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

by John Lloyd

  No human artefacts at all can be seen from the moon with the naked eye.

  The idea that the Great Wall is the ‘only man-made object that can be seen from the moon’ is all-pervasive, but it confuses ‘the moon’ with space.

  ‘Space’ is quite close. It starts about 100 km (60 miles) from the Earth’s surface. From there, many artificial objects are visible: motorways, ships on the sea, railways, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual buildings.

  However, at an altitude of only a few thousand miles after leaving the Earth’s orbit, no man-made objects are visible at all. From the moon – over 400,000 km (some 250,000 miles) away – even the continents are barely visible.

  And, despite Trivial Pursuit telling you otherwise, there is no point in between the two where ‘only’ the Great Wall of China is visible.

  Which of these are Chinese inventions?

  a) Glass

  b) Rickshaws

  c) Chop suey

  d) Fortune cookies

  Chop suey. There are many fanciful stories about its American origin but it is a Chinese dish.

  In E. N. Anderson’s definitive The Food of China (1988), chop suey is named as a dish local to Toisan in southern Canton. They called it tsap seui, which means ‘miscellaneous scraps’ in Cantonese. Most of the early immigrants to California came from this region, hence its early appearance in America.

  Glass isn’t Chinese: the earliest-known glass artefacts are from ancient Egypt in 1350 BC. The earliest Chinese porcelain dates from the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). Ancient China built a whole culture on porcelain, but they never got to grips with transparent glass. This is sometimes used to explain the fact that they never had a scientific revolution comparable with the one in the West, which was made possible by the development of lenses and transparent glassware.

  The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama in Japan in 1869.

  Fortune cookies are also American, though they were probably invented by a Japanese immigrant, Makato Hagiwara, a landscape designer who created the Golden Gate tearoom in San Francisco. He served small, sweet Japanese buns with thank-you notes inside from about 1907 onwards. Restaurant owners in the city’s Chinatown copied them and the notes soon started to tell fortunes.

  But who’s complaining? Chinese resourcefulness has given us: the abacus, bells, brandy, the calendar, the compass, the crossbow, the decimal system, drilling for oil, fireworks, the fishing reel, the flamethrower, the flush toilet, gunpowder, the helicopter, the horse collar, the iron plough, the kite, lacquer, magic mirrors, matches, the mechanical clock, miniature hot-air balloons, negative numbers, paper, parachutes, porcelain, printmaking, relief maps, rudders, seismographs, silk, stirrups, the suspension bridge, the umbrella, the water pump and the wheelbarrow.

  PHILL Was the rickshaw invented by a bloke called Rick Shaw?

  Where did Marco Polo come from?

  Croatia.

  Marco Polo (or ‘Mark Chicken’ in English) was born Marko Pilić in Korcula, Dalmatia, in 1254, then a protectorate of Venice.

  We shall probably never know whether he really went to the Far East as a seventeen-year-old with his merchant uncles or if he simply recorded the tales of Silk Road traders who stopped off at their Black Sea trading post.

  What is certain is that his famous book of travels was largely the work of a romance writer called Rustichello da Pisa with whom he shared a cell after being captured by the Genoans in 1296. Polo dictated it; Rustichello wrote it in French, a language Polo didn’t speak.

  The result, which appeared in 1306, was designed to entertain, and it became a best-seller in the era before printing. As an accurate history its status is less secure.

  Its original title was Il Milione – ‘the Million’ – for reasons that are now obscure, although it quickly became nicknamed ‘the million lies’, and Polo – now a rich and successful merchant – was known as ‘Mr Million’. It was probably just a catchy thirteenth-century version of a title like ‘Wonder Book of Wonders’. No original manuscripts survive.

  Marco Polo is also supposed to have brought pasta and ice cream to Italy.

  In fact, pasta was known in Arab countries in the ninth century and dried macaroni is mentioned in Genoa in 1279, twenty-five years before Polo claimed to have returned. According to the food historian Alan Davidson, the myth itself only dates back as far as 1929 when it was mentioned in an American pasta-trade journal.

  Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention but it seems unlikely to have been introduced to the West by Polo, as it doesn’t get mentioned again until the middle of the seventeenth century.

  PHILL A lot of people thought he was a Dalmatian. He was actually Irish. He was Marc O’Polo!

  What is Croatia’s most lasting contribution to world business?

  The neck tie.

  Hravat is the Croatian word for ‘Croat’ and it’s where we get the word ‘cravat’ from. So, Croatia means ‘tie-land’.

  In the seventeenth century Louis XIII of France kept a regiment of Croatian mercenaries during the Thirty Years War. Part of their uniform was a broad, brightly coloured neckcloth by which they became known. The flamboyant yet practical style became very popular in Paris, where military dress was much admired.

