journey to work may have been a shortish time to think up a number.
The Stephen Fry Completely Obvious
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the original broadcast of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy Douglas Adams’ friend, colleague and occasional house-sitter, Stephen Fry, was interviewed for BBC News, on the March 7th 2008 and simultaneously both illuminated and tantalised by saying:
‘Douglas told me in strictest confidence exactly why forty two. The answer is fascinating, extraordinary and when you think hard about it, completely obvious. Nonetheless amazing for that.
‘Remarkable really, but sadly I cannot share it with anyone and the secret must go with me to the grave. Pity because it explains so much beyond the books. It really does explain the secret of life, the universe and everything.’
Knows words, Stephen Fry. Picking here ‘why forty two’, not ‘what forty two means’.
As Told to John Lloyd
At the sixth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture on March 12th 2008, John Lloyd, his friend, and co-author of episodes Five and Six of the radio series and The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff introduced a special 30th anniversary performance of scenes from The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy by members of the original cast and said that Douglas had told him it was:
‘The funniest of the two digit numbers.’
It was to John Lloyd whom Douglas Adams had turned with deadlines racing up for episodes five and six. Had there been some significance associated with the choice of forty two then it appears not to have been part of their discussion and plotting for where these fifty or so minutes of radio script would be headed.
Some Interesting Reads…
Apollo 13
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, Andrew Chaikin, 1994
Apollo 13: Lost Mo
on, Jim Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger, 1994
Baseball
Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige and David Holman, 1963
Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Jules Tygiel, 2008
Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams, Robert Peterson, 1992
Bay of Pigs (The)
Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, Grayston L. Lynch, 1998
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Digging Up Butch and Sundance, Anne Meadows, 1996
The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch, Charles Kelly, 1996
Centralia
Fire underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, David DeKok, 2009 (revised edition)
Chuck Yeager
Yeager: An Autobiography, Chuck Yeager and Leo Lanos, 1985
Cricket
The Don: The Definitive Biography of Sir Donald Bradman, Roland Perry, 2000 (new edition)
The Best of the Best: A New Look at the Great Cricketers and Their Changing Times, Charles Davis, 2000
All-Round Genius. The Unknown Story of Britain’s Greatest Sportsman, Mick Collins, 2006
In Quest of the Ashes, Douglas Jardine and Fianach Jardine, 2005 (new edition)
Harold Larwood, Duncan Hamilton, 2009
Douglas Adams
Don’t Panic, Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, Neil Gaiman, 2009 (revised edition)
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy The Original Radio Scripts, Douglas Adams (edited and introduced by Geoffrey Perkins), 2003 (updated edition)
Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, Nick Webb, 2003
E = mc2
Why Does E=mc2?: (and Why Should We Care?), Brian Cox, and Jeff Forshaw, 2009
Edward Whymper
Travels Amongst The Great Andes Of The Equator With Supplementary Appendix, Edward Whymper, 1891
Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day, Don Yoder, 2003
Gutenberg Bible (The)
The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History, John Man, 2009
Jack Warner
Clown Prince of Hollywood: The Antic Life and Times of Jack L. Warner, Bob Thomas, 1990
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll in Numberland, Robin Wilson, 2008
Makin Island
Forgotten Raiders of ’42, Tripp Wiles, 2007
Oceans
Mapping the Deep, The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science, Robert Kunzig, 2000
Organised Crime
Me and My Brothers: Inside the Kray Empire, Charles Kray and Robin McGibbon, 2005 (2nd Edition)
World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime, Jay Robert Nash, 1995 (new edition)
Roadlit
On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 1951
Statistics
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than The Few, James Surowiecki, 2005 (new edition)
Skunk Works
Skunk Works, Ben R Rich and Leo Janos, 1995
SS Sultana
Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, Alan Huffman, 2009
Stanley and Livingstone
Into Africa. The Dramatic Retelling of the Stanley-Livingstone Story, Martin Dugard, 2003
Stanley. The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Tim Jeal, 2007
Star Trek
The Nitpicker’s Guide for Classic Trekkers, Phil Farrand, 1994
Whaling (The Whaleship Essex)
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, 2001, Nathaniel Philbrick
Acknowledgements
I would very much like to thank everyone who has helped and inspired me: including Fred Bermingham McDonogh and Deirdre nic Mhurchú—roast grouse, Irish house claret & wisdom; Eleanor Gill, Cesca Gill, Phoebe Gill, Milla Gill and Sebastian Broster—help in eating 42 Happy Meals (a day to remember); Ken and Susan Tonkin, John and Jacqui Wynn Jones, Barrie Spears, Stuart and Rose Crocker, Alan and Julie Otter, Bill and Amanda Gowans, Nigel and Dinah Mike, Paddy and Anne Nagel, Sue and David Groves, Ian and Julie Baguley, David and Helen Kent, Paul and Sabina Attard, Rick and Gill Liver, David and Jane Errington, Roger and Leslie Hall, George and Fiona Chancellor—all for friendship and stimulating ideas. Professor Jeff Forshaw of the Manchester University School of Physics & Astronomy, Michael Farr of Delmar Printers, and Caroline James—for special expertise. Simon, Derry, James and Roy—the no-folk-in-Ikea quiz team, and Dean and the other irregulars at the Coach & Horses.
