A QUITE INTERESTING BOOK
1,227 QI FACTS
TO BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF
Compiled by
John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
& James Harkin
with the QI Elves
Anne Miller, Andy Murray & Alex Bell
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Epigraph
1,227 Facts
Tasting Notes
Index
About the Authors
By the Same Authors
Copyright
Introduction
I am no poet but, if you think for yourselves as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.
MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867)
Michael Faraday was one of the greatest scientists in history and the greatest experimentalist of them all. The son of a village blacksmith from a desolate part of Cumbria, he left school at 14 with only the most rudimentary education, and taught himself everything he knew by reading the books that passed through his hands during his seven-year apprenticeship to a London bookbinder.
At QI, we think a great deal of Michael Faraday, and we’re not the only ones. Albert Einstein kept a picture of him on his study wall, alongside Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell.
Like Faraday, we read a lot of books – on any and every conceivable subject, and the more madly random the better.
None of us claim to have an ounce of Faraday’s genius, but all three of us, despite the fact that we each went to university (43, 31 and 16 years ago respectively), count ourselves as essentially self-educated.
We have achieved this together over the last ten years by applying the QI Research Method, which can be expressed in a single line. It is to ‘read all of anything (even the footnotes) but only write down what you, personally, find interesting’. This not only reduces, by several orders of magnitude, the essentially infinite amount of available information in the universe, but it also has the delightful side effect that we really do ‘learn something new every day’.
For instance, until 20 minutes ago, when we started writing this introduction, none of us knew that Michael Faraday (as in so many other ways) was more than 150 years ahead of us. For he did exactly the same thing as we now do: he read every book he came across, but only noted down what he found ‘singular or clever’.
Core QI research always begins like this, in nuggets. Each bit is then added to our database, expressed in the clearest and sparest form that we can manage.
This simple way of distilling knowledge leaves behind a rich residue of astonishment and delight, a small selection of which is before you.
Much of what we find lays bare, surprisingly often, what is not known, rather than what is known. Such information (or lack of it) can be returned to again and again without ever becoming dull. It bears thinking about, often. When Newton was asked how he had discovered the universal law of gravitation, he replied, ‘By thinking on it continually.’ Or, as another of our heroes, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, put it: ‘Do not become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.’
So here, in bite-sized pieces, nestling among the known and the numbered, are the mysteries of the enormous and the minuscule; of human comedy and tragedy; of heat, light, speed, life, art and thought.
As Faraday urged his students, we also try to think for ourselves. But more uncannily than that, coaxing these 1,227 items into an order that felt comfortable and right has had the strange result that they have indeed come to form a kind of poem in the mind.
We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have enjoyed putting them together.
And, if you solve any of the mysteries, let us know.
JOHN LLOYD, JOHN MITCHINSON & JAMES HARKIN
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,
but they are not entitled
to their own facts.
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN (1927–2003)
Asteroid
1,227
is called Geranium.
The ozone layer
smells faintly of
geraniums.
The centre of the galaxy
tastes like
raspberries.
The universe
is shaped
like a vuvuzela.
Light travels
18 million times faster
than rain.
The Queen is the legal owner
of one-sixth of the
Earth’s land surface.
The name of the first human being
in Norse mythology
is Ask.
Everybody expected
the Spanish Inquisition –
they were legally obliged
to give 30 days’ notice.
Octopuses
have three hearts.
Kangaroos
have three vaginas.
Three of Fidel Castro’s sons,
Alexis, Alexander and Alejandro,
are named
after Alexander the Great.
The opening lines of
Jerome K. Jerome’s
Three Men In A Boat are:
‘There were four of us.’
40% of the human race
did not survive
beyond its 1st birthday.
One in ten European babies
is conceived
in an IKEA bed.
The human heart
pumps enough blood in a lifetime
to fill three supertankers.
The word ‘time’
noun in English.
10% of all the photographs
in the world
were taken in the last 12 months.
Between 1838 and 1960,
more than half the photos taken
were of babies.
The words written on
Twitter every day
would fill
a 10-million-page book.
In 2008, a man in Ohio
was arrested for
having sex with a picnic table.
The average person walks
the equivalent of three times
around the world
in a lifetime.
The world’s population spends
500,000 hours a day
typing Internet security codes.
The first book ever printed in Oxford
had a misprint on the first page:
they got the date wrong.
For 100 years, the flag of the
tropical Turks and Caicos Islands
in the West Indies
mistakenly featured an igloo.
One third of Russians
believe that
the Sun revolves around the Earth.
46% of American adults
believe that the world
is less than 10,000 years old.
46% of American adults
can’t read well enough to understand
the label on their prescription medicine.
More than 50% of NASA employees
are dyslexic,
hired for their superior problem-solving
and spatial-awareness skills.
Beyoncé Knowles
is an 8th cousin, four times removed,
of Gustav Mahler.
Shostakovich
wrote his 8th Symphony
in a henhouse.
Argentina
is the 8th-largest country
with the 8th-largest Jewish population.
