by John Lloyd
Born in New York City, his mother Catherine was a widow who resettled with Henry and his brother Joe in Wichita, Kansas in 1870. It was a wild place, the centre of the cattle trade. ‘In Wichita’, according to a contemporary newspaper, ‘pistols are as thick as blackberries.’
By November 1870, the town had 175 buildings and a population of nearly 800. Mrs McCarty was well known in town for the hand laundry she ran on North Main Street. The family later moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Billy’s mother was married to William Antrim, a homesteader.
It was in the deserts of New Mexico that Billy began to rustle cattle and make a name for himself as a gunslinger. By 1879, with perhaps seventeen deaths to his name, he was offered an amnesty by the Governor of New Mexico, Lew Wallace, best remembered today as the author of Ben Hur, the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century.
Billy turned himself in, then had second thoughts and broke jail. He was pursued and finally killed by Pat Garrett in 1881, but not before he had sent a series of letters imploring Wallace to honour his promise of an amnesty. They went unacknowledged.
Despite the official death warrant, there were persistent stories that the Kid had survived. In 1903, Wallace’s successor as Governor of New Mexico had the case reopened to establish whether he had really died and whether he deserved to be pardoned. The investigation was never concluded.
In 1950, a member of Buffalo Bill the bison-killer’s Wild West Show known as ‘Brushy Bill Roberts’ died claiming that he was in fact Billy the Kid.
Billy the Kid is said to be the real-life person who has been most depicted in films; he’s portrayed in at least forty-six movies.
Carty/Antrim/Bonney didn’t become known as Billy the Kid until the end of the last full year of his life. Until then, he was known, simply, as ‘the Kid’.
What do we have Thomas Crapper to thank for?
a) The manhole cover
b) The bathroom showroom
c) The ballcock
d) The flush toilet
All of them except the last one.
Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) was a London plumber who held nine patents: for manhole covers, drains, pipe joints, and, most notably, the ballcock.
His innovative Chelsea showroom was a big hit, though ladies were said to faint at the sight of the unmentionables on display. Crapper’s, on the King’s Road, started by his nephew George, only closed in 1966.
Crapper & Co. held four royal warrants. When the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) bought Sandringham in 1880, they did all the plumbing.
In Flushed with Pride (1969), the author Wallace Reyburn claimed Crapper invented the flush toilet, and was knighted and cited in the Encyclopædia Britannica. As any plumber will tell you, none of these things is true.
Though Crapper’s ‘Silent Valveless Waste Water Preventer’ was a flush toilet, the patent was not his: it was filed by a Mr Alfred Giblin in 1819.
The first flush toilet was discovered in China in 2000 in the palace of a king of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). It is a stone latrine with a seat, armrest and a system of pipes for flushing the pan. Arguably, the first modern WC was invented in 1592 by Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I.
As for Crapper’s surname being the origin of the slang for a lavatory, this is just possible. The word doesn’t appear in print until the 1930s. ‘Crap’ dates from 1440, but it meant ‘chaff’ and had fallen out of use by 1600. Victorians would not have understood the word ‘crapper’, let alone found it funny.
The story goes that English settlers took the word with them to America, where it was vulgarised to its present meaning. When American GIs came to Britain in the First World War, they found the name Crapper engraved on all the lavatories hilarious, and the name stuck.
Wallace Reyburn went on to publish Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling (1971), a ludicrous fiction about the supposed inventor of the bra.
STEPHEN The ball … cock. Erm … sorry. I don’t know why that’s funny. Sorry that it’s funny to say ball … cock. Yes! I learned at the University of Rowan Atkinson, me!
What was Mozart’s middle name?
Wolfgang.
His full name was Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He usually called himself Wolfgang Amade (not Amadeus) or Wolfgang Gottlieb. ‘Amadeus’ is Latin for Gottlieb and means ‘God’s love’.
Other memorable middle names include Richard Tiffany Gere, Rupert Chawney Brooke, William Cuthbert Faulkner and Harry S. Truman, where the S stands for nothing, despite the full stop.
Apparently Truman’s parents couldn’t agree whether he should be named after Anderson Shipp Truman or Solomon Young, his grandfathers.
For punctuation fiends, we draw your attention to The Chicago Manual of Style: ‘all initials given with a name should for convenience and consistency be followed by a period even if they are not abbreviations of names.’
How did Mark Twain get his name?
He stole it.
The usual explanation is that he took the name from the call of the leadsman on a Mississippi paddle-boat steamer. ‘Mark Twain’ was the second mark on the lead line used to calculate the river’s depth. It indicated a depth of 2 fathoms (12 feet), which was ‘safe water’.
This isn’t wrong, it’s just that someone else had got there first. The name was already being used by Captain Isaiah Sellers (1802–63), a river news correspondent.
