QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (27 page)

Whether from Amsterdam or elsewhere, tulips are as famous a symbol of Holland as windmills and clogs, but they are not native to the Netherlands.

The natural habitat of the tulip is mountainous terrain.

It was only in 1554 that the first tulips were imported from Constantinople (now Istanbul) into the Netherlands. Wild tulips can be found in southern Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia up to north-east China. The tulip is the national flower of both Turkey and Iran.

The name of the flower comes from the word
tülbent
which is the Turkish pronunciation of the Persian word
dulband
, meaning turban. This is because of what etymologists call a ‘fancied resemblance’ of the shape of the flower when not in full blossom to a turban (or perhaps because the Turks traditionally wore the bloom in their headwear).

Tulips did become exceedingly popular in the Netherlands (as it should be called: ‘Holland’ only describes two of the country’s twelve provinces) but the stories of the great ‘tulipomania’ bubble of the early seventeenth century now look rather overcooked.

According to Professor Peter Garber, Head of Global Strategy at Deutsche Bank, the most lurid tales of people being ruined by the collapse of tulip prices stem mainly from a single book –
Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay published in 1852 – and were the result of a moralistic campaign by the Dutch government to spread scare stories to discourage tulip speculation.

It’s true that the price of tulips was inflated (and that one bulb of the most valuable plants could cost as much as a house) but there are many instances of even higher values being achieved in other countries for other plants, for example, orchids in nineteenth-century England.

At its wildest, Garber says that the Dutch speculation ‘was a phenomenon lasting one month in the dreary Dutch winter of 1637 … and was of no real economic consequence’.

Today, Holland produces about three billion tulip bulbs a year, of which two billion are exported.

Between 85,000 and 140,000. Which is why, even today, top-grade Spanish ‘
mancha
’ saffron retails at
£
3,750 per pound.

There are frescoes in Minoan Crete dated to 1600
BC
showing saffron being gathered. Alexander the Great washed his hair in saffron to keep it a lovely shiny orange colour. It was a seriously upmarket shampoo: at that time saffron was as rare as diamonds, and more expensive than gold.

In fifteenth-century Nuremberg and during the reign of Henry VIII in England, adulterating saffron by mixing it with something else was a capital offence. Culprits were burned at the stake, or buried alive with their illegal wares.

The town of Saffron Walden in Essex takes its name from the spice: it was the centre of the English saffron trade. Legend has it that this dates from the fourteenth century when a pilgrim from the Middle East arrived with a stolen bulb of a saffron crocus hidden in his stick. Until then, the town was simply called Walden.

Only the arrival of tea, coffee, vanilla and chocolate saw its cultivation decline, although it remained an important crop in Italy, Spain and France.

The word saffron comes from the Arabic
asfar
, meaning ‘yellow’.

Stop sniggering at the back there. In most cases, it won’t even tell you the size of his feet.

A study in 2002, published in the
British Journal of Urology
International
, scientifically proved there is no link between shoe size and penis size. Nurses at St Mary’s Hospital and University College Hospital in London measured the foot size and penis length of 104 men. In each case, the penis was ‘gently stretched’ before it was measured, but no correlation was found.

Previous studies, which had seemed to indicate a mild link between the two, relied on simply asking male subjects for their intimate personal details rather than, in this case, whipping them out for some hard evidence.

The average Caucasian man’s penis is 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) long when limp and 5.1 inches long (12.9 cm) when erect. Most penises stop growing when their owner is in his sixteenth year, although there is some evidence to suggest that it begins to shrink in middle age. Most men who opt for penis enlargements are in fact average-sized rather than small, though no doubt the people who carry out the operations have good reason to encourage them to think otherwise.

Even more surprisingly, most people don’t know how big their own feet are and they don’t wear the correct shoe size. According to David G. Armstrong, Professor of Surgery at the William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine in Chicago, three-quarters of people wear the wrong-sized shoes. The reason for this may be that they stick to a size they were measured for when young and fail to realise that their feet change shape throughout their lives. Or it may be that they like to get value for money and wear and re-wear a pair of shoes even if they don’t fit.

Somewhat stating the obvious, podiatrists (‘foot doctors’ to you and me) recommend trying on shoes first rather than buying a standard size off the peg, as each brand uses slightly different measurements, though they stop short at suggesting you buy a different size shoe for each foot.

