QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (39 page)

In 1990.

Although actual hostilities came to an end with the Japanese surrender signed on 2 September 1945, the Cold
War got in the way of a formal legal settlement. Peace treaties were signed with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland in 1950. All the Allies except the USSR signed a treaty with Japan in 1951. Austria waited until 1955 to regain its sovereignty. Germany, however, was divided between the Western powers and the USSR, and no peace treaty was signed with what emerged as the German Democratic Republic in 1949.

So, the first celebration of German reunification on 3 October 1990 marks the official end to World War II.

The United States has formally declared war just eleven times: twice against Germany, twice against Hungary (1917, in its guise as Austria-Hungary, and 1942) and once each against Romania (1942), Bulgaria (1942), Italy (1941), Japan (1941), Spain (1898), Mexico (1898) and the United Kingdom (1812).

The Vietnam War and the two Iraq campaigns were not formal declarations of war, but ‘military engagements authorized by Congress’. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the President gained authority to deploy troops (within certain limits of size and time) without a formal declaration. Formal declarations are disliked because they lend legitimacy to unrecognised or unpopular regimes.

The Korean War was neither formally declared nor approved by Congress and, despite hostilities ending in 1953, a peace treaty has never been signed with North Korea.

The longest war fought by the United States was the forty-six year campaign against the Apache nation which ended in 1886 with Geronimo’s surrender at Skeleton Canyon, New Mexico.

J. Edgar Hoover? J. Robert Oppenheimer? George W. Bush?

It was probably Thomas Midgely, a chemist from Dayton, Ohio, who invented both CFCs and lead in gasoline.

Born in 1889, Midgely trained as an engineer. Early in his career he discovered by chance that adding iodine to kerosene slightly reduced ‘knocking’ in engines. But ‘slightly’ was not good enough for him. So he taught himself chemistry from scratch and, over six years, worked through the entire periodic table looking for the perfect solution. In 1921, he found it.

By then, the company he worked for had merged with General Motors who eagerly began adding his completely ‘knock-free’ answer to fuel for car engines. It was tetraethyl lead. Ethyl gasoline transformed the modern world. But it was also toxic, and pumped billions of tons of lead into the atmosphere over seven decades, poisoning thousands of people – including Midgely himself (though he always denied it).

Some think it was Midgely’s guilt over lead gasoline that motivated him to develop a safe alternative to the noxious chemicals like sulphur dioxide and ammonia which were used in refrigeration. His discovery of dichloroflouromethane – the first of the Freons – took three days. CFCs seemed like the perfect solution – inert, non-toxic, beneficial. Unfortunately, we now know they destroy the ozone layer and, since 1987, their production has been banned internationally.

By any standard, Midgely was an extraordinary man. He held 171 patents, loved music and wrote poetry. But his inventions were lethal. At fifty-one he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. In a final irony, the harness he designed to help him get in and out bed got tangled one morning and in the ensuing struggle, America’s most dangerous man inadvertently strangled himself. He was fifty-five.

It’s not oil: it’s bird-shit.

In the 1850s, American farmers were so desperate for fertiliser that they were reduced to putting hair, feathers and soot on their over-farmed soil to increase the yields of wheat, cotton and tobacco.

Bird dung, rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, and known as guano (from a Quechua Indian word meaning ‘the droppings of sea-birds’) looked like the answer. The discovery of massive deposits off the coast of Peru in the early nineteenth century set off a guano rush, which enabled the Peruvian government to charge huge prices for it. The American response was to pass a special bill through Congress in 1856 called the Guano Islands Act. This granted mining rights to any US citizen who hoisted the stars and stripes on any previously unclaimed, guano-laden island. Almost a hundred Pacific and Caribbean islands were acquired in this way, including Christmas and Midway Island. The Act has never been repealed.

The scene of one of the most notorious ‘guano-snatches’ was the island of Navassa, near Haiti. Now uninhabited except for giant iguanas and goats the size of ponies (left by seventeenth-century pirates), in the late nineteenth century, it was home to the notorious Navassa Phosphate Company where, in 1899, four white overseers were killed by black
miners rioting against appalling working conditions. The discovery of this shameful pocket of slavery caused outrage among liberal Americans and some historians credit the Navassa Riot with kick-starting the modern American labour movement. Navassa is still subject to a formal claim by Haiti – the last US territory to be claimed by a foreign nation.

Guano is the product of billions of anchovies (
Engraulis ringens
) that live in gigantic shoals off the coast of Peru, the largest fish resource by weight in the world. It feeds the planet’s largest bird colony: ten million boobies, cormorants, gulls and penguins that feed on the anchovies. Their droppings produce such a powerful fertiliser that the Incas ranked it alongside gold as a gift from the gods, allotting the death penalty for anyone who molested the birds that made it.

