QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Hampson worked on Dan Dare until 1959, when the relentless pressure and recurring depressive illness became too much for him. He left the Eagle and toiled as an anonymous freelance illustrator for the next twenty-five years. In 1975 a jury of his peers voted him the best writer and artist of strip cartoons since the war. His Eagle had been a magnet for illustrators: it featured the first published work by David Hockney and Gerald Scarfe.

  Dan Dare’s Christian past was not without precedent. Superman’s adopted parents were committed Methodists, although the Man of Steel never went to church in his tights – unlike Captain America, who was openly Protestant. Spiderman’s Peter Parker had regular conversations with God, and The Thing in the Fantastic Four is Jewish. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was explicitly conceived and drawn as an unreconstructed pagan goddess.

  Why were postcards invented?

  Not as tourist souvenirs – but as a speedy way of keeping in touch.

  Postcards were the email of the pre-electronic age and the first medium of personal mass communication. Between 1905 and 1915, about 750 million postcards were sent in Britain each year, more than 2 million a day. The seven daily deliveries of post meant it was perfectly possible to arrange and confirm an appointment in the evening by sending a postcard in the morning.

  The postcard era started in the 1870s when government postal services in Europe and the US began issuing pre-paid postal cards. By the 1890s, private printers had produced their own versions, with illustrations on the front and the words ‘Post Card’ moved to the back.

  Between 1901 and 1907 postcard production doubled every six months. At the time, this frenetic activity was known as ‘postal carditis’ or ‘postcard mania’ and it was driven by three factors. Technological advances in printing meant that high-quality colour images could be mass-produced cheaply for the first time. Efficient postal services meant they were cheap to send (1 cent in the US; 1 penny in the UK). Finally, better public transport meant people had begun to travel much more regularly and adventurously.

  This was the era of the great fairs and exhibitions. If you visited contemporary marvels like the Eiffel Tower, or the 1908 Franco-British exhibition at the White City, or the amusement arcades at Coney Island in New York, a postcard was the perfect way to prove it. On one day in 1906 200,000 of them were sent from Coney Island alone. Postcard collecting (or deltiology – from the Greek deltion, ‘little writing tablet’) became the world’s number one pastime.

  The parallels with email are striking. Advertising quickly saw the benefits and most of the nineteenth-century postcard traffic was a kind of spam, selling unsolicited goods and services. In 1906 Kodak brought out the 3A folding pocket camera that had postcard-sized negatives and a door that opened allowing a message to be scratched directly on to them. This meant that people could then have their own postcards printed – rather in the way we send attachments.

  As with email, postcards had their detractors. The satirist John Walker Harrington wrote of postcard mania in American Magazine in March 1906: ‘Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain.’

  As 75 per cent of US postcards were printed in Germany, the advent of the First World War destroyed the German printing industry. This, and the arrival of the telephone, ended the golden age of the postcard.

  But still they continue to thrive in the UK, especially from people at the seaside. The Royal Mail estimated that 135 million postcards were sent during the summer of 2009. The top five places they came from were, in order: Brighton, Scarborough, Bournemouth, Blackpool and Skegness.

  Who made the first computer?

  The key word here is made.

  The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791–1871) is known as the ‘father of modern computing’, but more for his ideas than for any concrete achievement. The first full-size Babbage Engine, using his original designs, made exclusively from materials available in his day, wasn’t completed until 2002. It is 3.3 metres (11 feet) long, weighs 5 tons, contains 8,000 parts and took seventeen years to build. It can be seen at the Science Museum in London.

  In the nineteenth century, the British Empire ran on lists of calculations. From banking to shipping, every aspect of trade was dependent on accurate tables. Mistakes could cost money and lives and the books of tables were notoriously unreliable. It was in 1821 that Babbage decided to build a machine to replace them. Confronted by an error-strewn set of astronomical tables, he exclaimed to a colleague: ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!’

  Babbage was a brilliant mathematician but found human beings difficult to deal with. His intolerance of street musicians led to an organised campaign against him: his London home in Portland Place was bombarded by noise at all hours and abusive placards were hung in local shops. He wasn’t much better at handling the politicians whose support he needed to fund his work. Asked by MPs whether his machine would still produce the right answers even if wrong figures were entered, he replied, ‘I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.’

  Despite patenting the cowcatcher for locomotives, and a pair of shears that made the metal tips for shoelaces, Babbage died embittered and forgotten. He had failed to find the money to build his greatest invention, a computer in the modern sense, with a memory and a printer, run by a programme that used punched cards. This first programming ‘language’ was the work of Ada Lovelace (1815–52), daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who understood the potential of Babbage’s work even better than he did, predicting (in the 1840s) that computers would one day play chess and music.

  Using Babbage’s plans, two Swedish engineers, George and Edward Schuetz, completed the first prototype of what Babbage called his ‘Difference Engine’ in 1853. The father and son team not only built the first working computer of modern times, they sold two – one to an observatory in New York and the other to the Registrar-General’s office in London. Each was the size of a piano.

