QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (6 page)

The neck tie.

Hravat
is the Croatian word for ‘Croat’ and it’s where we get the word ‘cravat’ from. So, Croatia means ‘tie-land’.

In the seventeenth century Louis XIII of France kept a regiment of Croatian mercenaries during the Thirty Years War. Part of their uniform was a broad, brightly coloured neckcloth by which they became known. The flamboyant yet practical style became very popular in Paris, where military dress was much admired.

During the reign of Louis XIV, the cravat was replaced by a more restrained military
Steinkirk
, tied about the neck in a loose knot, but it wasn’t until the reintroduction of the flowing cravat by dandies (or ‘
macaroni
’ as they were then known) in the late eighteenth century that individual styles of tying them became popular, the generic name then changing to ‘tie’.

The relentless march of the tie through the twentieth century has made it the dress item de rigeur for men in all but the most casual of businesses. Bremer Communication, a US image consultancy, has divided the now ubiquitous ‘business casual’ into three levels: basic, standard, and executive. Only at the basic level is a tie not required, and they recommend that
this is best restricted to ‘those days when you have little customer contact or are taking part in an informal activity’.

In the late 1990s, two researchers at Cambridge University used mathematical modelling to discover that it is topologically possible to tie eighty-five different knots with a conventional tie. They found that, in addition to the four well-known knots, six other knots produced aesthetically pleasing results.

It’s not who you think it is.

Walter Raleigh, poet, courtier, explorer and Renaissance man, is a perfect example of how popular myths attach themselves to attractive characters. His fame now rests almost entirely on 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.

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 fast
rail 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 portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.

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.

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 ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish
uisge beatha
, from the Latin
aqua vitae
or ‘water of life’.

The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.

Hae’ing said a’ that, they’ve nae been idle, ye ken. Scots inventions and discoveries include adhesive stamps, the Bank
of England, bicycle pedals, Bovril, the breech-loading rifle, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, colour photography, cornflour, the cure for malaria, the decimal point, electro-magnetism, the
Encyclopædia Britannica,
finger-printing, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the Kelvin scale, the lawnmower, lime cordial, logarithms, lorries, marmalade, motor insurance, the MRI scanner, the paddle steamer, paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tyres, the postmark, radar, the raincoat, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, tarmac, the teleprinter, tubular steel, the typhoid vaccine, the ultrasound scanner, the United States Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generators and wire rope

Glasgow.

Britain exports chicken tikka masala to India.

Invented in Glasgow in the late 1960s, chicken tikka masala, or CTM, is Britain’s most popular dish. There is no standard recipe. In a recent survey, the
Real Curry Guide
tested forty-eight different versions and found the only common ingredient was chicken.

Chicken tikka is a traditional Bangladeshi dish in which pieces of marinated chicken are cooked in a clay oven called a
tandoor.
This ancient style of cooking originated in the Middle East, the word deriving from the Babylonian
tinuru,
meaning ‘fire’.

The first chicken tandoori on a British restaurant menu was at the Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London, in 1966 – the same
restaurant where
Not the Nine O’Clock News
was invented in 1979. The recipe reached Glasgow shortly afterwards and when, as the legend goes, a customer asked for some gravy to go with it, the chef improvised with tomato soup, spices and cream.

Masala
means a mixture of spices, and the usual CTM contains ginger and garlic, tomatoes, butter and cream, spiced with cardamom, cloves, cumin, nutmeg, mild red chilli powder and paprika, fenugreek and turmeric.

It is the turmeric that it gives it the bright yellow colour, although the synthetic dye tartrazine is often substituted. (It is tartrazine, among other unpleasant things, that makes curry stains impossible to remove from clothing.) CTM doesn’t have a standard style or colour: it can be yellow, brown, red, or green and chilli hot; creamy and mild; or very smooth and sweet.

In 2001, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook declared that: ‘Chicken tikka masala is now a true British national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.’

One in seven curries sold in the UK are CTMs – 23 million portions each year. Many of the schools and charities in the city of Sylhet in Bangladesh are funded by profits from the British chicken tikka masala boom.

There are now 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, turning over in excess of £2 billion and employing 70,000 workers.