QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition Read Online Free PDF

things he didn’t do.
    The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol, seen ‘emitting smoke from his nostrils’. This was in 1556, four years before Raleigh was born.
    Raleigh never personally visited Virginia or any other part of North America. It was a Frenchman named Jean Nicot, from whose name the word ‘nicotine’ is derived, who introduced tobacco to France in 1560, and it was from France, not the New World, that tobacco reached England.

    Raleigh was a keen smoker and probably helped popularise the tobacco habit after he was introduced to it by Sir Francis Drake.
    The term ‘smoking’ is a late seventeenth-century coinage; until then it was referred to as ‘drinking smoke’.
    Potatoes were known in Spain by the mid-sixteenth century, and probably reached the British Isles from Europe, rather than directly from America. As a member of the nightshade family the plant was assumed to be poisonous (as, indeed, the upper portions are). When Raleigh planted one in his garden in Ireland, his neighbours threatened to burn his house down.
    Potatoes gradually caught on. By the middle of the seventeenth century the surgeon Dr William Salmon was claiming they could cure tuberculosis, rabies and ‘increase seed and provoke lust, causing fruitfulness in both sexes’.
    As for the cloak spread across the puddle for the Queen, the story originated after Raleigh’s death with the historian Thomas Fuller. It only became famous as a result of Walter Scott’s 1821 Elizabethan romance, Kenilworth .
    Raleigh’s name was spelt many different ways but it seems to have been pronounced ‘Raw Lie’. His first name was probably pronounced ‘water’.
    He spent fifteen years on death row writing his projected five-volume History of the World but never got further than 1300 BC .
    After his execution, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She carried it with her at all times in a velvet bag until she died twenty-nine years later and it was returned to Raleigh’s tomb at St Margaret’s, Westminster.

Who invented the steam engine?
     
     
    a ) James Watt
b ) George Stephenson
c ) Richard Trevithick
d ) Thomas Newcomen
e ) A Heron from Egypt
     
    Heron (sometimes called Hero) takes the prize, some 1,600 years before Newcomen’s engine of 1711.
    Heron lived in Alexandria around AD 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was also a visionary inventor and his aeolopile or ‘wind-ball’ was the first working steam engine. Using the same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun round at 1,500 rpm. Unfortunately for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an amusing novelty.
    Amazingly, had Heron but known it, the railway had already been invented 700 years earlier by Periander, tyrant of Corinth. Called the Diolkos, or Slipway, it ran for 6 km (4 miles) across the isthmus of Corinth in Greece, and consisted of a roadway paved with limestone blocks in which were cut parallel grooves 1.5 m (5 feet) apart. Trolleys ran along these tracks, on to which ships were loaded. These were pushed by gangs of slaves forming a sort of ‘land-canal’ offering a short cut between the Aegean and the Ionian seas.
    The Diolkos was in use for some some 1,500 years until it fell into disrepair around AD 900. The principle of railways was then completely forgotten about for almost another 500 years, until people had the idea of using them in mines in the fourteenth century.
    The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a brilliant essay speculating what would have happened if the two inventions had been combined to create a global Greek empire, based on a fastrail network, Athenian democracy and a Buddhist-style religion founded on the teachings of Pythagoras. He briefly mentions a failed prophet who lived at 4, Railway Cuttings, Nazareth.
    Heron also invented the vending machine – for four drachmas you got a shot of holy water – and a