QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (19 page)

Seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface area may be covered in water, but water accounts for less than a fiftieth of one per cent of the planet’s mass.

The Earth is big – it weighs about 6 million, billion, billion kg. Half of this is contained in the lower mantle, the massive semi-molten layer that begins 660 km (410 miles) below the crust. Even on the apparently watery crust, the mass of the land is forty times greater than that of the oceans.

A Japanese experiment reported in
Science
in 2002 suggests that there may be five times as much water dissolved in the lower mantle than sloshing around on the Earth’s surface.  

Using pressures of 200,000 kg per cm and temperatures of 1,600 °C, the researchers created four mineral compounds similar to those found in the lower mantle. They then added
water and measured how much of it was absorbed.

If the Japanese are right, the proportion of the world that is water will have to be revised upwards – to 0.1 per cent.

It depends. The widely held belief that it is the Coriolis force, created by the Earth’s spin, that drives bathwater into a spiral is untrue.

Although it does influence large, long-lasting weather patterns such as hurricanes and ocean currents, it is by orders of magnitude too weak to have an effect on domestic plumbing. The direction of drainage is determined by the shape of the basin, the direction from which it was filled and the vortices introduced into it by washing or when the plug is removed.

If a perfectly symmetrical pan, with a tiny plughole and a plug which could be removed without disturbing the water, were filled and left for a week or so, so that all the motion settled completely, then it might in principle be possible to detect a small Coriolis effect, which would be anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the south.

This myth was lent some credence by inclusion in Michael Palin’s
Pole-to-Pole
series. They showed film of a showman in Nanyuki, Kenya, who purports to demonstrate the effect on either side of the equator, but even supposing the effect
existed, though, this particular demonstration got the direction of circulation the wrong way round.

Fat.

Camels’ humps don’t store water, but fat, which is used as an energy reserve. Water is stored throughout their bodies, particularly in the bloodstream, which makes them very good at avoiding dehydration.

Camels can lose 40 per cent of their body-weight before they are affected by it, and can go up to seven days without drinking. When they do drink, they really go for it – up to 225 litres (around 50 gallons) at a time.

Here are a few quite interesting facts about camels, which have nothing to do with their humps.

Before elephants acquired their reputation for long memories, the ancient Greeks believed it was camels that didn’t forget.

Persian hunting hounds – Salukis – hunted on camels. They lay on the camel’s neck watching for deer, and then leapt off in pursuit when they saw one. A Saluki can jump up to 6 metres (20 feet) from a standing start.

In 1977 in
Zoo Vet
, David Taylor observed that ‘camels may build up a pressure cooker of resentment toward human beings until the lid suddenly blows off and they go berserk.’ The camel handler calms it down by handing the beast his coat.
‘The camel gives the garment hell – jumping on it, biting it, tearing it to pieces. When the camel feels it has blown its top enough, man and animal can live together in harmony again.’

Camel-racing in the United Arab Emirates has started to use robot riders in place of the traditional child jockeys. The remotely operated riders were developed following a ban on the use of jockeys under sixteen years of age, imposed by the UAE Camel Racing Association in March 2004.

These laws are regularly flouted and there is a brisk child-slave trade, with children as young as four being kidnapped in Pakistan and kept in Arab camel camps. The only qualifications needed to become a jockey are not to weigh much and be able to scream in terror (this encourages the camels).

The famous line from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’, is possibly a mistranslation, where the original Aramaic word
gamta
, ‘sturdy rope’, was confused with
gamla
, ‘camel’.

This makes more sense, and is a comforting thought for the well-off.

North America.

The icons of the African and Arabian deserts are American in origin.

Like horses and dogs, camels evolved in the grasslands of America, 20 million years ago. In those days they were more like giraffes or gazelles than the humped beasts of burden we know and love. It wasn’t until four million years ago that they crossed the Bering land-bridge into Asia.

They became extinct in North America during the last Ice Age and, unlike horses and dogs, haven’t made it back.

It is not clear why the North American camel species died out. Climate change is the obvious culprit. More specifically it may have been due to a change in the silica content of grass. As the North American climate got cooler and drier, silica levels in grass tripled. This new super-tough grass wore out the teeth of even the longest-toothed grazers and the horses and camels gradually died of starvation, as a result of being unable to chew.