In the 1860s, guano accounted for 75 per cent of Peru’s total revenue. At the time the Guano Islands Act was passed, the Peruvian President, Rámon Castilla (1797–1867) was earning twice as much as Franklin Pierce (1804–69), his American counterpart.

Even though the guano rush is long over, anchovy fishmeal is still Peru’s biggest export, much of it going to China to feed chickens. Sadly, Peruvians rarely eat the anchovy itself, believing it to be poisonous.

The Hawker Hurricane.

The Spitfire was a more advanced design, faster, lighter to handle and capable of operating at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. But the records clearly show that the heavy fighting in the Battle of Britain was done by the Hawker Hurricane.

There were more of them, for a start. In 1940, Hurricane squadrons outnumbered Spitfire squadrons by three to two; 1,715 Hurricanes were used in the battle, more than all the other RAF aircraft put together.

And they downed more planes. In Francis K. Mason’s exhaustive account,
Battle over Britain
(1969), he shows that of 11,400 reported engagements, Hurricanes accounted for 55 per cent of all kills, to the Spitfires’ 33 per cent.

In general, the Hurricanes specialised in attacking bombers, while the Spitfires took the fighters. However, the highest-scoring RAF pilot in the battle, Sergeant Josef František (a Czech), only flew Hurricanes and still managed to down nine Me 109s – the fastest and best-equipped German fighter – among his total of seventeen enemy aircraft.

The first Hawker Hurricane flew in 1935 and was basically a single-winged Hawker Fury, one of the most reliable of the biplanes designed for Hawker between the wars by Sydney Camm. Hurricanes were built from 1937 to 1944 on a steel frame with a linen fabric covering. The Spitfire was all metal.

The Hurricane was cheap to make and easy to repair. Its fabric skin meant bullets could pass right through, and on more than one occasion Hurricanes returned safely with large pieces of wing missing.

Hurricanes could be turned around more quickly for battle, absorbed the shudder of eight guns rather better than Spitfires and, because the cockpits were larger, fighter pilots could wrap up warmer. There was no cockpit heating in either plane.

Spitfires scored their first kills for the RAF in September 1939 when they inadvertently shot down some of their own Hurricanes.

The RAF lost 1,173 planes and 510 pilots and gunners in the Battle of Britain, including 538 Hurricanes and 342 Spitfires. The Luftwaffe lost 1,733 planes, and 3,368 airmen were killed or captured.

2004.

The last veteran of the Crimean War, which ended in 1856, was Timothy, a Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoise. He was thought to be approximately 160 years old at the time of his death, and the UK’s oldest known resident.

Timothy was found aboard a Portuguese privateer in 1854 by Captain John Courtenay Everard of the Royal Navy and served as a mascot on a series of Navy vessels until 1892, including service as ship’s mascot of HMS
Queen
during the first bombardment of Sebastopol in the Crimean War.

He then retired to Powderham Castle, where he was taken in by Everard’s relative, the tenth Earl of Devon.

Timothy had the Devon’s family motto – ‘Where have I fallen? What have I done?’ – inscribed on his underside.

During the Second World War, he left the shade of his favourite wisteria and dug his own air-raid shelter under the terrace steps. Lady Gabrielle Courtenay, aunt to the current Earl and Timothy’s keeper, claimed this was because the vibration from bombs falling on nearby Exeter had disturbed him. She also believed he could recognise people’s voices, and always came when called.

After the war, he returned to the same rose-bed to hibernate every year, wearing a large tag marked ‘My name is Timothy – I am very old. Please do not pick me up.’

According to Rory Knight-Bruce, Timothy’s biographer, the few who were allowed to carry him ‘would have held a doughty veteran with a gimlet eye whose density of weight was about that of a medium-sized Le Creuset pot.’

In 1926, the Devons decided that Timothy should mate. It was then discovered that Timothy was actually female. Given her age, they decided against changing his/her name, and although they did introduce a potential mate called Toby, she died without an heir.

Timothy was buried in the family burial plot in the castle grounds.

It’s not seven.

No reliable authority can be found to help us make simple cross-species age comparisons.

Some twelve-year-old cats and dogs have a much higher level of physical capability than even the most sprightly eighty-four-year-old human and there does seem to be significant variation between different breeds.

The best that can be done is to apply a widely accepted approximate formula which suggests that kittens and puppies mature much faster than babies, with the rate of ageing slowing down significantly after two years.

Therefore, a one-year-old cat might be roughly sixteen in
human years, while a four-year-old could be compared to a man or woman of thirty-two, an eight-year-old to a sixty-four-year-old and so on.