Alternatively, you could give up wearing shoes altogether. Shoes are actually bad for you. In 2007, a South African study in the podiatry journal,
The Foot,
looked at the feet of 180 people from three different ethnic backgrounds (Sotho, Zulu and European) and compared them to 2,000-year-old skeletons. The research concluded that human beings had healthier feet, joints and posture before the invention of shoes. The Zulu, who often go barefoot, had the healthiest feet of the three groups in the study.

The smell of lily of the valley.

It appears sperm have ‘noses’ which they use to navigate towards a woman’s egg. Researchers experimented with a range of floral fragrances and lily of the valley came top, getting the random sperm wiggling in the same direction at twice the normal speed.

The research was carried out at Ruhr University in Germany in 2003. They discovered a new sperm protein, hOR17-4, which acted as a receptor for sperm in exactly the same way as protein sensors in the nose detect smells. They then tested their new sperm ‘nose’ on hundreds of synthetic compounds, many of them used to mimic floral scents in commercial perfumes.

One of these, bourgeonal, is used to create the lily of the
valley fragrance. It had two dramatic effects on the behaviour of sperm: doubling its speed and changing undirected swimming behaviour to direct movement. The ‘foot-to-the-floor’ effect seems to derive from hOR17-4 making the sperm wag their ‘tails’ harder.

Bourgeonal is now being used in fertility treatment to pick out the Mark Spitzes of the sperm world.

Because it feels nice, apparently, and also helps if they get injured. The idea that it gives them a speed advantage is ludicrous. There is no aerodynamic advantage in cycling with shaved legs.

It’s true that swimmers who shave their bodies can gain a 2 per cent boost to their speed, but that’s in water. The main reason given for leg-shaving among cyclists is that it makes it easier to clean a wound after a fall, and sticking plasters stay on better (and pull off less painfully). They also have their calves massaged a lot, and that’s more comfortable on a shaved leg.

Personal aesthetic considerations may also be a consideration – it’s part of
le look
. Austrian cyclist René Haselbacher had his shorts ripped off in a fall in the 2003 Tour de France, and it emerged that he had comprehensively shaved where the wind doesn’t blow.

The original idea of the Tour de France was to sell copies
of
L’Auto
newspaper, a publicity stunt that was such a success it destroyed the paper’s rival
Le Vélo
in the process.

The winner of the first Tour (in 1903) was well-known French rider Maurice Garin, nicknamed the ‘Chimney Sweep’. In the second year, almost everyone cheated: fans left nails in the road in front of their favourites’ rivals while the competitors themselves gained an edge by taking their bicycles on car trips and even train rides. The winner actually finished fifth, but the first four riders across the line were disqualified.

It used to be that a rider had to make his own repairs. In 1913, Eugène Christophe snapped some forks on his bike and so begged a piece of metal and fixed it. However, he was punished with a time delay: a young boy had helped him by operating the bellows at his hastily borrowed forge.

In 1919, the first person to be offered the famous yellow jersey (awarded for being in the lead) turned it down because he thought it would make him a more obvious target for his rivals.

The Tour is the toughest sporting event in the world. According to Dan Coyle, biographer of seven-times winner Lance Armstrong, studies have shown that Tour riders expend more daily energy than Everest climbers over an event that lasts three weeks. To fuel this effort, they need to eat the equivalent of twenty-eight cheeseburgers a day. Early cheats dosed themselves with alcohol and ether. Not to improve their speed, but to numb the pain.

The whip.

Whips were invented in China 7,000 years ago but it wasn’t
until the invention of high-speed photography in 1927 that the ‘crack’ of the whip was seen to be a mini sonic-boom and not the leather hitting the handle.

The whip’s crack is caused by a loop that forms in the whip as you flick it. The loop travels along the length of the whip and, because the leather tapers to a fine tip, the loop speeds up as it travels, reaching over ten times its original speed. The ‘crack’ is when the loop breaks the sound barrier at about 1,194 kph (742 mph).

The Bell X1 was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier, piloted by Chuck Yeager in 1947. In 1948 it reached 1,540 kph (957 mph) at 21,900 metres (71,850 feet).

The record for the fastest manned flight is still held by the X-15A which reached 6,389 kph (3,970 mph) at 31,200 metres (102,360 feet) in 1967.

The fastest any human has ever travelled was on the reentry of Apollo 10 in 1969. This was recorded at 39,897 kph (24,791 mph).