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

portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.
    ALAN I know something interesting! Stephenson’s Rocket went at 30 miles an hour, and they were sure if you went to 30 miles an hour or over, you would suffer irreparable brain damage. So they put fences alongside the tracks so that passers-by wouldn’t have to witness them just losing it. I suspect that the person who came up with that notion wasn’t a medical doctor or anything like that; I suspect it was a fence-maker.
     

Who invented the telephone?
     
     
    Antonio Meucci.
    An erratic, sometimes brilliant, Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the USA in 1850. In 1860, he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono . He filed a caveat (a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.
    In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler exploded. Unable to speak much English, and living on the dole, he failed to send the $10 required to renew his caveat in 1874.
    When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued.He’d sent his original sketches and working models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
    Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci who got the credit for the invention. In 2004, the balance was partly redressed by the US House of Representatives who passed a resolution that ‘the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.’
    Not that Bell was a complete fraud. As a young man he did teach his dog to say ‘How are you, grandmamma?’ as a way of communicating with her when she was in a different room. And he made the telephone a practical tool.
    Like his friend Thomas Edison, Bell was relentless in his search for novelty. And, like Edison, he wasn’t always successful. His metal detector failed to locate the bullet in the body of the stricken President James Garfield. It seems Bell’s machine was confused by the President’s metal bed-springs.
    Bell’s foray into animal genetics was driven by his desire to increase the numbers of twin and triplet births in sheep. He noticed that sheep with more than two nipples produced more twins. All he managed to produce was sheep with more nipples.
    On the plus side, he did help to invent a hydrofoil, the HP 4, which set the world water-speed record of 114 kph (70.84 mph) in 1919 and stood for ten years. Bell was eighty-two at the time and wisely refused to travel in it.
    Bell always referred to himself first and foremost as a ‘teacher of the deaf’. His mother and wife were deaf and he taught the young Helen Keller. She dedicated her autobiography to him.

What’s quite interesting about Scotland, kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky and tartan?
     
     
    None of them is Scottish.
    Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland. ‘Scots Gaelic’ is actually a dialect of Irish.
    Kilts were invented by the Irish but the word ‘kilt’ is Danish ( kilte op , ‘tuck up’).
    The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3: 5, 10, 15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century BC . The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century AD.
    Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 BC ).
    Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of 5,000-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.
    Whisky was invented in