QI

Cally Beaton, Nish Kumar and Laura Smyth join regular panellist Alan Davies on the comedy quiz, with host Sandi Toksvig asking questions on the theme of visionaries.

Topics

- Jules Verne predicted a lot of things that would be in Paris a hundred years ahead of his time. His 1863 book Paris in the Twentieth Century was set in 1960, and in it he predicted burglar alarms, cars, petrol stations, the Paris Metro, canned applause, fax machines, electronic music, the electric chair, skyscrapers, feminism (which he did not approve of), the internet, wind power and climate change. The book also includes a 152m lighthouse in Paris, which would be the highest monument in the world and situated on the Champ de Mars. This is where the Eiffel Tower now stands, and when it was built it was the tallest building in the world. Despite all this, his publishers did not believe any of this would happen, and the book was not published until 1994.

- XL Tangent: Alan recalls that back in the year 2000, they looked back at people form 1900, and most people said there would be great improvements in agriculture. No-one predicted the rise in electronics.

- Tangent: In another book by Verne, From The Earth to the Moon, written in 1865, he predicted the Apollo 11 moon landings. He wrote it would consist of three men in a projectile called the Columbiad, which had very similar dimensions to the actual Columbia Command Module. Verne also predicted they would launch from Florida and came back to Earth by parachuting into the sea. However, Verne was wrong about the mode of propulsion, as he wrongly predicted the projectile would be shot from a giant cannon. It has been calculated that the barrel of such a cannon would need to be 60km long and propel the men at a force of 100Gs, which would most kill the astronauts instantly.

- XL Tangent: Cally was once in the west of Iceland in a place called Hellnar. This is place where Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth starts.

- Tangent: Verne's son Michel, who was also a writer, wrote a story called An Express of the Future, in which he talked about a transatlantic tube where trains were going to be propelled by air. Something very similar is now being considered, with scientists at MIT predicting that trains could successfully run underneath the Atlantic at speeds of 1,200mph.

- XL Tangent: Jules Verne is the second most translated author in the world, with Agatha Christie first and William Shakespeare third. In his time, Verne was often considered a children's author, mainly due to terrible translations. In early versions they deleted large swathes of texts, so the book would not make sense to the reader. In one mistranslation the Badlands of Nebraska were turned into the Disagreeable Territory of Nebraska. Any social and political commentary was removed. One translator was just terrible at science, with them saying a boat made of iron would float because iron is lighter than water. Alan was once in a play at university, and someone said the wrong line. Someone just said another line and the carried on with the rest of play, missing 20 pages. No-one noticed the error. Many years ago, Sandi was in an open-air theatre performing "The Comedy Of Errors", and the actors realised that there is a whole section which is just jokes that were no longer funny. Sandi decided to rewrite the section in the Shakespeare style, and not a single reviewer noticed.

- In Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, it took Phileas Fogg 79 days to go around the world. At the end of the book there is a section where he thinks he has missed the deadline by five minutes, only to realise he has misjudged the date due to the number of time zones he travelled through. (Forfeit: Eighty)

- The thing that could be more exciting that a rail replacement bus is a bus replacement rail. In 2016, the road between Scotland's two highest villages, Wanlockhead and Leadhills in South Lanarkshire, was closed for a week for resurfacing. This cut off Wanlockhead's residents from shops and doctors' surgeries, resulting in a 45-mile diversion. However, there was a volunteer-run railway line tourist attraction which goes between the two villages, and the people running it decided to use it as a replacement service. It completely took over the normal bus service for a week. The train had a top speed of 8mph, and on one trip a journalist reported seeing the train being overtaken by a heron.

- Tangent: For two weeks a year, Switzerland has a rail replacement helicopter. The villages of Linthal and Braunwald have a funicular railway which has annual maintenance. As Braunwald is a car-free village, the locals take a 90-second long helicopter trip instead, costing £6.50. The photo shows the luggage being put in a device on the outside of the helicopter. Sandi says this device might be used when injured people are airlifted out, which she has had experience of because she was once airlifted out after being injured in a rodeo.

- Tangent: In the 1890s, Austrian Friedrich Volderauer proposed an aerostatic railway, which was a train that is helped uphill by a hot-air balloon, and gravity pulls the train back downhill. Alan points out that they could just go in the balloon.

