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

by John Lloyd

  Not the vodka martini.

  A painstaking study at www.atomicmartinis.com of Fleming’s complete oeuvre has shown that James Bond consumed a drink, on average, every seven pages.

  Of the 317 drinks consumed in total, his preferred tipple was whisky by a long margin – he drinks 101 in all, among them fifty-eight bourbons and thirty-eight Scotches. He’s pretty fond of champagne (thirty glasses) and in one book, You Only Live Twice (1964), which is mostly set in Japan, Bond tries sake. He likes it: he has thirty-five of them.

  Bond only opts for his supposed favourite, vodka martini, nineteen times, and he drinks almost as many gin martinis (sixteen – though most of these are bought for him by other people).

  The famous ‘shaken, not stirred’ line appears for the first time in Diamonds are Forever (1956) but isn’t used by Bond himself until Dr No (1959). Sean Connery was the first screen Bond to utter ‘shaken, not shtirred’, in Goldfinger (1964), and it occurs in most of the films thereafter. In 2005, the American Film Institute voted it the 90th greatest movie quote of all time.

  James Bond’s personal martini recipe, taken from the first book, Casino Royale (1953), is: ‘Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.’

  This is the only time he drinks a gin and vodka mix. He calls it the Vesper, after Vesper Lynd, the double agent and love interest in the novel. She is also the girl who drinks most in all the novels and stories.

  Why does Bond insist on ‘shaken’ martinis? Strictly speaking, a shaken gin martini is called a Bradford. Purists frown on them because the intake of air caused by the shaking oxidises – or ‘bruises’ – the aromatic flavourings in the gin. But there’s no such problem with vodka, and the action of shaking makes the drink colder and sharper.

  Ian Fleming himself preferred his martinis shaken, and made with gin. On his doctor’s orders he switched from drinking gin to bourbon later in life, which may explain his hero’s predilection. Fleming and Bond were both men who knew what they liked.

  What shouldn’t you drink if you’re dehydrated?

  Alcohol is fine. So are tea and coffee.

  Virtually any fluid will help to hydrate you, although you should steer clear of seawater.

  There’s no scientific basis for the curious idea that fluids other than water cause dehydration. As a diuretic (something that makes you pass water), caffeine does cause a loss of water, but only a fraction of what you’re adding by drinking the coffee. Tea, coffee, squash and milk for children are all equally good at replacing fluids.

  Ron Maughan, Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Aberdeen Medical School, has looked at the effects of alcohol, considered to be another diuretic, and found that, in moderation, it too has little impact on the average person’s state of fluid balance.

  His results, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that alcoholic drinks with an alcohol content of less than 4 per cent, such as light beer and lager, can be used to stave off dehydration.

  Seawater, on the other hand, is an emetic, so, if you drink it, you’ll throw up. If you do manage to keep any of it down, then all the water in your body’s cells will move towards the highly concentrated salty fluid, by osmosis, in an attempt to dilute it.

  This will leave your cells dehydrated, and in severe cases can lead to spasms, the breakdown of brain functions, and liver and kidney failure.

  STEPHEN Anyway, what should you not drink if you’re dehydrated?

  JIMMY Jacob’s Crackers…. You could blend them up with a little flower top. Ooh, refreshing.

  What contains the most caffeine: a cup of tea or a cup of coffee?

  A cup of coffee.

  Dry tea-leaves contain a higher proportion of caffeine by weight than coffee beans. But an average cup of coffee contains about three times as much caffeine as an average cup of tea, because more beans are needed to make it.

  The amount of caffeine in coffee and tea depends on several factors. The higher the temperature of the water, the greater the caffeine extracted from beans or leaves. Espresso, which is made with pressurised steam, contains more caffeine, drop for drop, than brewed coffee. The amount of time that water is in contact with coffee beans or tea-leaves affects the caffeine content. Longer contact equals higher levels of caffeine.