  During the reign of Louis XIV, the cravat was replaced by a more restrained military Steinkirk, tied about the neck in a loose knot, but it wasn’t until the reintroduction of the flowing cravat by dandies (or ‘macaroni’ as they were then known) in the late eighteenth century that individual styles of tying them became popular, the generic name then changing to ‘tie’.

  The relentless march of the tie through the twentieth century has made it the dress item de rigeur for men in all but the most casual of businesses. Bremer Communication, a US image consultancy, has divided the now ubiquitous ‘business casual’ into three levels: basic, standard, and executive. Only at the basic level is a tie not required, and they recommend that this is best restricted to ‘those days when you have little customer contact or are taking part in an informal activity’.

  In the late 1990s, two researchers at Cambridge University used mathematical modelling to discover that it is topologically possible to tie eighty-five different knots with a conventional tie. They found that, in addition to the four well-known knots, six other knots produced aesthetically pleasing results.

  STEPHEN My prep school tailors were called Gorringe, funnily enough.

  SEAN ‘Which … which side does young Sir dress on?’

  BILL ‘Would Sir like to wear a cravat on the cross-country run?’

  Who introduced tobacco and potatoes to England?

  It’s not who you think it is.

  Walter Raleigh, poet, courtier, explorer and Renaissance man, is a perfect example of how popular myths attach themselves to attractive characters. His fame now rests almost entirely on things he didn’t do.

  The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol, seen ‘emitting smoke from his nostrils’. This was in 1556, four years before Raleigh was born.

  Raleigh never personally visited Virginia or any other part of North America. It was a Frenchman named Jean Nicot, from whose name the word ‘nicotine’ is derived, who introduced tobacco to France in 1560, and it was from France, not the New World, that tobacco reached England.

  Raleigh was a keen smoker and probably helped popularise the tobacco habit after he was introduced to it by Sir Francis Drake.

  The term ‘smoking’ is a late seventeenth-century coinage; until then it was referred to as ‘drinking smoke’.

  Potatoes were known in Spain by the mid-sixteenth century, and probably reached the British Isles from Europe, rather than directly from America. As a member of the nightshade family the plant was assumed to be poisonous (as, indeed, the upper portions are). When Raleigh planted one in his garden in Ireland, his neighbours threatened to burn his house down. />
  Potatoes gradually caught on. By the middle of the seventeenth century the surgeon Dr William Salmon was claiming they could cure tuberculosis, rabies and ‘increase seed and provoke lust, causing fruitfulness in both sexes’.

  As for the cloak spread across the puddle for the Queen, the story originated after Raleigh’s death with the historian Thomas Fuller. It only became famous as a result of Walter Scott’s 1821 Elizabethan romance, Kenilworth.

  Raleigh’s name was spelt many different ways but it seems to have been pronounced ‘Raw Lie’. His first name was probably pronounced ‘water’.

  He spent fifteen years on death row writing his projected five-volume History of the World but never got further than 1300 BC.

  After his execution, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She carried it with her at all times in a velvet bag until she died twenty-nine years later and it was returned to Raleigh’s tomb at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

  Who invented the steam engine?

  a) James Watt

  b) George Stephenson

  c) Richard Trevithick

  d) Thomas Newcomen

  e) A Heron from Egypt

  Heron (sometimes called Hero) takes the prize, some 1,600 years before Newcomen’s engine of 1711.

  Heron lived in Alexandria around AD 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was also a visionary inventor and his aeolopile or ‘wind-ball’ was the first working steam engine. Using the same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun round at 1,500 rpm. Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty.

  Amazingly, had Heron but known it, the railway had already been invented 700 years earlier by Periander, tyrant of Corinth. Called the Diolkos, or Slipway, it ran for 6 km (4 miles) across the isthmus of Corinth in Greece, and consisted of a roadway paved with limestone blocks in which were cut parallel grooves 1.5 m (5 feet) apart. Trolleys ran along these tracks, on to which ships were loaded. These were pushed by gangs of slaves forming a sort of ‘land-canal’ offering a short cut between the Aegean and the Ionian seas.

  The Diolkos was in use for some some 1,500 years until it fell into disrepair around AD 900. The principle of railways was then completely forgotten about for almost another 500 years, until people had the idea of using them in mines in the fourteenth century.

  The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a brilliant essay speculating what would have happened if the two inventions had been combined to create a global Greek empire, based on a fast rail network, Athenian democracy and a Buddhist-style religion founded on the teachings of Pythagoras. He briefly mentions a failed prophet who lived at 4, Railway Cuttings, Nazareth.