- XL: Alan is asked on his feeling on Galileo managing the Arsenal. 400 years before Henry Ford achieved mass production, Galileo managed the same thing in Venice's Arsenale. By the 1500s, it was the largest industrial complex in the world, employing about half of Venice's male workforce. Galileo worked there for about 20 years, and credited his work there with inspiring some of his greatest works. In the Arsenale, different parts of the arsenal built different parts of ships, which were then put together at the end of the line. The final assembly of a ship could take just one day. The entire complex could build 50 ships a month from scratch, and they cared for their staff so much that the wine given to the people who worked there accounted for 2% of Venice's entire budget. In the 1600s, they created a state-sponsored fountain which dispensed wine at a rate of ten litres a minute.

- XL Tangent: The question is illustrated with a painting of a ceremony in which Venice marries the sea. Venice holds the world record for the longest marriage. Since around 1000AD, a service is held every year where a ring is tossed into the sea and the people chant: "I wed thee, O sea, in token of true and lasting dominion."

- Half a vasectomy is not of any use at all, but people wrongly thought it gave you a second puberty. In the 1920s, Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach developed an operation called Steinaching, which was a vasectomy on one testicle only, the idea being the second puberty gave you a new lust for life. It did not work. Despite this, Steinach was generally a good doctor and was nominated six times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. However, his methods were morally dubious. He once arranged for three men to be Steinached without their knowledge, by telling them they were having a different routine operation. Steinach reported that all three men felt rejuvenated, thus popularising the procedure. Steinach himself claimed he carried out the operation on himself three times. Famous people to have been Steinached included Sigmund Freud at the age of 67 in the hope it would treat his oral cancer, and W. B. Yates at the age of 69 in the belief it would improve his poetry. In the case of Yates, it might have worked four years after the operation he wrote his most famous line: "Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by."

- Tangent: Regarding vasectomies, there is a retired Texan urologist called Dick Chopp, who gave out t-shirts to his patients reading: "I was 'Chopped'", and a bag of frozen peas.

- Tangent: A vasectomy once brought the London Underground to a standstill. In 2003, a train was being driven by a trainee, and there was an instructor and a senior driver with him, both of whom were discussing rather grisly details of a vasectomy that one of them had undergone. The trainee asked them to stop talking about it because he could not concentrate. They did not, and as the result the trainee vomited, fainted and fell out of the cab, onto the track. He had to be taken to hospital with chest and head injuries, and two London Underground lines had to be closed as a result. Luckily the train was only going at 15mph, and the trainee made a full recovery.

- XL: The panel are show a photo of a man and are asked why they would not want to try the contents of his freezer. The reason is his freezer is full of poo. Prof. Adrian Egli from Switzerland has 3,000 samples in a freezer known as the microbiota vault, and he needs more, because he wants to collect all the human microbes that are on Earth in case they go extinct in the wild. The idea is to find good bacteria, and make a permanent vault, because there is a mass extinction going on in the human gut. For example, poos in Ethiopia show signs of antibiotic resistance, even in children who have never been exposed to antibiotics. The project is based on the same idea as the Svalbard seed vault in Norway, which is housing every kind of seed in the world in case certain types of plant go extinct.

- XL Tangent: Nish is given a replica of the coco de mer, the biggest seed in the world. It looks like a pair of buttocks and weighs as much as four newborn babies. When the seeds are covered in their husk, they sink to the bottom of the sea. When the husk is worn away, the seeds float back up. As a result, when they were first observe people mistakenly thought the seas came from the sea rather than from trees.

- The panel are played a video and asked what they can see. The thing about the video is that you can only truly see what is in it if you take psychedelic drugs. These kinds of drugs can change your vision, so moving images leave a sort of visible trail behind them. You see an image where it is, and also dozens of others in the places where it used to be. It is known as psychedelic cryptography, and people make videos with hidden messages in them that can only been seen if you take psychedelics. In 2023, a contest was held by the California Qualia Research Institute to see who could make the best such video. The winner had a message hidden in a swirl of circular rainbows, and if you were on the drugs, would be able to see the swirls contained pictures of aliens and the message: "We love you".