  Also important are the variety of coffee or tea, where it is grown, and the roast of the coffee and cut of the tea-leaf.

  The darker the roast of coffee, the lower the caffeine content. With tea, the tips of the plant contain a higher concentration than the larger leaves.

  Paradoxically, an average 30 ml (1 fl. oz) espresso contains about the same amount of caffeine as a 150 ml (5 fl. oz) cup of PG Tips. So a single-shot cappuccino or latte won’t give you much more of a caffeine hit than a cuppa. A cup of instant coffee, on the other hand, contains only half the caffeine of a filter coffee.

  Why was the dishwasher invented?

  Not to make doing the dishes easier.

  Its main purpose was to reduce the number of breakages caused by servants, rather than to act as a labour-saving device.

  The first practical mechanical dishwasher was invented in 1886 by Josephine Garis Cochran (1839–1913) of Shelbyville, Illinois. She was the daughter of a civil engineer and, on her mother’s side, the great-granddaughter of John ‘Crazy’ Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat. A prominent socialite, married to a merchant and politician, her main problem in life was worrying about the maids chipping her precious china (it had been in the family since the seventeenth century).

  This enraged her and, so the story goes, one night she dismissed the servants, did the dishes on her own, saw what an impossible job it was and vowed, if no one else would, to invent a machine to do it instead. When her husband William died in 1883, leaving her in debt, she got serious.

  With the help of an engineer friend, she designed the machine in her woodshed. It was crude and cumbersome but effective. There was a small foot-pedal driven version and a large steam-driven one. The latter, able to wash and dry 200 dishes in two minutes, was the sensation of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and won first prize for the ‘best mechanical construction for durability and adaptation to its line of work’. At $250 each, however, the machines were too expensive for home use, but enough were sold to hotels and restaurants to keep Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company in business until her death in 1913.

  Other mechanical dishwashers had been developed (and patented) in the US between 1850 and 1865 (all of them, it seems, by women) but none of them really worked. A hand-cranked wooden machine was invented and patented in 1850 by Joel Houghton. In 1870, Mary Hobson obtained a dishwasher patent, but even then it contained the word ‘improved’. The electric dishwasher first appeared in 1912; the first specialised dishwasher detergent (Calgon) in 1932; the first automatic dishwasher in 1940, but it didn’t reach Europe until 1960.

  STEPHEN So, er, the first practical dishwasher was invented to wash dishes more …

  JO More … often than women can be arsed to.

  What kind of fruit are Jaffa Cakes made from?

  Apricots.

  The ‘orange jam’ at the heart of Britain’s eighth most popular biscuit is actually apricot pulp, sugar, and a squirt of tangerine oil. This assertion appeared in the Daily Telegraph in September 2002.

  (If it’s not true perhaps someone from McVitie’s would like to get in touch with us and correct this heinous slur. We note in passing that even the company’s advertising refers to it as the ‘smashing orangey bit’ (our italics), which doesn’t strictly imply the presence of actual oranges.)

  It would take a 70-kg (11-stone) man a 90-minute football match to work off the 809 calories gained by a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Over 750 million Jaffa Cakes are eaten every year, generating sales of £25 million. If placed end to end, they would stretch from London to Australia and back again.

  In 1991 McVitie’s w
on a landmark case (United Biscuits (UK) Ltd v The Commissioners of Customs and Excise) to prove that Jaffa Cakes are, in fact, cakes not biscuits.

  This was to avoid paying VAT – cakes and biscuits are zero-rated by the UK Customs and Excise, except for chocolate-coated biscuits, which are taxable as luxury items. McVitie’s had to show that Jaffa Cakes were chocolate cakes, rather than chocolate biscuits.

  The evidence turned on what happens when they go stale: like cakes, Jaffa Cakes grow harder, while biscuits become soft.