The young Samuel Longhorn Clemens (1835–1910) cut his teeth writing parodies of Sellers under the pen-name Sergeant Fathom. According to Clemens, Sellers was ‘not of a literary turn or capacity’ but was ‘a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on land’. The Sergeant Fathom burlesques mortified him. Clemens later wrote: ‘He had never been held up to ridicule before; he was sensitive, and he never got over the hurt which I had wantonly and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity.’
This didn’t stop him stealing the pen-name, as Twain (Mark II) explained in a letter to a reader:
Dear Sir,
‘Mark Twain’ was the nom de plume of one Capt. Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1863, and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear.
Yours truly,
Samuel L. Clemens
What was the surname of the Swiss Family Robinson?
We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t Robinson.
Johann David Wyss (1743–1818), a Swiss clergyman and former military chaplain, wrote the original stories as an entertainment for his four sons on long hiking trips. One of the boys, Johann Emmanuel, illustrated them and many years later, another one, Johann Rudolf (already famous for having written the words to the Swiss National anthem) edited them into a book. Der Schweizerische Robinson (literally ‘The Swiss Robinson’) was published in German in 1812.
The story follows the adventures of a Swiss family stranded in the East Indies after a shipwreck on the way to Australia, and is told from the point of view of the father (who is not named). Wyss intended the stories to offer his sons practical guidance on family values and self-reliance, inspired by the work of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719).
The enduring popularity of the basic idea has survived endless liberties taken with the original text. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature comments: ‘with all the expansions and contractions over the past two centuries (this includes a long history of abridgements, condensations, Christianisings and Disney products), Wyss’s original narrative has long since been obscured, and the book is chiefly characterised by its improbable profusion of animals – penguins, kangaroos, monkeys and even a whale – conveniently gathered together on a tropical island.’
As for the confusion over the family’s name, this wasn’t a problem for William Godwin (1756–1836), h
usband of Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley and influential social philosopher. He and his second wife produced the first English translation in 1814, calling it – quite logically – The Family Robinson Crusoe.
In 1818, for some reason, the title was changed to The Swiss Family Robinson (surely The Swiss Family Crusoe would have made more sense?) and this – unlike the details of the plot, the names and the sexes of the characters and the underlying moral lessons – is about the only part of it all to have stood the test of time.
It won’t surprise you to learn that roughly a third of the endless film and TV adaptations have hammered home the mistake by unambiguously (and without a shred of embarrassment) calling the Swiss family ‘Robinson’.
How did Nome in Alaska get its name?
a) By mistake
b) To attract good luck: ‘Nomes’ are a type of Alaskan pixie
c) After Sir Horace Nome (1814–72), Scottish explorer
d) After an Inuit greeting: Nome nome (‘Here you belong’)
It was a spelling mistake.
In the 1850s, a British ship noted the existence of a prominent but unnamed point of land in Alaska. A ship’s officer scribbled ‘Name?’ next to the point on a manuscript map. When the map was being copied at the Admiralty, a cartographer misread the scribble, and wrote in the new point’s name as ‘Cape Nome’.
In 1899 the burghers of Nome tried to change the name of their town to Anvil City, but the US Postal service objected on the grounds that it risked confusion with the nearby settlement of Anvik, so the name stuck.
As the city’s community website www.nomealaska.org reminds us: ‘There’s no place like Nome.’
What is the name of the capital city of Thailand?
Grung Tape.
The city’s day-to-day name, which means ‘City of Angels’ (the same as Los Angeles), is an abbreviation for the official name, which is the longest place name in the world.
Only ignorant foreigners call it Bangkok, which hasn’t been used in Thailand for more than 200 years. For Europeans (and every single one of their encyclopaedias) to go on calling the capital of Thailand Bangkok is a bit like Thais insisting that the capital of Britain is called Billingsgate or Winchester.
Grung Tape (the rough pronunciation) is usually spelt Krung Thep.
Bangkok was the name of the small fishing port that used to exist before King Rama I moved his capital there in 1782, built a city on the site and renamed it.
The full official name of Krung Thep is Krungthep Mahanakhon Amorn Rattanakosin Mahintara Yudthaya Mahadilok Pohp Noparat Rajathanee Bureerom Udomrajniwes Mahasatarn Amorn Pimarn Avaltarnsatit Sakatattiya Visanukram Prasit.
In Thai, this is written as a single word of 152 letters or 64 syllables.
It translates roughly as ‘Great City of Angels, the supreme repository of divine jewels, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of the reincarnated spirits.’
The front part of the name Bangkok is the common Thai word bang meaning village. The second part is supposed to have come from an old Thai word makok which means some kind of fruit (either olives or plums or some sort of mixture of the two). So it could be ‘Village of Olives’ or ‘Village of Plums’. Nobody seems to be quite sure which – or to care.
Krung Thep (or Bangkok if you insist) is the only city in Thailand. It is almost forty times bigger than the next largest town.
ALAN Pluto and Bangkok don’t exist. I’m scared to go out.
What’s the world’s largest city?
a) Mexico City
b) São Paolo
c) Mumbai
d) Honolulu
e) Tokyo
Honolulu, although it’s a bit of a trick question.
