QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (22 page)

All of them except the last one.

Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) was a London plumber who held nine patents: for manhole covers, drains, pipe joints, and, most notably, the ballcock.

His innovative Chelsea showroom was a big hit, though ladies were said to faint at the sight of the unmentionables on display. Crapper’s, on the King’s Road, started by his nephew George, only closed in 1966.

Crapper & Co. held four royal warrants. When the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) bought Sandringham in 1880, they did all the plumbing.

In
Flushed with Pride
(1969), the author Wallace Reyburn claimed Crapper invented the flush toilet, and was knighted and cited in the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
As any plumber will tell you, none of these things is true.

Though Crapper’s ‘Silent Valveless Waste Water Preventer’ was a flush toilet, the patent was not his: it was filed by a Mr Alfred Giblin in 1819.

The first flush toilet was discovered in China in 2000 in the
palace of a king of the Han Dynasty (206
BC–AD
220). It is a stone latrine with a seat, armrest and a system of pipes for flushing the pan. Arguably, the first modern WC was invented in 1592 by Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I.

As for Crapper’s surname being the origin of the slang for a lavatory, this is just possible. The word doesn’t appear in print until the 1930s. ‘Crap’ dates from 1440, but it meant ‘chaff’ and had fallen out of use by 1600. Victorians would not have understood the word ‘crapper’, let alone found it funny.

The story goes that English settlers took the word with them to America, where it was vulgarised to its present meaning. When American GIs came to Britain in the First World War, they found the name Crapper engraved on all the lavatories hilarious, and the name stuck.

Wallace Reyburn went on to publish
Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling
(1971), a ludicrous fiction about the supposed inventor of the bra.

Wolfgang.

His full name was Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. He usually called himself Wolfgang Amade (not Amadeus) or Wolfgang Gottlieb. ‘Amadeus’ is Latin for Gottlieb and means ‘God’s love’.

Other memorable middle names include Richard Tiffany Gere, Rupert Chawney Brooke, William Cuthbert Faulkner and Harry S. Truman, where the S stands for nothing, despite the full stop.

Apparently Truman’s parents couldn’t agree whether he should be named after Anderson
Shipp
Truman or
Solomon
Young, his grandfathers.

For punctuation fiends, we draw your attention to
The Chicago Manual of Style
: ‘all initials given with a name should for convenience and consistency be followed by a period even if they are not abbreviations of names.’

He stole it.

The usual explanation is that he took the name from the call of the leadsman on a Mississippi paddle-boat steamer. ‘Mark Twain’ was the second mark on the lead line used to calculate the river’s depth. It indicated a depth of 2 fathoms (12 feet), which was ‘safe water’.

This isn’t wrong, it’s just that someone else had got there first. The name was already being used by Captain Isaiah Sellers (1802–63), a river news correspondent.

The young Samuel Longhorn Clemens (1835–1910) cut his teeth writing parodies of Sellers under the pen-name Sergeant Fathom. According to Clemens, Sellers was ‘not of a literary turn or capacity’ but was ‘a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on land’. The Sergeant Fathom burlesques mortified him. Clemens later wrote: ‘He had never been held up to ridicule before; he was sensitive, and he never got over the hurt which I had wantonly
and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity.’

This didn’t stop him stealing the pen-name, as Twain (Mark II) explained in a letter to a reader:

We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t Robinson.

Johann David Wyss (1743–1818), a Swiss clergyman and former military chaplain, wrote the original stories as an entertainment for his four sons on long hiking trips. One of the boys, Johann Emmanuel, illustrated them and many years later, another one, Johann Rudolf (already famous for having written the words to the Swiss National anthem) edited them into a book.
Der Schweizerische Robinson
(literally ‘The Swiss Robinson’) was published in German in 1812.

The story follows the adventures of a Swiss family stranded in the East Indies after a shipwreck on the way to Australia, and is told from the point of view of the father (who is not named). Wyss intended the stories to offer his sons practical guidance on family values and self-reliance, inspired by the work of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712–78) and Daniel Defoe’s novel
Robinson Crusoe
(1719).

The enduring popularity of the basic idea has survived endless liberties taken with the original text.
The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature
comments: ‘with all the expansions and contractions over the past two centuries (this includes a long history of abridgements, condensations, Christianisings and Disney products), Wyss’s original narrative has long since been obscured, and the book is chiefly characterised by its improbable profusion of animals – penguins, kangaroos, monkeys and even a whale – conveniently gathered together on a tropical island.’

As for the confusion over the family’s name, this wasn’t a problem for William Godwin (1756–1836), husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, father of Mary Shelley and influential social philosopher. He and his second wife produced the first English translation in 1814, calling it – quite logically –
The Family Robinson Crusoe
.

In 1818, for some reason, the title was changed to
The Swiss Family Robinson
(surely The Swiss Family Crusoe would have made more sense?) and this – unlike the details of the plot, the names and the sexes of the characters and the underlying moral lessons – is about the only part of it all to have stood the test of time.

It won’t surprise you to learn that roughly a third of the endless film and TV adaptations have hammered home the mistake by unambiguously (and without a shred of embarrassment) calling the Swiss family ‘Robinson’.

It was a spelling mistake.

In the 1850s, a British ship noted the existence of a prominent but unnamed point of land in Alaska. A ship’s officer scribbled ‘Name?’ next to the point on a manuscript map. When the map was being copied at the Admiralty, a cartographer misread the scribble, and wrote in the new point’s name as ‘Cape Nome’.

In 1899 the burghers of Nome tried to change the name of their town to Anvil City, but the US Postal service objected on the grounds that it risked confusion with the nearby settlement of Anvik, so the name stuck.

As the city’s community website www.nomealaska.org reminds us: ‘There’s no place like Nome.’

Grung Tape.

The city’s day-to-day name, which means ‘City of Angels’ (the same as Los Angeles), is an abbreviation for the official name, which is the longest place name in the world.

Only ignorant foreigners call it Bangkok, which hasn’t been used in Thailand for more than 200 years. For
Europeans (and every single one of their encyclopaedias) to go on calling the capital of Thailand Bangkok is a bit like Thais insisting that the capital of Britain is called Billingsgate or Winchester.

Grung Tape (the rough pronunciation) is usually spelt Krung Thep.

Bangkok was the name of the small fishing port that used to exist before King Rama I moved his capital there in 1782, built a city on the site and renamed it.

The full official name of Krung Thep is Krungthep Mahanakhon Amorn Rattanakosin Mahintara Yudthaya Mahadilok Pohp Noparat Rajathanee Bureerom Udomrajniwes Mahasatarn Amorn Pimarn Avaltarnsatit Sakatattiya Visanukram Prasit.

In Thai, this is written as a single word of 152 letters or 64 syllables.

It translates roughly as ‘Great City of Angels, the supreme repository of divine jewels, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of the reincarnated spirits.’

The front part of the name Bangkok is the common Thai word
bang
meaning village. The second part is supposed to have come from an old Thai word
makok
which means some kind of fruit (either olives or plums or some sort of mixture of the two). So it could be ‘Village of Olives’ or ‘Village of Plums’. Nobody seems to be quite sure which – or to care.

Krung Thep (or Bangkok if you insist) is the only city in Thailand. It is almost forty times bigger than the next largest town.