  Heron also invented the vending machine – for four drachmas you got a shot of holy water – and a portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.

  ALAN I know something interesting! Stephenson’s Rocket went at 30 miles an hour, and they were sure if you went to 30 miles an hour or over, you would suffer irreparable brain damage. So they put fences alongside the tracks so that passers-by wouldn’t have to witness them just losing it. I suspect that the person who came up with that notion wasn’t a medical doctor or anything like that; I suspect it was a fence-maker.

  Who invented the telephone?

  Antonio Meucci.

  An erratic, sometimes brilliant, Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the USA in 1850. In 1860, he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. He filed a caveat (a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.

  In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler exploded. Unable to speak much English, and living on the dole, he failed to send the $10 required to renew his caveat in 1874.

  When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He’d sent his original sketches and working models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab and the models had mysteriously disappeared.

  Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci who got the credit for the invention. In 2004, the balance was partly redressed by the US House of Representatives who passed a resolution that ‘the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.’

  Not that Bell was a complete fraud. As a young man he did teach his dog to say ‘How are you, grandmamma?’ as a way of communicating with her when she was in a different room. And he made the telephone a practical tool.

  Like his friend Thomas Edison, Bell was relentless in his search for novelty. And, like Edison, he wasn’t always successful. His metal detector failed to locate the bullet in the body of the stricken President James Garfield. It seems Bell’s machine was confused by the President’s metal bed-springs.

  Bell’s foray into animal genetics was driven by his desire to increase the numbers of twin and triplet births in sheep. He noticed that sheep with more than two nipples produced more twins. All he managed to produce was sheep with more nipples.

  On the plus side, he did help to invent a hydrofoil, the HP 4, which set the world water-speed record of 114 kph (70.84 mph) in 1919 and stood for ten years. Bell was eighty-two at the time and wisely refused to travel in it.

  Bell always referred to himself first and foremost as a ‘teacher of the deaf’. His mother and wife were deaf and he taught the young Helen Keller. She dedicated her autobiography to him.

  What’s quite interesting about Scotland, kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky and tartan?

  None of them is Scottish.

  Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland. ‘Scots Gaelic’ is actually a dialect of Irish.

  Kilts were invented by the Irish but the word ‘kilt’ is Danish (kilte op, ‘tuck up’).

  The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3: 5, 10, 15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century AD.

  Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 BC).

  Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of 5,000-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.

  Whisky was invented in ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish uisge beatha, from the Latin aqua vitae or ‘water of life’.

  The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.

  Hae’ing said a’ that, they’ve nae been idle, ye ken. Scots inventions and discoveries include adhesive stamps, the Bank of England, bicycle pedals, Bovril, the breech-loading rifle, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, colour photography, cornflour, the cure for malaria, the decimal point, electro-magnetism, the Encyclopædia Britannica, finger-printing, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the Kelvin scale, the lawnmower, lime cordial, logarithms, lorries, marmalade, motor insurance, the MRI scanner, the paddle steamer, paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tyres, the postmark, radar, the raincoat, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, tarmac, the teleprinter, tubular steel, the typhoid vaccine, th
e ultrasound scanner, the United States Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generators and wire rope

  Where does Chicken Tikka Masala come from?

  Glasgow.

  Britain exports chicken tikka masala to India.

  Invented in Glasgow in the late 1960s, chicken tikka masala, or CTM, is Britain’s most popular dish. There is no standard recipe. In a recent survey, the Real Curry Guide tested forty-eight different versions and found the only common ingredient was chicken.

  Chicken tikka is a traditional Bangladeshi dish in which pieces of marinated chicken are cooked in a clay oven called a tandoor. This ancient style of cooking originated in the Middle East, the word deriving from the Babylonian tinuru, meaning ‘fire’.

  The first chicken tandoori on a British restaurant menu was at the Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London, in 1966 – the same restaurant where Not the Nine O’Clock News was invented in 1979. The recipe reached Glasgow shortly afterwards and when, as the legend goes, a customer asked for some gravy to go with it, the chef improvised with tomato soup, spices and cream.

  Masala means a mixture of spices, and the usual CTM contains ginger and garlic, tomatoes, butter and cream, spiced with cardamom, cloves, cumin, nutmeg, mild red chilli powder and paprika, fenugreek and turmeric.

  It is the turmeric that it gives it the bright yellow colour, although the synthetic dye tartrazine is often substituted. (It is tartrazine, among other unpleasant things, that makes curry stains impossible to remove from clothing.) CTM doesn’t have a standard style or colour: it can be yellow, brown, red, or green and chilli hot; creamy and mild; or very smooth and sweet.