1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (3 page)

Charles Blondin crossed Niagara Falls

several times on a 1,000-foot tightrope:

blindfolded, in a sack, on stilts,

carrying a man on his back

and cooking an omelette in the middle.

Michael J. Fox’s

middle name is

Andrew.

Emile Heskey’s

middle name is

Ivanhoe.

David Frost’s

middle name is

Paradine.

Richard Gere’s

middle name is

Tiffany.

1 in 50 Americans

executed for murder

had the middle name ‘Wayne’.

1 in 50 Scots

are heroin addicts.

1 in 50 Americans

claim to have been abducted

by aliens.

1 in 50 words

in the lyrics of the winning entries of

the Eurovision Song Contest

is ‘love’.

More people go to church

on Sunday in China

than in the whole of Europe.

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.