  But they weren’t the very first. In 1900 a rusty artefact was discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera. We now know that the ‘Antikythera mechanism’ was a 2,000-year-old clockwork calculator that could predict astronomical phenomena with striking accuracy and detail.

  What we now call ‘computers’ were originally called ‘computing machines’. Until the mid-twentieth century, ‘computers’ were simply ‘people who carried out computations’. So, strictly speaking, the correct answer to the question ‘Who made the first computer?’ should really be ‘the computer’s parents’.

  What is paper money made from?

  Money doesn’t grow on trees. Not metaphorically and not actually.

  Paper is made from pressed wood pulp. ‘Paper money’ is made from cotton or linen (sometimes called ‘rag paper’). Cotton and linen fibres contain far fewer acids than wood pulp, so they don’t discolour or wear out so easily. The cloth is then infused with gelatine to give it extra strength. This material is still used for folding money in the UK, the US and the European Union. The average lifespan of such banknotes is two years.

  In 1988, after several years of research and testing by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia introduced a new set of banknotes made of polypropylene plastic. These last longer and are harder to counterfeit, as they make it easier to incorporate security devices such as holograms. New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, Israel and the Northern Bank of Northern Ireland have now all switched to plastic notes. In 2005 Bulgaria introduced banknotes using the world’s first cotton–polymer hybrid.

  The first paper currency was made from wood-pulp paper. When gold and silver coins became too heavy to carry around, in the eleventh century during the Song dynasty, ‘promissory notes’ were issued in China. These were pieces of paper agreeing to pay over to the bearer the equivalent value in gold or silver coins if asked. The notes were made of dried, dyed mulber
ry bark printed with official seals and signatures. It was called ‘convenient money’. It is thought that local issues of non-metal money were made as early as the Tang dynasty in Sichuan. Japanese banknotes still use paper made from mulberry bark.

  This state guarantee of paper currency is the principle upon which most money is now issued. In the past, individuals and private banks were also able to issue promissory notes and this led to problems over guarantees. In 1660 Stockholms Banco in Sweden was the first bank in Europe to issue notes but four years later it ran out of coins to redeem them and collapsed.

  Times of crisis have often led to emergency currency being issued on material other than cotton or paper. In 1574, when the Dutch were struggling to regain their independence from the invading Spanish, the city of Leyden produced cardboard coins minted from the covers of prayer books. During the Russian administration of Alaska in the late nineteenth century, banknotes were printed on sealskin. In Africa, during the Boer War in 1902, bits of khaki shirt were used.

  Sometimes, the value of banknotes falls below the cost of producing them. The hyperinflation in Germany and Austria after the First World War meant that, by 1922, a single gold krone coin was worth 14,400 paper krone (a stack of cash that would weigh about 15 kilograms or 33 pounds). As a result, people improvised their own currency out of playing cards instead.

  On a pirate’s treasure map, what does X mark?

  There are no documented cases of a real pirate ever drawing up a treasure map, let alone putting an ‘X’ on it to mark where the treasure is buried. Only one pirate, William Kidd (about 1645–1701), is ever recorded as having buried any treasure at all.

  There is even some doubt as to whether Kidd was a pirate. Protected by a ‘letter of marque’ from King William III, he was privately employed by the British governors of New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to protect their coastline from genuine pirates or from the French. Legally, this meant he was not a pirate but a ‘privateer’ (like Sir Francis Drake). His enemies didn’t agree; they vilified him as a ruthless, disrespectful and violent brigand. For example, Kidd’s sailors once showed their backsides to a Royal Navy yacht instead of saluting it, and Kidd himself killed a disobedient member of his crew in cold blood. He became a political embarrassment and, when he was eventually arrested, the wealthy Englishmen who financed his voyages chose to hand him over to the authorities rather than be accused of piracy alongside him.

  It is known that Kidd buried some of his wealth on Gardiners Island, off the coast of Long Island. He had hoped to use it as a bargaining tool to clear his name. However, he’d given the details to one of his backers who then dug it up and sent it on to London to be used in evidence against him. Kidd was tried and found guilty of piracy and murder. He was hanged on 23 May 1701, at ‘Execution Dock’ at Wapping, in London. His body was hung in a steel-hooped cage over the Thames and remained there for twenty years.

  The first treasure map with an X marking the spot appears in the novel Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson also introduced the Black Spot (the pirate’s curse) and several piratical expressions including ‘Avast’, ‘Yo-ho-ho’ and ‘matey’ – though ‘Shiver my timbers!’ came from the pen of another Victorian novelist, Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848). It seems that ‘walking the plank’ was also a literary invention: the only recorded real-life case happened in 1829, well after most piracy had ceased.

  Hardly any pirate booty was ‘treasure’. The majority was food, water, alcohol, weapons, clothing, ships’ fittings or whatever commodity was in the hold. The victims’ ship itself might be sold or taken over if it was better than the pirates’ own, and the crew and passengers were also valuable – either for ransom or to be sold as slaves. During the seventeenth century, over a million Europeans were captured and sold into slavery by Barbary pirates from Algiers.

