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

  than were killed in action.

  In 117 AD, Emperor Hadrian declared

  attempted suicide by soldiers

  a form of desertion

  and made it a capital offence.

  Jack Bauer,

  the lead character in the TV series 24,

  killed 112 people

  in the first five seasons of the show.

  The longest hangover

  in medical literature

  lasted four weeks.

  It belonged to a 37-year-old man

  from Glasgow.

  In 1715, a group of Jacobite rebels

  failed to take Edinburgh Castle

  because their rope ladders

  were six feet too short.

  The first manager

  of the first McDonald’s franchise

  was called Ed MacLuckie.

  Coca-Cola in the Maldives

  is made from seawater.

  A ‘riot’ in England and Wales

  must legally involve

  a minimum of 12 people.

  Under US federal law

  it’s only three people

  and in Nevada

  only two.

  More than 1 in 20 football injuries

  are caused by

  celebrating goals on the pitch.

  Slavery was not made

  a statutory offence in the UK

  until 6th April 2010.

  Diagnosed with pleurisy,

  Sir Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of

  Vaseline, decided to coat himself

  in his product from head to foot.

  He survived and lived to be 96.

  In 1915, Charlie Chaplin entered

  a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest

  in San Francisco. Not only did he not win,

  he failed even to make the final.

  Male fruit flies rejected by females

  drink significantly more alcohol than

  those that have had a successful encounter.

  In Inuktitut,

  iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga

  means

  ‘I should try not to become an alcoholic’.

  2,520 is the smallest number

  that can be exactly divided

  by all the numbers

  1 to 10.

  2.5 million Mills & Boon novels

  were pulped and added to the tarmac

  of the UK’s M6 toll motorway

  to make it more absorbent.

  In 1999, more than 3,000 people

  were hospitalised after

  tripping over a

  laundry basket.

  In 1997, 39 people in the UK

  found themselves in

  hospital with

  tea-cosy-related

  injuries.

  Deipnophobia n.

  The fear of

  dinner party conversations.

  Nomophobia n.

  The fear of being

  out of mobile phone contact.

  Metrophobia n.

  Fear of poetry.

  Lachanophobia n.

  Fear of vegetables.

  Since 1990, the number of people

  living in poverty in China

  has fallen from

  85% to 15%.

  A ‘knot’ is something

  tied in a single piece of rope or line.

  Something that joins two ropes

  together is a ‘bend’.

  A baby oyster

  is called a ‘spat’.

  More chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos

  are eaten by people every year

  than there are in

  all the zoos in the world.

  In the 19th century,

  sausages were marketed as

  ‘bags of mystery’.

  If a vampire were to feed once a day

  and turn each of his victims

  into a vampire,

  the entire human population of the planet

  would become vampires

  in just over a month.

  Relative to our galaxy,

  the Earth is travelling through space

  at more than 500,000 mph.

  The Sun takes 220 million years

  to orbit the galaxy,

  a journey it has made

  20 times so far.

  Abbey-lubber n.

  A lazy monk.

  Acrochordon n.

  A wart that hangs down

  like a string.

  Apport n.

  Something that appears out of thin air:

  the opposite of a vanishing.

  Autotelic adj.

  Worth doing for its own sake.

  Although Shakespeare’s works run to

  more than a million words,

  only 14 exist in his own handwriting:

  12 of them are his signatures

  and the other two are ‘by’ and ‘me’.

  George W. Bush named

  The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

  as his favourite childhood book. It was

  published when he was 23 years old.

  In 2012, Britain’s Eurovision entrant,

  Englebert Humperdinck (76), was

  not only the oldest of the contestants,

  he was older than more than 20

  of the countries they represented.

  Swans do not sing (before dying or

  otherwise), although one species, the

  Whistling Swan, whistles a bit.

  There are ten times as many stars

  in the known universe

  as there are

  grains of sand in the world.

  The ties bought in America

  for Father’s Day each year

  would stretch from New York to Rome.

  There are thought to be 100,000

  uncharted mountains under the sea.

  Only 1,000 or so have ever been mapped.

  Aborigines, whose culture reaches back

  to the last Ice Age, have names for

  (and can locate) mountains

  that have been under the sea

  for 8,000 years.

  Just like humans,

  British cows moo in accents

  specific to their region.

  95% of all data in the world

  is still stored on paper.

  Most of it is never looked at again.

  The common shrew

  protects itself from predators

  by dying of fright.

  The next person to walk on the Moon

  will almost certainly be

  Chinese.

  Almost half of all babies in China

  are born by Caesarean section.

  The half a million tonnes of chocolate

  eaten each year in Britain

  represent 87% of the entire

  annual cocoa production

  of Latin America.

  A single zinc mine in Namibia

  uses a fifth of the country’s

  electricity supply.

  Per gram per second, more energy

  runs through a sunflower

  than through the Sun itself.

  It takes ten times

  as much energy to heat water

  as it does to heat iron.

  It takes ten times

  as much energy to turn water into steam

  as it does to bring it to the boil.

  It takes an hour

  to soft-boil an ostrich egg

  and an hour and a half

  to hard-boil one.

  It takes between 70,000 and 150,000

  crocuses to make

  a kilo of saffron.

  Alexander the Great

  washed his hair in saffron

  to keep it shiny and orange.

  In 1999, a four-year-old girl

  turned yellow

  after drinking too much

  Sunny Delight.

  Russian has no word for ‘blue’,
>
  only two different words for

  ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’.

