1,227 QI Facts To Blow Your Socks Off Read online

  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’

  is the most commonly used

  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
r />   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.

  A burning candle creates

  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 –