QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (36 page)

A cup of coffee.

Dry tea-leaves contain a higher proportion of caffeine by weight than coffee beans. But an average
cup
of coffee contains about three times as much caffeine as an average cup of tea, because more beans are needed to make it.

The amount of caffeine in coffee and tea depends on several factors. The higher the temperature of the water, the greater the caffeine extracted from beans or leaves. Espresso, which is made with pressurised steam, contains more caffeine, drop for drop, than brewed coffee. The amount of time that water is in contact with coffee beans or tea-leaves affects the caffeine content. Longer contact equals higher levels of caffeine.

Also important are the variety of coffee or tea, where it is grown, and the roast of the coffee and cut of the tea-leaf.

The darker the roast of coffee, the lower the caffeine content. With tea, the tips of the plant contain a higher concentration than the larger leaves.

Paradoxically, an average 30 ml (1 fl. oz) espresso contains about the same amount of caffeine as a 150 ml (5 fl. oz) cup of PG Tips. So a single-shot cappuccino or latte won’t give you much more of a caffeine hit than a cuppa. A cup of instant coffee, on the other hand, contains only half the caffeine of a filter coffee.

Not to make doing the dishes easier.

Its main purpose was to reduce the number of breakages caused by servants, rather than to act as a labour-saving device.

The first practical mechanical dishwasher was invented in 1886 by Josephine Garis Cochran (1839–1913) of Shelbyville, Illinois. She was the daughter of a civil engineer and, on her mother’s side, the great-granddaughter of John ‘Crazy’ Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat. A prominent socialite, married to a merchant and politician, her main problem in life was worrying about the maids chipping her precious china (it had been in the family since the seventeenth century).

This enraged her and, so the story goes, one night she dismissed the servants, did the dishes on her own, saw what an impossible job it was and vowed, if no one else would, to invent a machine to do it instead. When her husband William died in 1883, leaving her in debt, she got serious.

With the help of an engineer friend, she designed the machine in her woodshed. It was crude and cumbersome but effective. There was a small foot-pedal driven version and a large steam-driven one. The latter, able to wash and dry 200 dishes in two minutes, was the sensation of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and won first prize for the ‘best mechanical construction for durability and adaptation to its line of work’. At $250 each, however, the machines were too expensive for home use, but enough were sold to hotels and restaurants to keep Cochran’s Crescent Washing Machine Company in business until her death in 1913.

Other mechanical dishwashers had been developed (and patented) in the US between 1850 and 1865 (all of them, it seems, by women) but none of them really worked. A hand-cranked wooden machine was invented and patented in 1850 by Joel Houghton. In 1870, Mary Hobson obtained a dishwasher patent, but even then it contained the word ‘improved’. The electric dishwasher first appeared in 1912; the
first specialised dishwasher detergent (Calgon) in 1932; the first automatic dishwasher in 1940, but it didn’t reach Europe until 1960.

Apricots.

The ‘orange jam’ at the heart of Britain’s eighth most popular biscuit is actually apricot pulp, sugar, and a squirt of tangerine oil. This assertion appeared in the
Daily Telegraph
in September 2002.

(If it’s not true perhaps someone from McVitie’s would like to get in touch with us and correct this heinous slur. We note in passing that even the company’s advertising refers to it as the ‘smashing
orangey
bit’ (our italics), which doesn’t strictly imply the presence of actual oranges.)

It would take a 70-kg (11-stone) man a 90-minute football match to work off the 809 calories gained by a packet of Jaffa Cakes. Over 750 million Jaffa Cakes are eaten every year, generating sales of £25 million. If placed end to end, they would stretch from London to Australia and back again.

In 1991 McVitie’s won a landmark case (United Biscuits (UK) Ltd v The Commissioners of Customs and Excise) to prove that Jaffa Cakes are, in fact, cakes not biscuits.

This was to avoid paying VAT – cakes and biscuits are zero-rated by the UK Customs and Excise, except for
chocolate-coated biscuits, which are taxable as luxury items. McVitie’s had to show that Jaffa Cakes were chocolate cakes, rather than chocolate biscuits.

The evidence turned on what happens when they go stale: like cakes, Jaffa Cakes grow harder, while biscuits become soft.

McVitie’s is the third largest biscuit company in the world and is owned by United Biscuits. United Biscuits is owned, in turn, by Nabisco. Nabisco is owned by Kraft Foods Inc., the second largest food corporation in the world after Nestlé. Kraft has 98,000 employees and turned over $32 billion in 2004.

Kraft itself is 85 per cent owned by the Altria Group, formerly Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company.

Not a lot.

Digestive biscuits were invented by McVitie’s in Edinburgh by a young employee, Alexander Grant, in 1892.

They were advertised as ‘aiding digestion’ (a euphemism for reducing wind) because of the high content of baking soda and coarse brown flour. This has never been scientifically proven and it is consequently illegal to sell them under that name in the USA. The US equivalent is the graham cracker.

