QI

Sandi Toksvig takes a look at tubes and tubas with Bridget Christie, Sara Pascoe, Deborah Frances-White and series regular Alan Davies.

Themes

- The buzzers all mention stations on the London Tube: Sara has "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty, Bridget has "Warwick Avenue" by Duffy, Deborah has "Waterloo" by ABBA, and Alan has comedian Jay Foreman's song listing every tube station.

Topics

- They thing that you can do on the London Underground in summer that a cow can't is travel on it. The Central Line can get so hot that it passes above the limit where it becomes legal to transport cattle. In 2019, a journalist recorded a temperature of 36.6ºC (100ºF) on a Central line carriage when leaving Mile End. The reason it gets so hot is that it was one of the first lines built, and the early engineers did not leave any space around the trains for ventilation or air conditioning, thus meaning it is snugly wrapped in the surrounding clay. Abandoned tube stations are now used as heat reservoirs to warm homes in winter. For example City Road heats 1,000 homes in Islington. Meanwhile, Down Street has baths and showers.

- Tangent: London's first tunnel was the Thames Tunnel, which was started in 1825 and still has trains going through it. It was the first time engineers had tunnelled under a major river, and was created by Sir Marc Brunel, father of Isambard. Marc claimed he got the idea to make it by watching shipworms (teredo) pooing. When they burrow into wood, the head is protected by a helmet-like shell, it digests the wood and then excretes it out behind itself as a sort of hard residue which lines and strengths the tunnel. Marc thus made a tunnelling shield in the form of an iron grid that pressed against the face of the tunnel when the workers were digging out the earth between grid squares. As they dug, other people behind them reinforced the tunnel they were creating. It took about 16 years to complete and they progressed about four inches a day. To illustrate this question the panel a shown a picture entitled "A Correct View of the Thames Tunnel", as the tunnel was not suitable for horse-drawn carriages and nice ladies and gentlemen it shows. Instead the passageway ended up being filled by souvenir sellers, vagrants, acrobats and ne'er-do-wells.

- Tangent: Sara once pitched a novel unsuccessfully about some people who wanted to save the remaining endangered species by wiping out humanity by using the 580-tonne Channel Tunnel boring machine. The real-life machine was put on sale after they finished the tunnel. In 2004, it was bought for just under £40,000 by a bidder on eBay. The price did not include delivery and there were no returns. Bridget once bought a painting of a cat dressed in human clothes at auction for £50. She put in the first bid, and the auctioneer said: "Thank God that's gone. It gives me the creeps", and everyone laughed at Bridget, but she is happy with the painting. Sandi once hosted an auction at Epsom Racecourse, tried to start the bidding for a horse at 1,000 guineas by betting herself, but no-one else bid. Fortunately she was able to give the horse back to the original owner.

- The thing that is as long as a telephone pole and comes out of a person is the breath blown by someone playing a tuba. If you press down on any of the valves it takes longer for the air to travel, and if you press down on all the valves then your breath travels a distance of just over 30ft. There is a subcontrabass tuba which is 7ft tall and normally takes two or even three people to play it. Only four of these tubas remain in the world today, and the only playable one is at Harvard University.

- XL Tangent: There has been a spate of tuba thefts in the USA in the past 20 years, with them believed to have been smuggled into Mexico as they are used in a genre of music called banda. Alan however argues if you can have a 20-year spate.

- Tangent: The world's longest tuber is longer than the world's longest tuba. The tallest tuber was a cassava harvested in Nigeria and is 2.46m, while the Harvard contrabass tuba is 2.13m.

- Tangent: Bazookas were originally a type of trombone. American radio comedian Bob Burns invented in 1905 as a child who played an instrument he made that looked like what is now considered to be a bazooka. When Americans started using portable rocket-launchers in WWII, they called them bazookas because they looked like Burns' bazooka.

- XL: The person who slept on lion skins and could play two trumpets at once was Herodorus of Megara, who won ten titles in the Ancient Olympic Games for trumpet-playing between 328-292 BC. Herodorus ate about eight loaves of breads per day, as well as nine kilos of meat and six litres of wine.

- XL Tangent: Trumpeter John Blanke is the only identifiable black British Tudor of whom we have a picture. He is depicted on the Westminster Tournament Roll of 1511, and trumpeted in Henry VII and Henry VIII's courts. He probably came to England as one of the African attendants to Catherine of Aragon when she first arrived in 1501 to marry Henry VIII's brother.