  Few pirates (or privateers) sailed in galleons. Most used galleys (with banks of oars rather than sails). Unlike the sailing ships that were their prey, these could be rowed against the wind and in any direction, even on a windless day.

  Two privateers (though no pirates) are known to have had wooden legs: the sixteenth-century Frenchman François Le Clerc, known as Jambe de Bois, and Cornelis Corneliszoon Jol (1597–1641), nicknamed Houtebeen (‘Pegleg’).

  There is no historical evidence for any pirate ever owning a pet parrot.

  STEPHEN Why would a pirate want to bury treasure?

  PHILL JUPITUS Well, they can hardly go to the Bradford & Bingley, can they? ‘Hello, we’ve got a chest full of doubloons and booty.’ ‘Yes, would you like fixed term or extended interest?’

  What did early nineteenth-century whalers use to kill whales?

  Not harpoons, but lances.

  For the early whalers, the harpoon wasn’t a killing weapon; it was used to attach a line to the whale. This was thrown by a specialist harpooner who stood up in a rowing boat with one knee jammed into a cut-out section of thwart called the ‘clumsy cleat’. He hurled the harpoon into the whale from up to 6 metres (20 feet) away. The harpoon was attached to a 150-fathom (275-metre or 900-foot) rope impregnated with animal fat to help it run smoothly, coiled in a huge bucket on the deck and kept wet to prevent it catching fire from friction as it paid out.

  When it reached its limit, the whalers were treated to a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’. This meant being pulled along by the whale at up to 42 kilometres per hour (26 miles per hour), the fastest speed any man had then reached on water. (Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, was the centre of whaling in the North Atlantic in the nineteenth century.) Many hours later, the whale would eventually tire and the boat would row over to it. An officer would then change places with the harpooner to deliver the death blow with a lance (only officers could lance a whale). The cry of ‘There’s fire in the chimney’ meant that blood was spouting from the whale’s blowhole and the end was near.

  The carcass was then towed alongside the mother vessel and cut up or ‘flensed’ from the deck using long-handled tools. Often, this exercise was a race against teeming sharks, which tore pieces of blubber from the whale while it was being butchered. Harpooning was such a dangerous profession that the Norwegians allowed only single men to do it.

  Things changed in 1868 when Sven Foyn, a Norwegian engineer, invented an exploding harpoon gun. This did kill the whale and could be used from the deck of large, steam-powered vessels. It transformed whaling, allowing the hunting of faster, more powerful species, such as rorquals like the blue whale (from the Norwegian röyrkval, meaning ‘furrowed whale’, after the long pleats in their underbellies). Because rorquals sank when they died, later versions of the exploding harpoon also injected air into the carcass to keep it afloat.

  The blue whale became the most profitable of all whale catches: a 27-metre (90-foot) whale yielded 15,900 litres (3,500 gallons) of oil. By the 1930s more than 30,000 blue whales were being killed annually. When the International Whaling Commission banned hunting them in 1966, the population of blue whales had dropped from an estimated 186,000 in 1880 to fewer than 5,000.

  The eponymous whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) was named after a real albino sperm whale called ‘Mocha Dick’ who was often seen near the Chilean island of Mocha and who carried with him dozens of harpoons left embedded in his body from more than a hundred battles with whalers throughout the 1830s and 1840s.

  In 2007 Alaskan whalers killed a Bowhead whale that had the tip of a bomb harpoon dated to 1880 embedded in its blubber, which meant it was at least 130 years old when it died.

  What makes the Penny Black stamp so special?

  It’s not their rarity, but their relative commonness that sets them apart.

  A staggering 69 million Penny Blacks have been in circulation at one time or other. Many have survived intact. This is because, instead of using envelopes, Victorian letters were written on one side of a sheet of paper, which was then folded and sealed, so the address and stamp were on the reverse of the
letter itself. If the letter was kept, so was the stamp.

  If you have a Penny Black in your collection, you’ll be lucky to get more than £100 for it. Even this is rather a lot considering how many of them there are – their value is kept artificially high by collectors sitting on hundreds of them and releasing them on to the market very slowly.

  The world’s most valuable stamp, the Tre Skilling Yellow, was sold at auction in Zurich in 1996 for 2.88 million Swiss Francs (about £1.8 m) and again in Geneva in May 2010 for an undisclosed price, all bidders at the auction being sworn to secrecy. If the paper that the stamp is printed on were a commodity sold by weight, it would retail at £55 billion a kilo. The best-known rare stamp is the 1856 British Guiana 1 cent Magenta, which has been kept in a vault since it last changed hands in 1980. Its owner, John du Pont, heir to the Du Pont chemicals fortune, is currently serving a life sentence for murder.

  The most valuable British stamp is a Penny Red printed from plate number 77 in 1864. Plate 77 was corrupt and a few defective stamps went into circulation. There are only six known examples left. One is in the Tapling Collection at the British Library priced at £120,000.

  Until Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879), the social reformer and Secretary of the Post Office, introduced the Penny Black in 1840, it was the receiver not the sender of a letter who paid for the postage. MPs could send letters for free: they did this by stamping it with their ‘frank’ (a ‘true’ or ‘frank’ mark).