8th January 1835
is the only day in history
that the USA had no national debt.
Italy’s biggest business is the Mafia.
It turns over $178 billion a year
and accounts for 7% of GDP.
George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein
had their shoes hand-made
by the same Italian cobbler.
The designer of Saddam’s bunker
was the grandson of the woman
who built Hitler’s bunker.
Churchill’s secret bunker
was in Neasden.
It was so horrible
he only went there once.
In his first year at Harrow,
Winston Churchill was bottom
of the whole school.
The Irish poet Brendan Behan
became an alcoholic
at the age of eight.
Leonardo da Vinci
worked on the Mona Lisa for 15 years.
By the time he died in 1519,
he still didn’t consider it finished.
When the Mona Lisa was stolen
from the Louvre in 1911,
one of the suspects was Picasso.
Most diamonds are
at least 3 billion years old.
There are enough
diamonds in existence
to give everyone on the planet
a cupful.
1.5 million tiny diamonds
per second.
Under extreme high pressure,
diamonds can be made
from peanut butter.
The US tax code
is four times as long
as the complete works of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh
and King Charles I
all had pierced ears.
An ‘earworm’ is a song
that gets stuck in your head.
Over 100 billion neutrinos
pass unnoticed through your head
every second.
IKEA
is the world’s 3rd-largest user
of wood and sells 2 billion
Swedish meatballs a year.
In Afghanistan and Iraq
it takes 250,000 bullets
(three tons of ammunition)
to kill each insurgent.
More Falklands veterans
have committed suicide
since the war
than were killed during it.
A language
dies every 14 days.
The world’s largest pearl
weighs 14 pounds.
On average, American doctors
interrupt their patients
within 14 seconds.
There are over 14 billion light bulbs
in the world
but fewer than 14 million Jews.
People earning over £14,000 a year
are the richest 4%
on the planet.
There are eight times as many atoms
in a teaspoonful of water
as there are teaspoonfuls of water
in the Atlantic.
There are more living organisms
in a teaspoonful of soil
than there are people on Earth,
and a billion times more in a tonne
than there are stars
in the Milky Way.
Charles Darwin
calculated that English soil contained
50,000 worms an acre.
In 1999, Darlington FC acquired
50,000 worms to irrigate their
waterlogged pitch.
They all drowned.
Three and a half Olympic swimming pools
could hold all the gold
ever mined in the world.
In 2011, Birds Eye sold
225 billion frozen peas:
enough to fill
40 Olympic swimming pools.
If all the Birds Eye waffles
sold in a year were stacked up,
they would be 474 times higher
than Mount Everest.
Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb
Everest, was a professional beekeeper.
When filling in forms,
he always gave his occupation as
‘apiarist’.
The 10,000 trillion ants in the world
weigh about the same as
all the human beings.
If the 5 trillion spiders
in the Netherlands took to eating
humans rather than insects,
they’d consume all 16.7 million
Dutch people in just three days.
Alfred Kinsey, author of
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948),
had a collection of 5 million wasps
and could insert a toothbrush
into his penis, bristle-end first.
Biologically speaking,
‘bugs’ are insects that suck.
Biologists cannot agree
on definitions for the words
‘species’, ‘organism’ or ‘life’.
Behavioural biologists
do not agree on what constitutes
‘behaviour’.
Psychologists
cannot agree on
what ‘personality’ means.
Anthropologists cannot agree
on the meaning of the word
‘culture’
or on the meaning of the word
‘meaning’.
Abulia n.
The inability
to make decisions.
Astasia n.
The inability
to stand up.
Aprosexia n.
The inability
to concentrate on anything.
Apodysophilia n.
A feverish desire
to rip one’s clothes off.
If all the Lego bricks ever manufactured
were clipped on top of each other,
they would make a tower ten times as high
as the distance to the Moon.
Liechtenstein,
the world’s 6th-smallest country,
is the world’s largest exporter of
false teeth.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries,
having all your teeth removed
and replaced with false ones
was a popular
21st-birthday present.
The road signs
of the Austrian village of Fucking
are set in concrete
to deter thieves.
London,
with a population of over 8,000,000,
is not a city,
though the City of London,
with a population of about 7,000,
is.
According to the Forestry Commission,
London is
‘the largest urban forest in the world’.
In 1894, The Times estimated that by 1950
London would be nine feet deep
in horse manure.
The Roman name for Paris was
Lutetia,
which translates into English
as ‘Slough’.
In 1811, nearly a quarter
of all the women in Britain
were named Mary.
In 1881, there were only six men
in Britain
called Derek.
Only 4 Clives, 13 Trevors and 15 Keiths
were born in the UK
in 2011.
Naughty racehorse names
that managed to escape
the Jockey Club censor include
Hoof Hearted, Peony’s Envy,
Wear The Fox Hat and Sofa Can Fast.
In 2012,
the Advertising Standards Authority
ordered a Northampton-based
furniture store to stop
advertising its prices
as ‘Sofa King Low’.
Caterpillars make no noises
other than chewing –