- The peaceful use for a torpedo is for medicine. Torpedo torpedo is the scientific name for an electric ray found in the Mediterranean. The first-century Greek physician Dioscordies recommended applying a live one up the seat to cure haemorrhoids, and it is one of the few ancient remedies that actually worked, and electrotherapy is still used to treat less severe haemorrhoids. "Torpedo" comes from the Latin "torpor" meaning to "numb", where as the weapon gets its name from the Napoleonic Wars and is named after the fish, which incapacitates its enemies when it touches them.

- Tangent: When Deborah's godson was six he was playing an online video game, his character had a shark pet and he wanted to give it a name. As his shark went really fast, he wanted to call him "Shark-pedo", but the game banned his choice. He said: "I think it's cos it's got a rude word in it - 'pee'."

- XL Tangent: The coffin torpedo was a device in the 19th century designed to stop body-snatching. The coffin would operate like a shotgun, so if you lifted the lid shot was fired into the air. One review of an Ohio grave torpedo that was tested on a mule reported that: "He lifted up one foot when the explosion occurred, but never stopped munching fodder."

- The thing that is so terrible about trousers is that women could be arrested for wearing them back in the day. It was illegal for women to wear trousers in about 40 cities in the USA, with women being charged for impersonating a man. It wasn't until 1923 when the Federal Government overrode the laws. Before that, even when serving in the army or mountain climbing, women had to wear heavy woollen skirts. In Europe, Henriette d'Angeville, who claimed to be the first woman to climb Mont Blanc in 1838, had to do so in a skirt. In 1895, the first woman to climb the Matterhorn in trousers was Annie Smith Peck. She also once climbed a mountain and on the top she hanged a "Votes for Women" banner from it. In Paris, between 1800 and February 2013, women needed a special permit called a "permission de travestissement" to allow them to wear trousers. The panel are shown one given to Rosa Bonheur, an artist famous for painting farm animals and who wanted to wear trousers for her work. These permits however were not constantly enforced, and they were amended in 1892 and 1909, allowing women to wear trousers without a permit if they were holding the bicycle handlebars or the reins of a horse.

- XL Tangent: There was also a rule that forbade women from wearing trousers on the floor of the US Senate that was not revoked until 1993, and when Sandi was a law student women were not allowed to wear trousers at the Inns of Court. One woman who went to a compulsory dinner at the Inns of Court wearing trousers was told by a clerk she could not enter wearing them, so she took them and gave the trousers to the clerk.

- Tangent: Bridget once ordered a Christmas dress, but when it arrived it was way too wide for her. When she complained, she was told: "Well, that's what size it is." When Bridget still complained, they said: "Well, it will fit someone." Bridget told them that clothes come in lots of sizes and they can't just have one, to which they said: "Well, we do, and then we send them out, and just give it to someone if you don't want it."

- [i]XL: Tangent: In the Hebridean Island of Seil, there is a pub called Tigh na Truish, meaning "The House of Trousers". There is a bridge nearby connecting to the Scottish mainland called the Bridge over the Atlantic, and the British government in the Jacobite rebellion banned the wearing of tartan and kilts, punishing it with transportation to Australia. If the locals were heading over the bridge where the authorities might see them in a kilt, they went to the pub and changed into trousers there before crossing. The pub still has hooks were you can change.

- Regarding how comfortable it would be to snuggle up under a blanket octopus, it depends if it is a male or female. The female would almost certainly not notice the male as they have extreme sexual dimorphism. The female can grow to about two metres long, but the male in comparison is a tiny dot, and basically a kind of sperm sac. If Alan and Sandi had similar proportions, Alan would be roughly the length of a thumbnail, or Sandi would be the height of the Gherkin skyscraper in London.

- XL Tangent: The females are immune to Portuguese man-of-war stings, so when one floats by, they sometimes rip off its tentacles to wield as defensive weapons.

- The thing that is unusual about the seven-armed octopus is that it has is that is has eight arms, but one of them coiled up in a sac beneath the right eye for most of the time called a "hectocotylus", which is the technical name for a removable penis. Strictly speaking, octopuses don't have tentacles as their arms have suckers all the way up, where as tentacles just have a sucker on the end. (Forfeit: It has seven arms)

- XL Tangent: Octopuses used to have ten arms, with a fossil of a ten-armed octopus recently discovered. It was named after Joe Biden.

- Tangent: Tentacles can be found on carnivorous plants. The pimpernel sundew has two types of tentacles. Insects walking near it can trigger a touch-sensitive, lightning-fast snap tentacle, which catapults the prey into glue tentacles which slowly draw it to death.