- Tangent: In the 1960s there were experiments to give dolphins LSD. NASA were looking for way to communicate with aliens, so they wondered if it would be possible to teach English to dolphins by giving them LSD. Neuroscientist John Lilly and his assistant Margaret Lovatt spent two years with three dolphins called Peter, Pamela and Sissy, who has all come off the TV show Flipper. Margaret stayed with Peter 24 hours a day, gently encouraging him to mimic her. John gave the Pamela and Sissy LSD and played them music in an attempt to communicate telepathically. None of it worked. Peter was also an adolescent with very strong sexual urges, and for a while they transported him backwards and forwards to frolic with female dolphins. However, this became so expensive and time consuming that in the end Margaret had to "relieve" Peter herself.

- It was considered attractive to slather yourself in vinegar and paint your breasts blue in the 17th and 18th centuries. Fair skin was very fashionable, so women would paint delicate blue lines across their bosoms to indicate veins. Men and women used a toxic white lead paint called Venetian ceruse to whiten their faces, which was mixed with vinegar, manure and arsenic. This paint may have hastened the death of Elizabeth I. 18th century socialite Maria, Countess of Coventry, died aged 27, probably poisoned by the lead. She insisted on wearing it on her deathbed despite knowing it was probably killing her. She also wore a kind of beauty spot called a mouche (French for "fly", as in the insect), which was sometimes made of mouse fur. The location where you put it was meant to indicate your mood, so if it was near the eye it indicated passion, while if it is near the mouth it suggests coquettishness. It was not fashion to wear lots of them, because it then suggests you are covering up scars. You can also use mouche to indicate political allegiance by putting on the left or right side of the face to suggest left or right wing.

- Tangent: The segment about the mouche is illustrated by a painting of a rather grumpy-looking woman sporting on. Alan says she looks like Alex Ferguson. Sandi was once the very-last-minute replaced for Ferguson at a football dinner. She says that: "I can only describe the room as alive with disappointment."

- Tangent: Another painting, called Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies, moralises against bespotting, showing a white woman and a black woman covered with lots of mouche. The painting, from around 1650, is interesting for the time for showing no social status different between the races. The painting only came to light in 2021.

General Ignorance

- The very first talkie was Lights of New Work in 1928. 1927's The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length film which had some synchronised dialogue, but only about a quarter of the film was recorded with sound. The year before that, Don Juan was the very first feature length to play sound, featuring a score performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Before then, orchestras were in the cinema playing the music live. The very first feature in which all the dialogue was recorded was Lights of New Work. (Forfeit: The Jazz Singer)

- XL Tangent: The addition of sound to the movies changed the audiences, because prior to them captions were used to tell people what was happening. Those who were poorer and could not read thus did not go to the cinema because they missed out on what was happening, but once sound came in, the captions went, and everyone could understand the film. These poorer audiences also brought with them popcorn, which was made outside on the street. Cinemas at first hated people bringing in popcorn because it made the cinemas less tidy, but then they realised that to make money they needed to sell popcorn themselves.

- Tangent: There had been earlier, short films which also used synchronised sound before The Jazz Singer. In 1894, William Dickson directed a film called The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, in which Dickson plays the violin as two men dance. For it, sound and visuals were recorded simultaneously. However, it was years before it was able to be shown publicly, before there was the technology to show it. The film is then played.[/iindent]

- XL: The thing that has been done to refried beans is that they are boiled, fried, then mashed. They are only fried once. It is a traditional Mexican dish, in which pinto beans are boiled, fried once, then mashed. While people call them refried beans, this name comes from "refritos" meaning "well-fried".

- XL Tangent: Triple-cooked chips are indeed cooked three times. Created by Heston Blumenthal in 1993, you parboil them in water, refrigerate them, then fry them, refrigerate them again, and then you deep fry them.

- XL: The difference between a taco and a burrito is the size, with the taco being the smaller.

- The panel are asked to name any form of transport used by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. He uses automobile, train, steamship, elephant and wind-powered sledge. Hot air balloons don't appear in the novel, but people think it does because the film adaptation of the book starring David Niven. (Forfeit: Hot air balloon)

- Tangent: Alan was once pitched a TV idea which was a transatlantic balloon race, in which he would be in one balloon with two expert balloonists, and he would be racing another balloon containing Tamzin Outhwaite and another two experts. The balloons are normally designed for two people, so they would have to make special cabins for Alan and Tamzin, and they would be flown across the Atlantic. In an effort to persuade Alan, he was told the last time they did this race, only four of the six balloons ditched in the sea. He turned it down, and he has no idea why he was picked.

Scores

- Nish Kumar: 5 points
- Laura Smyth: -1 point
- Cally Beaton: -7 points
- Alan Davies: -8 points