There is also some evidence that these already weakened species, their escape-route to Asia blocked by the disappearance of the Bering land bridge 10,000 years ago, were ‘finished off’ by human hunters.

Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant.

Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot – the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorised by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the West.

On his little ship
Matthew
, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, pre-dating Vespucci by two years.

Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: ‘… on St John the Baptist’s day [24 June], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the
Mathew
’, that clearly suggests this is what happened.

Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term ‘America’ to refer to the new continent.

The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502.

This suggests he didn’t know for sure, and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name ‘America’ was known and used was Bristol – not somewhere the French-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced ‘America’ with ‘Terra Incognita’ in his world map of 1513.

Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the term ‘America’ for his discovery.

There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land or the Cook Islands).

America would have become ‘Vespucci Land’ (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.

Technically, there are only forty-six.

Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are all officially Commonwealths.

This grants them no special constitutional powers. They simply chose this word to describe themselves at the end of the War of Independence. It made clear they were no longer ‘royal colonies’ answering to the King, but states governed by the ‘common consent of the people’.

Virginia (named after the ‘Virgin’ Queen Elizabeth I) was one of the thirteen original states (hence the thirteen stripes on the American flag) and the first of the states to declare itself a Commonwealth in 1776.

Pennsylvania and Massachusetts followed suit shortly afterwards, and Kentucky, which was originally a county of Virginia, became a Commonwealth in 1792.

There are also two American Commonwealths overseas. In July 1952, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico drew up its own constitution which declared itself a Commonwealth of the United States. The Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean did the same in 1975. Neither are US states.

Peyton Randolph.

He was the first of fourteen pre-Washington Presidents of the Continental Congress, or the ‘United States in Congress Assembled’.

The Continental Congress was the debating body formed by the thirteen colonies to formulate their complaints to the British Crown. In its second meeting, under Randolph, it resolved that Britain had declared war on the colonies, and, in response, created the Continental Army, appointing George Washington as its Commander-in-Chief.

Randolph’s successor, John Hancock, presided over the declaration of independence from Great Britain, where the Congress asserted its right to govern the thirteen colonies.

Peyton was followed by thirteen other Presidents until, on 30 April 1789, the triumphant George Washington was sworn in as the President of the independent United States of America.

Mostly hippopotamus.

Washington was a martyr to his teeth. According to John Adams he lost them because he used them to crack Brazil nuts, although modern historians suggest it was probably the mercury oxide he was given to treat illnesses such as smallpox and malaria.

He lost his first tooth when he was twenty-two and had only one left by the time he became President. He had several sets of
false teeth made, four of them by a dentist called John Greenwood.

Contrary to traditional wisdom, none of these sets was made of wood. The set made when he became President was carved from hippopotamus and elephant ivory, held together with gold springs. The hippo ivory was used for the plate, into which real human teeth and also bits of horses’ and donkeys’ teeth were inserted.

Dental problems left Washington in constant discomfort, for which he took laudanum, and this distress is apparent in many of the portraits of him painted while he was in office – including the one still used on the $1 bill.

The awkward look of a man with a mouth full of hippopotamus teeth is thought to have been deliberately exaggerated by the portraitist Gilbert Stuart, who didn’t get on with the President.

Until the invention of modern synthetic materials, the false tooth of choice was another human tooth, but these were hard to come by. In addition, they could fall out if they were rotten, or if their previous owner had syphilis.

The best source for decent false teeth was dead (but otherwise healthy) young people and the best place to find them was a battlefield.

One such was Waterloo; 50,000 men died in the battle and their teeth were plundered wholesale for the denture market. For years afterwards dentures were known as ‘Waterloo teeth’, even when they came from other sources.

Real human teeth continued to be used in dentures until the 1860s, when the American Civil War provided a plentiful supply.

Artificial false teeth came in at the end of the nineteenth century. Celluloid was one of the first materials to be tried, though not with conspicuous success.

Celluloid teeth tasted of ping-pong balls and melted if you drank hot tea (see
‘What’s made of celluloid?’
).