  McVitie’s is the third largest biscuit company in the world and is owned by United Biscuits. United Biscuits is owned, in turn, by Nabisco. Nabisco is owned by Kraft Foods Inc., the second largest food corporation in the world after Nestlé. Kraft has 98,000 employees and turned over $32 billion in 2004.

  Kraft itself is 85 per cent owned by the Altria Group, formerly Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company.

  What do digestive biscuits do?

  Not a lot.

  Digestive biscuits were invented by McVitie’s in Edinburgh by a young employee, Alexander Grant, in 1892.

  They were advertised as ‘aiding digestion’ (a euphemism for reducing wind) because of the high content of baking soda and coarse brown flour. This has never been scientifically proven and it is consequently illegal to sell them under that name in the USA. The US equivalent is the graham cracker.

  McVitie’s Original Digestive is still the ninth-biggest biscuit brand in Britain, with annual sales of £20m.

  McVitie’s best-selling biscuit and the second biggest biscuit brand in Britain is the chocolate digestive launched in 1925. KitKat remains the biggest UK brand in the sector.

  The annual sales of chocolate digestives are over £35m – that’s 71 million packets, or 52 biscuits per second. Despite recent controversial mint, orange and caramel versions, it remains the chocolate biscuit of first resort. The American travel writer Bill Bryson has called it a ‘British masterpiece’.

  Biscuits are one of the oldest-known foods. Six-thousand-year-old biscuits have been found in Switzerland. They were eaten in ancient Egypt and were being baked in ancient Rome in the second century AD.

  Biscuit means ‘twice-cooked’ in French, but the English came directly from the Latin biscoctum panem – ‘twice cooked bread’ – and was, until the mid-eighteenth century, correctly spelt ‘bisket’.

  The adoption of the French spelling ‘biscuit’ (without the French pronunciation) was not only pretentious and pointless, but wrong as well. In French, un biscuit is not a biscuit but a cake – a sponge-cake to be precise. A biscuit in the English sense is un biscuit sec.

  In North America ‘biscuits’ are more like scones. What Britons call biscuits, Americans call either cookies or crackers. The American English word cookie comes from the Dutch koekje, which means ‘cake’.

  Biscuits were cooked more than once to make them last longer than bread, but most biscuits are no longer cooked twice. In fact, most biscuits have never been cooked twice. According to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, biscuits designed for long sea voyages were usually cooked four times.

  ARTHUR It’s a … it’s a very, very hard-working biscuit. But have you ever noticed that there is a slightly fishy taste about a digestive?

  STEPHEN Is there? What have you been dunking them in? Good heavens!

  ALAN Or ‘who’ have you been dunking them in?

  How was Teflon discovered?

  Despite persistent claims to the contrary, Teflon was not discovered as a by-product of the space programme.

  Teflon is the trade name of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), or fluoropolymer resin, discovered serendipitously by Roy Plunkett in 1938 and first sold commercially in 1946.

  While experimenting with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigeration, Plunkett found that a sample had frozen overnight into a whitish, waxy solid with unusual properties: it was extremely slippery as well as inert to virtually all chemicals, including highly corrosive acids.

  His employers, DuPont, soon found a range of uses for the new material, initially in the Manhattan Project (the code-name for the development of nuclear weapons in 1942–6) and subsequently in cookware.

  No one has been able to find a precise source for the ‘space programme’ myth, except that the Apollo missions all depended on Teflon for cable insulation.

  Other myths about Teflon include the belief that Teflon-coated bullets are better at piercing body armour than other kinds; actually the Teflon coating is there to reduce the amount of wear on the inside of the rifle barrel, and has no bearing on the effectiveness of the bullet.

  Teflon does, however, have the lowest friction rating of any known solid material, which is why it works so well as a non-stick surface for frying pans.

  If it’s so slippery, how do they get it to stick to the pan? The process involves sandblasting to create tiny scratches on the pan’s surface, then spraying on a thin coat of liquid Teflon which flows into the scratches. This is baked at high heat, causing the Teflon to harden and get a reasonably secure mechanical grip. It’s then coated with a sealant and baked again.