McVitie’s Original Digestive is still the ninth-biggest biscuit brand in Britain, with annual sales of
£
20m.

McVitie’s best-selling biscuit and the second biggest biscuit brand in Britain is the chocolate digestive launched in 1925. KitKat remains the biggest UK brand in the sector.

The annual sales of chocolate digestives are over
£
35m – that’s 71 million packets, or 52 biscuits per second. Despite recent controversial mint, orange and caramel versions, it remains the chocolate biscuit of first resort. The American travel writer Bill Bryson has called it a ‘British masterpiece’.

Biscuits are one of the oldest-known foods. Six-thousand-year-old biscuits have been found in Switzerland. They were eaten in ancient Egypt and were being baked in ancient Rome in the second century
AD.

Biscuit means ‘twice-cooked’ in French, but the English came directly from the Latin
biscoctum panem
– ‘twice cooked bread’ – and was, until the mid-eighteenth century, correctly spelt ‘bisket’.

The adoption of the French spelling ‘biscuit’ (without the French pronunciation) was not only pretentious and pointless, but wrong as well. In French,
un biscuit
is not a biscuit but a cake – a sponge-cake to be precise. A biscuit in the English sense is
un biscuit sec.

In North America ‘biscuits’ are more like scones. What Britons call biscuits, Americans call either cookies or crackers. The American English word cookie comes from the Dutch koekje, which means ‘cake’.

Biscuits were cooked more than once to make them last longer than bread, but most biscuits are no longer cooked twice. In fact, most biscuits have never been cooked twice. According to Dr Johnson’s
Dictionary
, biscuits designed for long sea voyages were usually cooked four times.

Despite persistent claims to the contrary, Teflon was not discovered as a by-product of the space programme.

Teflon is the trade name of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), or fluoropolymer resin, discovered serendipitously by Roy Plunkett in 1938 and first sold commercially in 1946.

While experimenting with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigeration, Plunkett found that a sample had frozen overnight into a whitish, waxy solid with unusual properties: it was extremely slippery as well as inert to virtually all chemicals, including highly corrosive acids.

His employers, DuPont, soon found a range of uses for the new material, initially in the Manhattan Project (the code-name for the development of nuclear weapons in 1942–6) and subsequently in cookware.

No one has been able to find a precise source for the ‘space programme’ myth, except that the Apollo missions all depended on Teflon for cable insulation.

Other myths about Teflon include the belief that Teflon-coated bullets are better at piercing body armour than other kinds; actually the Teflon coating is there to reduce the amount of wear on the inside of the rifle barrel, and has no bearing on the effectiveness of the bullet.

Teflon does, however, have the lowest friction rating of any known solid material, which is why it works so well as a non-stick surface for frying pans.

If it’s so slippery, how do they get it to stick to the pan? The process involves sandblasting to create tiny scratches on the pan’s surface, then spraying on a thin coat of liquid Teflon which flows into the scratches. This is baked at high heat, causing the Teflon to harden and get a reasonably secure mechanical grip. It’s then coated with a sealant and baked again.

Not the Quakers.

The Quaker Oats Company, started in Pennsylvania in 1901, was named after the Quakers because there were a lot of them in Pennsylvania and they had a reputation for honesty.

However, Quaker Oats, now part of the huge PepsiCo corporation, has no affiliation at all with the Quakers (or Religious Society of Friends) and, unlike the chocolate companies Cadbury’s, Fry’s and Rowntree, was not founded by Quakers, or established on Quaker principles.

This has caused some distress among The Society of Friends.

In the 1950s, researchers from Quaker Oats, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted experiments to try to understand how nutrients from cereals travelled through the body.

Parents of educationally subnormal children at the Walter E. Fernald State School (formerly known as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children) were asked to let their children become members of a special Science Club. As part of the club, the children were put on a diet high in nutrients and taken to baseball games.

What was not made clear, however, was that the food the children were given was laced with iron and radioactive calcium so its path could be traced in the body. The parents sued the Quaker Oats company, who agreed to pay out $1.85 million to more than 100 participants in 1997.

The cheery character on the front of the box is sometimes said to be William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, and an influential Quaker. The Quaker Oats company, perhaps wishing to improve relations with the Society, has emphatically denied this.

It was painted by Haddon Sundblom in 1957, the artist
who also created Coca-Cola’s iconic Santa Claus images in the 1930s. Sundblom’s last commission was a Christmas cover for
Playboy
in the early 1970s.

It is often alleged that The Society of Friends got the nickname ‘Quakers’ following the trial for blasphemy in 1650 of George Fox, the founder of the movement, who suggested during sentencing that the judge should ‘tremble at the word of the Lord’. However, the sect already had the reputation for ‘trembling’ in religious ecstasy and this seems a more likely source.