- Tangent: When an aphid has had her young, she turns herself into a blob of glue in front of them, so when predators come they stick to her. Bridget says she lives in a high crime area, and she was thinking of doing that on her front step.

- XL Tangent: Beefeaters living in the Tower of London could not get home insurance because they live in Tower Hamlets, which also has a high crime rate, and the windows in the tower have no locks on them.

- XL Tangent: The best use of tentacles comes from an Octopus for a Preemie community. These are toys knitted and crocheted by volunteers and are given to premature babies. Babies hold on to the umbilical cord for comfort, so when they are born the tentacles mimic the cord for them, and they soothe the babies in the neo-natal units. It also stops the babies from tugging on the tubes in intensive care. The panel are given some to play with, but after the show, they were washed and given to charity. When Bridget has a premature baby, something weird was done to the umbilical cord, but the doctors assured her that you can even swing a baby around by its umbilical cord and it would be fine.

- Victorian women might have actually had a lot of fun on their period because tampons were laced with drugs. Some were laced with cocaine and others with opium. They were used by both men and women to help with haemorrhoids. Drug tampons date back to Ancient Rome, but 19th century Pond's Tampons were laced with opiates and deadly nightshade. A modern version is the B&O, a belladonna and opium suppository that is used as a muscle relaxant after surgery.

- XL Tangent: During WWII, tampons were used to plug wounds, and then a woman observing this decided they could also be used by women during their periods.

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: When Sara was at university, she knew people who used vodka tampons and inserted them up their anuses because they believed the alcohol got into your bloodstream quicker.

- The most dangerous place for a toilet is in Camden on one particular day in 1900. At the time, there were very few ladies' public toilets, with many men thinking it was a bad idea to have women's toilets at all. George Bernard Shaw, who was working in local government in north London at the time and advocated for women's rights, pushed for a ladies' toilet to be built in Camden, beside the men's. Some people worried that this would lower property values and cause traffic problems. Thus, they built a wooden mock-up of the toilet to see if there was a traffic risk, and in a single day it was hit by vehicles 45 times - but these were all done by protesters trying to make a point. Shaw accused bus companies of taking bribes, which they denied. It took five years for the toilet to finally be built, and there is still a ladies' public toilet in the exact same spot. Deborah adds that she is from Camden and the toilet has not lowered house prices. Ladies' toilets were a key part of the suffrage movement.

- Tangent: The idea that pregnant women were allowed to urinate into policemen's helmets is a myth.

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent: The first person to sort of provide gender equality for toilets was Dick Whittington, who installed a 128-seat latrine for both men and women which used the Thames to flush everything away. Everyone sat down at the same time.

General Ignorance

- The animal with the longest neck for its torso is the tanystropheus. This was a reptile from the Triassic period, dating back 242 million years ago. When the bones were first discovered, there were a lot of small bones and palaeontologists thought they looked a bit like wings on a pterodactyl. In fact, these were elongated neck bones, meaning that the neck was three times longer than the torso, making up about half the length of the entire animal. They were about six metres long, and have 13 neck vertebrae, whereas both humans and giraffes have seven. This means their necks were stiff as opposed to the bendy necks of giraffes. (Forfeit: Snake)

- XL: The city which has the most French-speaking people in it is Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country has more French-speakers than France. Meanwhile, the USA has as many Spanish-speakers as Spain, with Spain being the fourth-biggest Spanish-speaking country. The city with the most English-speakers is Mumbai, with the UK being the sixth-biggest English-speaking country. (Forfeit: Quebec)

- A question about topology. The panel are shown a slice of Swiss cheese and are asked how many holes are in it. The slice only has two holes, because holes have to go through the entire slice, whereas the slice itself is covered with lots of dents and deformations as well. The only way there can be another hole in the cheese is if there is one inside the slice itself that is totally enclosed that we cannot see. Topology is the branch of maths dealing with shapes and spaces

- Tangent: The panel are shown a rubber ring and are asked how many holes it has. Again there is only two: the hole in the centre of the ring, and the hole full of air that is entirely surrounded by the tube as it is hollow. This obviously does not count the hole into which you blow up the ring. A doughnut meanwhile only has one hole because the second hole is filled solidly with dough.

Scores

- Deborah Frances White: 7 points
- Bridget Christie: 6 points
- Alan Davies: -2 points
- Sara Pascoe: -12 points