My special thanks naturally goes to Simon Petherick, Tamsin Griffiths and Robert Pereno at Beautiful Books, for their kindness, belief, and knowledge. Also my special thanks to Ken Welsh, for very kindly allowing me the use of his letter.
With special gratitude I would like to thank my parents, and Hannah for her infinite support and patience over 33 years—and doubly so since the day ‘writing a book’ joined an improbable list of other displacement activities that have resulted in the raw neglect of lawns needing mowing, things needing decorating, and the finding out of whether third-time-lucky applies to putting a shelf up.
The Big Wiki Thankyou
The book would not have been written without Wikipedia and Google. In recognition of the vital service being provided by Wikipedia two Altairian cents* will be given to the Wikipedia Foundation for every book sold.
* The Altairian dollar (ALD) is currently trading at parity or ‘as near as makes no difference’ with the British pound (GBP). This neatly makes the author’s donation to the Wikipedia Foundation a round two pence per book.
Errors and omissions
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6.
When you have six please use a separate sheet of paper.
Index
2,4 Dithiapentane, 1
2000 Guineas, 1
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1
20th Century Fox, 1
23 Gunga Din Crescent, 1
40Club, 1
42 Commando, 1
42 Puzzle (The), 1
42nd Street, New York, 1, 2
1/2, 3, 4, 5
A Brief History of Time, 1
A Clockwork Orange, 1
A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, 1
Aaron, Hank, 1
Abu Dhabi, 1
AC/DC, 1
Adams, Christopher, 1, 2
Adams, Douglas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26,
Adams, Polly, 1
Adams, Sue, 1
Adams-Smith-Adams, 1
Africa, 1, 2, 3, 4
Ahab, Captain, 1
Alaska, 1
Albania, 1
Albatross, 1
Albert, Prince, 1
Albuquerque Tribune, 1
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1, 2
Alcatraz, Birdman of, 1
Alexandra, Queen, 1
Alexei, Tsarevitch, 1
Alfonso X, King, 1
Ali Baba, 1
Alice in Wonderland, 1
Alice, Princess, 1
Allen, ‘Gubby’, 1
Allen, Paul, 1
Allen, Peter, 1
Allen, Woody, 1, 2
Altair (The), 1
Amazon, River, 1
Amelie, 1
America, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
Amstel Brewery, Amsterdam, 1
Anderson, Clive, 1
Angola, 1
Annie Hall, 1
Ant and Dec, 1
Apollo 1, 2
Apple Mac, 1
Appleby Magna, Leics, 1
Arc de Triomphe, Paris, 1
Argentina, 1, 2, 3
Argentinian Armada, 1
Arizona Memorial (The), 1
Armistead, George, 1
Ar
mstrong, Louis, 1
Arnos Grove, 1
Art of Travel, 1
Ashes (The), 1, 2, 3
Association of Hole In The Wall Camps, 1
Asteroid DA1, 2
Aston Martin DB1, 2, 3
Astronomy Precinct, 1, 2, 3
Athens, 1, 2
Atlanta, Georgia, 1
Atlantic, 1, 2, 3, 4
Auckland, New Zealand, 1
Audubon, JJ, 1
Austen, Jane, 1, 2
Australia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Azores, 1
B42, 1
B-52 Stratofortress, 1
Babe Ruth, 1
Babel fish, 1
Bach, JS, 1, 2
Bacharach, Burt, 1
Back in Black, 1
Baedeker Tourist Guide to Britain, 1
Bahkramov, Tofic, 1
Baker, Tom, 1
Balmoral, 1
Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh, 1