  Which organisation invented Quaker Oats?

  Not the Quakers.

  The Quaker Oats Company, started in Pennsylvania in 1901, was named after the Quakers because there were a lot of them in Pennsylvania and they had a reputation for honesty.

  However, Quaker Oats, now part of the huge PepsiCo corporation, has no affiliation at all with the Quakers (or Religious Society of Friends) and, unlike the chocolate companies Cadbury’s, Fry’s and Rowntree, was not founded by Quakers, or established on Quaker principles.

  This has caused some distress among The Society of Friends.

  In the 1950s, researchers from Quaker Oats, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted experiments to try to understand how nutrients from cereals travelled through the body.

  Parents of educationally subnormal children at the Walter E. Fernald State School (formerly known as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children) were asked to let their children become members of a special Science Club. As part of the club, the children were put on a diet high in nutrients and taken to baseball games.

  What was not made clear, however, was that the food the children were given was laced with iron and radioactive calcium so its path could be traced in the body. The parents sued the Quaker Oats company, who agreed to pay out $1.85 million to more than 100 participants in 1997.

  The cheery character on the front of the box is sometimes said to be William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, and an influential Quaker. The Quaker Oats company, perhaps wishing to improve relations with the Society, has emphatically denied this.

  It was painted by Haddon Sundblom in 1957, the artist who also created Coca-Cola’s iconic Santa Claus images in the 1930s. Sundblom’s last commission was a Christmas cover for Playboy in the early 1970s.

  It is often alleged that The Society of Friends got the nickname ‘Quakers’ following the trial for blasphemy in 1650 of George Fox, the founder of the movement, who suggested during sentencing that the judge should ‘tremble at the word of the Lord’. However, the sect already had the reputation for ‘trembling’ in religious ecstasy and this seems a more likely source.

  What shouldn’t you do twenty minutes after eating?

  Swim, is the answer your parents would have given, but there’s no evidence that normal swimming after normal eating is risky.

  Swimming pools are not particularly dangerous places – according to government statistics you are much more likely to injure yourself taking off a pair of tights, chopping vegetables, walking the dog or pruning the hedge.

  And keep well clear of cotton buds, cardboard boxes, vegetables, aromatherapy kits and loofahs. All of these things are becoming more dangerous.

  The idea behind the popular injunction against swimming after eating – frequently posted at pools to this day – is that blood will be diverted from other muscles to t
he stomach, to assist in digesting food, leaving your limbs with insufficient blood, thus leading to paralysing cramps. (In less sophisticated versions, the weight of the food in your gut sinks you.)

  Even if you overeat before swimming, the most likely result is a stitch in the side, or a touch of nausea. There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about the combination of food and water.

  A greater risk is dehydration from not drinking, or weakness caused by fasting.

  On the other hand, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) advocates ‘common sense’, arguing that there’s at least a theoretical risk of regurgitation, which might be more dangerous in water than on land.

  The 2002 RoSPA report revealed the following causes of accidents for one year in the UK:

  Trainers 71,309

  Tights 12,003

  Cardboard boxes 10,492

  Indoor swimming pool 8,795

  Cotton buds 8,751

  Trousers 8,455

  Twigs 8,193

  Aromatherapy 1,301

  Loofahs and sponges 942

  How does television damage your health?

  Not by sitting too close to one.

  Until the late 1960s, cathode-ray-tube television sets emitted extremely low levels of ultraviolet radiation and viewers were advised to sit no nearer than six feet from them.

  Children were at greatest risk. Their eyes are so good at accommodating changes in distance that they were able to sit and watch at a much closer range than most adults.

  Almost forty years ago, the Radiation Control for Health & Safety Act compelled all manufacturers to use leaded glass for their cathode-ray tubes, rendering television sets perfectly safe.