  Andy Warhol always wore

  green underpants.

  25 million Bibles were printed in 2011,

  compared to 208 million IKEA catalogues.

  The English version of Wikipedia

  has 50 times more words than

  the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  Up to 2010, Wikipedia had taken

  100 million person-hours to write:

  about the same amount of time

  that the population of the USA

  spends watching TV ad breaks

  in a single weekend.

  There is more information

  in one edition of the New York Times than

  the average person

  in 17th-century England

  would have come across in a lifetime.

  When Einstein published his

  Theory of General Relativity,

  the New York Times sent their

  golfing correspondent

  to interview him.

  The historic news of the

  first manned powered flight

  by the Wright Brothers

  first appeared in the magazine

  Gleanings in Bee Culture.

  Dune, by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling

  science fiction novel, was rejected

  over 20 times before being accepted

  by a publisher of car manuals.

  Ernest Hemingway bought the

  shotgun that he used to kill himself

  at Abercrombie & Fitch.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  was the first person to observe

  the curvature of the human spine.

  Until then everyone had assumed

  that it was straight.

  Rosa whitfield is a rose

  named after actress June Whitfield.

  As she pointed out,

  ‘The catalogue describes it as

  “superb for bedding,

  best up against a wall”.’

  Someone who is cock-throppled

  has an extremely prominent

  Adam’s apple.

  The symbols used by !$%@ing cartoonists

  to indicate swearing are called grawlixes.

  Jeremy Bentham’s body

  has been dressed

  in moth-resistant underwear

  since 1939.

  When Jeremy Paxman

  was at Cambridge, he failed

  to get into his college’s

  University Challenge team.

  Before Jeremy Clarkson

  became a journalist,

  he sold Paddington Bears

  for a living.

  Jeremy Kyle’s father

  was the Queen Mother’s

  accountant and personal secretary.

  A babalevante

  is someone who makes

  feeble jokes.

  Babeship

  is another word for

  infancy.

  Borborygmi

  are stomach rumbles.

  Buggerare

  is Italian for

  ‘to cheat’ or ‘swindle’.

  If you have a pizza

  with radius z and thickness a,

  its volume is pi*z*z*a.

  In 1998, 10,113 American women

  insured themselves against

  Virgin Birth

  at the millennium.

  The first motorist to be fined

  for speeding in the UK was

  Walter Arnold in 1896.

  He was doing 8 mph in a 2 mph zone.

  The first London Underground

  trains were nicknamed

  ‘sewer trams’.

  The world’s lightest metal

  is 100 times lighter than styrofoam

  and can rest on a dandelion puff

  without damaging it.

  Graphene,

  the world’s strongest material,

  is a million times thinner than paper

  but 200 times stronger than steel.

  To break through a sheet

  of graphene as thick as cling film

  would take the force of an elephant

  balanced on the point of a pencil.

  The pressure in the deepest ocean,

  at the bottom of the Marianas Trench,

  is equal to the weight of ten brown bears

  balancing on a postage stamp.

  All polar bears are Irish:

  they’re descended from brown bears

  that lived in Ireland

  over 10,000 years ago.

  More than half the world’s population

  is under 25

  and more than half of it

  is bilingual.

  Established writers and artists are

  18 times more likely

  to kill themselves

  than the general population.

  People with schizophrenia

  are three times more likely to smoke

  than the average person.

  Zischeln

  is a useful German verb meaning

  ‘to whisper angrily’.

  The Italian verb asolare

  means ‘to pass time in a delightful but

  meaningless

  way’.

  Hungarian has no words

  for ‘son’ or ‘daughter’,

  but nine specific words

  for different kinds of brother or sister.

  In North Welsh,

  the word for ‘now’ is rwan,

  in South Welsh it is nawr,

  the same word spelt backwards.

  Gold has its own E number.

  E175

  is officially suitable for consumption

  by vegetarians, vegans and members

  of all religious groups.

  The Victorians

  made tiepins

  out of badgers’ penis bones.

  Some parts of Tasmania

  are so fertile that

  the topsoil is 70 feet deep.

  Trinity College, Cambridge,

  has won more Nobel Prizes

  than the whole of Italy.

  The human body has 100 trillion cells,

  each one a 10,000th the size of a pinhead

  but containing enough DNA instructions

  to fill 1,000 600-page books.

  Every three seconds,

  the Sun emits more neutrinos

  than the number of atoms

  in all the humans who have ever lived.

  Neutrinos are 100,000 times

  smaller than electrons,

  but there are so many of them

  that they may outweigh

  all the visible matter in the universe.

  If an atom were the size

  of the Solar System,

  a neutrino would be the size

  of a golf ball.

  The man who sees to the needs of VIPs

  in the official presidential guest house

  in Washington DC

  is called Randy Bumgardner.

  The founder of Pan American Airlines

  was called

  Juan Trippe.

  The Archbishop of Manila

  from 1974–2003

  was called Cardinal Sin.

  Robert Burns was never called

  Rabbie or Robbie – though he did

  occasionally call himself Spunkie.

  The film Jaws was based on a novel

  by Peter Benchley.

  When he couldn’t think of a title,

  his father, Nathaniel, suggested

  What’s That Noshin’ On Ma Leg.

  As soon as tiger shark embryos

  develop teeth

  they attack and eat each other

  in the womb.

  If the three quarks in a hydrogen atom

  were scaled up to the size of garden peas,

  the hydrogen atom

 
would be 1,000 miles across.

  If all the land in Finland