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

  The lead singer of Iron Maiden

  has a day job as a

  Boeing 757 pilot.

  A greetings card

  that can play ‘Happy Birthday’

  has more computing power

  than existed in the whole world in 1950.

  You are 14% more likely to die

  on your birthday

  than any other day.

  Oranges and lemons smell different

  due to chemically identical molecules

  that are mirror images of each other.

  An orange is really

  just a left-handed lemon.

  Moon dust

  smells like gunpowder.

  A typical microwave oven

  uses more electricity

  keeping its digital clock on standby

  than it does heating food.

  As it grows,

  sweetcorn makes a squeaking noise

  like two balloons

  rubbing against each other.

  Emissions from car exhausts

  are responsible for

  more deaths every year

  than road accidents.

  You can legally buy cannabis

  in the US, but only as birdseed:

  the feathers of birds that eat it

  acquire a particularly

  glossy sheen.

  Fidel Castro

  estimated that he saved

  ten working days a year

  by not bothering to shave.

  Wild Bill Hickok’s brother Lorenzo

  was nicknamed

  ‘Tame Bill Hickok’.

  From 1912 to 1948,

  painting was an Olympic event.

  In 1924, Jack Yeats,

  brother of the poet W. B. Yeats,

  took the silver:

  Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.

  William Blake’s one-man exhibition

  of paintings in 1809

  received only one review.

  The critic described him as a lunatic.

  In 1891, Claude Monet won 100,000 francs

  in the French national lottery.

  Pigeons can tell the difference between

  impressionist paintings by Monet

  and cubist works by Picasso.

  They can even tell when

  the Monets are hung upside down.

  There are no cubes in Cubism.

  Cézanne’s theory was that everything

  could be broken down into

  cylinders, spheres and cones.

  Tour de France riders

  need to eat the equivalent of

  27 cheeseburgers a day.

  Lightning strikes the Earth

  8.6 million times a day or

  about 100 times a second.

  A single bolt of lightning

  contains enough energy

  to cook

  100,000 pieces of toast.

  Bovril

  was originally called

  ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef ’.

  Hovis

  was originally called

  ‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.

  7-Up

  was originally called

  ‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.

  The Bank of America

  was originally called

  the Bank of Italy.

  Reducing the voting age to 18,

  the introduction of 24-hour licensing

  and passports for pets

  were all policies initiated by

  the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

  The smallest known dinosaur

  was about four inches tall

  and weighed less than

  a chihuahua.

  Each year, drug baron Pablo Escobar

  had to write off 10% of his cash holdings

  because of rats nibbling away

  at his huge stash of bank notes.

  The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror

  came with a free mirror.

  After two weeks of wear

  a pair of jeans will have grown

  a 1,000-strong colony

  of bacteria on the front,

  1,500–2,500 on the back

  and 10,000 on the crotch.

  If all the salt in the sea

  were spread evenly over the land,

  it would be 500 feet thick.

  The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883

  was the loudest sound in recorded history.

  It was heard 3,000 miles away

  in Mauritius.

  Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years,

  but the temperature is minus 200°C.

  Summer nights in the Faroe Islands

  are so well illuminated that

  between May and July

  the lighthouses are turned off.

  In the 1st century ad most ships

  in the northern hemisphere only sailed

  between May and September.

  William Carstares (1649–1715)

  was the last man in Britain

  to be given the thumbscrew.

  As torture was illegal in England,

  he had to be taken to Edinburgh.

  Mussolini tortured his enemies

  by forcing them to swallow

  massive doses of castor oil.

  The second-largest lake in Bolivia

  is called Lake Poopó.

  It’s not a freshwater lake.

  The whole of Shakespeare

  contains only about 20,000

  different words –

  less than half the vocabulary of the

  average English speaker today.

  The whole of Liechtenstein

  can be rented for $70,000 a night,

  for a minimum of two nights.

  It sleeps 900.

  St Vitus

  is the patron saint of oversleeping.

  The International Space Station

  is as roomy as a five-bedroom house

  and travels at 17,500 mph.

  A marshmallow travelling at sea level

  would not begin to melt

  from friction caused by air resistance

  until it reached Mach 1.6

  (1,218 mph).

  When a medium in a trance

  offered to answer any question,

  Groucho Marx asked,

  ‘What’s the capital of North Dakota?’

  The popular Los Angeles beverage

  Original New York Express Iced Coffee

  is made in a factory in Singapore.

  Cameroon is home to the Eton tribe.

  The Eton word for ‘thank you’ is

  abumgang.

  Arabic words are written right to left, but

  Arabic numbers left to right.

  Arabic speakers reading anything

  with a lot of numbers in

  have to read in both directions

  at once.

  In 2010, the Catholic Church had an

  income of $97 billion.

  Trombone

  is French for

  ‘paperclip’.

  The word ‘gas’ was invented by

  the Flemish chemist

  Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644).

  He also invented the word blas

  but it didn’t catch on.

  The word ‘gasoline’

  doesn’t come from ‘gas’. It comes from

  Cazeline – after John Cassell,

  founder of the publisher Cassell & Co.,

  who was the first to sell it commercially.

  Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)

  invented the thesaurus

  and the slide rule.

  Edwin Beard Budding (1775–1846)

  invented the lawnmower

  and the adjustable spanner.

  In 1928, the Solomon Islands pidgin

  for ‘adjustable spanner’ was

  spanner he go walkabout

  and a ‘saw’ was


  this fella pull-him-he-come-push-him-he-go

  brother belong axe.

  The Zulu for ‘Jack-in-a-Box’ is

  udoli ohlala ebokisini ukuthi ufuna

  ukusabisa abantu abaningi.

  The Malay for ‘slate’ is

  sejenis batu berwarna kelabu

  kebiru-biruan yang selalu digunakan

  sebagai atap ruman.

  Wanklank

  is Dutch for

  a discordant noise.

  In 2010,

  Ghana banned

  the sale of second-hand underpants.

  No one has ever seen an atom.

  They’re too small to be seen

  by a microscope and can’t be counted

  or weighed individually.

  Plato thought

  that the smallest particles of matter

  were tiny right-angled triangles.

  Since at least the time of Pythagoras in

  500 BC, no sensible educated person

  has believed the Earth

  was flat.

  A snowflake that falls

  on a glacier in central Greenland

  can take 200,000 years

  to reach the sea.

  The King James Bible

  has inspired the lyrics

  of more pop songs

  than any other book.

  In 2001,

  the World Christian Encyclopaedia

  counted 33,830 different

  Christian denominations.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate

  Easter, Christmas or birthdays.

  For 48 years

  after tinned food was invented,

  people who wanted to eat it

  had to use a hammer and chisel.

  The can opener wasn’t invented

  until 1858.

  The screwdriver was invented

  a hundred years before the screw.

  It was originally used

  to extract nails.

  ‘Marking’ was invented

  at Cambridge University in 1792

  by a chemistry tutor

  called William Farish.

  Margaret Thatcher

  was part of the team that invented

  Mr Whippy ice cream.

  A single sperm contains 37.5 mb

  of DNA information.

  One ejaculation represents a data transfer

  of 15,875 gb,

  equivalent to the combined capacity

  of 62 MacBook Pro laptops.

  70% of all animals in the jungle

  rely on figs for their survival.

  In Antigua,

  ‘fig’ means banana.

  Linnaeus named the banana

  Musa paradisiaca because he thought it

  might have been the forbidden fruit

  of the Garden of Eden.

  The citizens of Kuwait

  celebrated the end of the first Gulf War

  by firing weapons into the air.

  20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets

  falling from the sky.

  The main predators of flamingos

  are zookeepers.

  At the outbreak of the Second World War,

  zookeepers killed all the poisonous

  insects and snakes in London Zoo,

  in case it was bombed

  and they escaped.

  The boa constrictor

  is the only living animal

  whose common name is

  exactly the same

  as its scientific name.

  In the 318 years between 1539 and 1857,

  there were only 317 divorces

  in England.

  At the 1900 Paris Olympics,

  events included Live Pigeon Shooting

  and Long Jump for Horses.

  Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act,

  it is explicitly illegal in Britain

  to use a machine gun

  to kill a hedgehog.

  In ancient Greek

  the word ‘idiot’ meant

  anyone who wasn’t a politician.

  The Icelandic phone book

  is ordered by

  first name.

  The human eye

  can detect 10 million

  different shades of colour.

  Wombats

  have cubic faeces.

  Harvard University

  has the largest ant collection

  in the world.

  It takes a photon 40,000

  years to get from the centre of the Sun

  to its surface, but only 8.3 minutes

  to get from there to the Earth.

  For water to flow 100 metres

  through the ground down a 1° slope takes

  5 days through gravel,

  13.7 years through sand and

  137,000 years through clay.

  In 1969,

  Apollo 11 returned from the Moon

  in half the time it took to get from

  Boston to New York by stagecoach

  in 1769.

  New York City drifts about one inch away

  from Europe every year.

  Between 1960 and 1977, the secret number

  authorising US presidents

  to launch nuclear missiles was

  00000000.

  Jimmy Carter once

  sent a jacket to the dry-cleaner’s

  with the nuclear detonation codes

  still in the pocket.

  Worried about his grades at law school,

  Richard Nixon broke into the Dean’s

  office – only to discover that he was

  top of his class.

  The highest scoring word in Scrabble

  is oxyphenbutazone, potentially earning

  1,178 points.

  (It’s a drug used to treat arthritis.)

  A coal-fired power station

  puts 100 times more radiation into the air

  than a nuclear power plant

  producing the same amount of energy.

  Treasure Island in Lake Mindemoya

  on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron

  is the largest island in a lake on an island

  in a lake in the world.

  The strongest creatures on Earth are

  gonorrhoea bacteria.

  They can pull 100,000 times

  their own body weight.

  A dog has the same ecological footprint as

  two Toyota Landcruisers;

  a cat the same environmental effect as a

  Volkswagen Golf;

  two hamsters the same as a plasma TV.

  Humans

  have the same number

  of hair follicles

  as chimpanzees.

  Gorillas and potatoes

  have two more chromosomes

  than people.

  The average person who lives to be 75

  will have spent six years

  dreaming.

  The word ambisinistrous is the

  opposite of ambidextrous;

  it means

  ‘no good with either hand’.

  James Garfield,

  20th president of the USA,

  could write Greek with one hand

  while writing Latin with the other.

  Young Neanderthal girls

  had bigger biceps

  than an adult male human.

  The second man to go over

  Niagara Falls in a barrel,

  Bobby Leach, survived the fall

  but later died as a result of

  slipping on a piece

  of orange peel.

  An orange is a berry but

  a strawberry isn’t.

  Vatican City has

  the highest crime rate in the world.

  Though the resident population

  is only just over 800,

  more than 600 crimes

  are committed there each year.

  90% of the crime

>   in Helmand province

  is committed

  by the Afghan police.

  50% more US soldiers committed suicide

  in Afghanistan in 2012