Under a Hawaiian state law established in 1907, the City and County of Honolulu are one and the same. The county not only includes the rest of the main island of Oahu but also the rest of the north-western Hawaiian islands which stretch 2,400 km (1,500 miles) into the Pacific.
This means that Honolulu covers the largest area of any city – 5,509 square km (2,127 square miles) – despite only having a population of 876, 156. Seventy-two per cent of the city is covered in seawater.
The world’s most populous city is Mumbai (formerly Bombay) with 12.8 million people living in 440 square km (170 square miles): an astonishing 29,042 people per square kilometre. If the whole metropolitan area is included, the most populous city is Tokyo with 35.2 million living in 13,500 square km (5,200 square miles).
Honolulu is the state capital of Hawaii, but it is not on the island of Hawaii. It is on Oahu, which is much smaller but much more densely populated. Hawaii is the most isolated major population centre on earth.
The islands of the Hawaiian Archipelago are the projecting tips of the world’s biggest mountain range. Hawaii is the only US state that grows coffee. More than a third of the world’s pineapples come from Hawaii and Hawaiians are the world’s largest per capita consumers of Spam, getting through seven million cans a year.
Spam’s popularity is mysterious but is probably due to the heavy US military presence during the war and the fact that tinned meat is handy during a hurricane. Spam fried rice is a Hawaiian classic.
Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian islands in 1778 and renamed them the Sandwich Islands in memory of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. Cook was murdered on Hawaii in 1779.
By the early nineteenth century the islands were known as the Kingdom of Hawaii. Although it became an American territory in 1900, and the 50th state in 1959, Hawaii is the only US state that still uses the Union Jack on their flag.
What’s the largest lake in Canada?
Great Bear Lake. None of the five ‘Great Lakes’ are entirely ‘in’ Canada.
Huron and Superior are larger than Great Bear Lake, neither are wholly inside Canada; Erie and Ontario are neither wholly inside Canada nor bigger than Great Bear Lake; and Lake Michigan, though larger than Great Bear Lake, isn’t in Canada at all.
Great Bear Lake up in the North West Territories on the same parallel as the Bering Strait and lying partly inside the Arctic Circle. It has a total area of 19,166 square miles, larger than the Canadian portions of Lake Superior, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Despite its relatively low profile it is the fourth largest lake in the Americas.
It is also larger than more than seventy of the world’s countries, including Albania, Belgium, Israel, Lesotho and Haiti.
There are somewhere in the region of two million lakes in Canada – no one knows exactly how many – covering about 7.6 per cent of the Canadian landmass.
The second-largest lake wholly inside Canada is Great Slave Lake (17,751 square miles) which is also the deepest lake in Canada (2,014 feet).
There are 31,752 lakes with an area of at least one square mile and an uncounted number of smaller ones. One square mile is about 640 acres, which is a pretty big lake: almost seven times the area of Vatican City.
There are so many lakes in the country that naming them seems to have a been a bit of a problem. There are 204 Long Lakes and 182 Mud Lakes. Other popular choices are: Lac Long (152), Long Pond (144), Lac Rond (132), Lac à la Truite (109), Round Lake (107), Otter Lake (103), Little Lake (101), Lac Perdu (101) and Moose Lake (100).
What’s the single largest man-made structure on Earth?
Wrong answers include the Great Pyramid, the Great Wall of China and (for clever-dicks) Mubarak al-Kabir Tower, Kuwait.
Our answer is Fresh Kills, the rubbish dump on Staten Island, New York, though we quite like Jimmy Carr’s alternative suggestion – Holland.
Opened in 1948, the Fresh Kills landfill site (named after the Dutch word kil meaning ‘small river’) soon became one of the largest projects in human history, eventually trumping (by volume) the Great Wall of China as the world’s largest man-made structure.
The site is 12 s
quare km (4.6 square miles) in area and, when operational, twenty barges, each carrying 650 tons of rubbish, were shipped in every day. Had Fresh Kills continued to stay open as planned, it would have grown to be the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard. At its peak the dump was already 25 m (over 80 feet) higher than the Statue of Liberty.
Under local pressure, the landfill closed in March 2001, only to be opened again to cope with the enormous amount of debris created by the destruction of the World Trade Center.
It is now completely shut down, and new restrictions mean it can’t reopen (no landfill is allowed within NYC limits). The site is currently being flattened and landscaped into parkland and a wildlife facility. Nice.
Arguably, there are structures which are spread across more space – the US road network, perhaps? The internet? The GPS satellite network? – but the Fresh Kills landfill is the largest single cohesive structure.
PHILL They sometimes have landfill explosions, don’t they?
JIMMY Which I think they should keep. They should turn it into land for ramblers … and then let them take their chances. It’s sort of natural selection.
How many times can you fold a piece of paper in half?
Everybody knows its only seven times, because most of us have tried it. But, in December 2001, a fifteen-year-old American schoolgirl called Britney Gallivan proved everybody wrong. And here’s her proof: