QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (25 page)

Writing was a hazardous activity before the advent of the ballpoint pen. Fountain pens had to be regularly dipped into an ink pot and were prone to leakages, and Indian ink 
(invented in China) was slow to dry on the page.

These problems were first recognised in a patent registered on 30 October 1888 by a leather tanner called John J. Loud. He created a pen with a small rotating ball for a nib that was constantly fed by an ink reservoir. Although the pen still leaked, it was much more effective for writing on leather than a fountain pen. Loud failed to exploit his patent. If he had, we might be talking about disposable ‘louds’ instead of ‘biros’.

The Hungarian László Biró (1899–1985) originally trained as a doctor but never graduated. He had brief stints as a hypnotist and a racing driver before taking up journalism.

Puzzled by the difference in drying times between newspaper ink and the slow-drying substance in his fountain pen, Biró and his chemist brother, György, fitted a pen with a small ball-bearing which successfully drew down the printing ink as it rotated. The biro was born.

The pair patented the pen in Hungary in 1938, and emigrated to Argentina in 1940 to avoid the Nazis, repatenting it there in 1943. An early customer was the RAF, encouraged by the pen’s performance at high altitude. This ensured the name ‘biro’ became synonymous with the ballpoint in Britain.

The first biros sold to the public were manufactured in 1945. At the same time, Biró licensed his pen to Frenchman Marcel Bich.

Bich called his company BiC and, by modifying Biró’s design, set up a mass-production process that meant the pens could be sold incredibly cheaply.

BiC remains the world’s ballpoint market-leader with annual sales of 1.38 billion euros. In 2005, they sold their 100 billionth pen. The best-selling BiC Cristal sells 14 million units a day.

As a mark of respect to Biró, the Argentines – who call the
pens
birome
– celebrate Argentinian Inventors Day on 29 September, his birthday.

Gypsum.

School ‘chalk’ is not chalk. Chalk is made of calcium carbonate – as is coral, limestone, marble, the skeletons of humans and fish, the lenses of eyes, the limescale in kettles and the indigestion pills Rennies, Setlers and Tums.

Gypsum is made of calcium sulphate. You may think it’s a picky distinction but though the two
look
similar they are in fact quite different and are not even made of the same chemical elements.

Many substances that
appear
to be radically different are actually made of exactly the
same
chemical elements. Take carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Combined in different proportions, they make stuff as wildly different as testosterone, vanilla, aspirin, cholesterol, glucose, vinegar and alcohol.

Technically known as hydrated calcium sulphate, gypsum is one of the most widely available minerals in the world. It has been mined for at least 4,000 years – the plasterwork inside the Pyramids is made of gypsum – and it is used today in a huge range of industrial processes, the commonest of which is ordinary building plaster.

About 75 per cent of all gypsum is used for plaster and products such as plasterboard, tiles and plaster of Paris. Gypsum is a key ingredient of cement and is used in the manufacture of fertiliser, paper and textiles. A typical new American home contains more than seven tons of gypsum.

Plaster of Paris is so called because there are large deposits
of gypsum in the clay soil in and around Paris, especially in Montmartre.

Gypsum also occurs naturally in the form of alabaster, a snow-white, translucent material used to make statues, busts and vases.

Alabaster can be artificially dyed any colour and, if heated, can be made to resemble marble. Powdered alabaster made into a salve was traditionally believed to be a cure for bad legs. It was common for people to chip pieces off church statues to make the ointment.

Ironically, the word gypsum comes from the Greek
gypsos
, meaning ‘chalk’. 

Wales.

This essential constituent of mathematics wasn’t a product of the Greeks, the Babylonians or the Arabs, but the small coastal town of Tenby in south Wales. There, in 1510, the astronomer and mathematician Robert Recorde was born. Recorde was a child prodigy who rose to prominence as Royal physician to Edward VI and Queen Mary and later as controller of the Royal Mint.

He was also a prolific author, writing a sequence of popular maths textbooks, of which
The Whetstone of Witte
(1557) is the
most famous. Not only did it introduce algebra to an English audience for the first time it also introduced the equals sign, =.

Recorde’s reason for adopting two parallel lines is refreshingly to the point: ‘bicause noe 2 thynges, can be moare equalle’. It took a while to catch on: | | and ae (from the Latin ‘
aequalis
’) were used well into the seventeenth century.

One Recorde invention which didn’t stick was his word describing numbers to the eighth power, e.g., 28 = 256.
Zenzizenzizenzic
was based on the German
zenzic
, a version of the Italian censo meaning ‘squared’ (so it means ‘x squared, squared and squared again’). It does, however, comfortably hold the record for the number of ‘z’s in a single word.

Despite his facility with numbers Recorde was less good with his personal finances. Poor political judgment meant he got on the wrong side of the Earl of Pembroke who called in a debt for the then astronomical sum of £1,000. This broke Recorde and he died in the King’s Bench debtors prison in Southwark, aged forty-eight.

Many things, but not the Bunsen burner.

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811–99) was an influential German chemist and teacher who devised or improved the design of a number of pieces of laboratory equipment still in use today. However, the item he is most famous for was actually invented by the English chemist Michael Faraday and then improved by Peter Desaga, Bunsen’s technician at the University of Heidelberg.

Bunsen first became renowned in the scientific community
for his work on arsenic. He eventually discovered the only known antidote to the poison, but not before losing his sight in one eye and almost dying of arsenic poisoning.

He went on to produce a galvanic battery that used a carbon element instead of the much more expensive platinum. Using this he was able to isolate pure chromium, magnesium, aluminium and other metals. At the same time, he also solved the riddle of how geysers worked by building a working model in his lab.

The need for a new style of burner grew out of his work with a young physicist called Gustav Kirchoff. Together they pioneered the technique that became known as spectroscopy. By filtering light through a prism they discovered that every element had its own signature spectrum. In order to produce this light by heating different materials, they needed a flame that was very hot but not very bright.

Bunsen developed this new heat source using Faraday’s burner as his starting point. In the earlier model, the oxygen was added at the point of combustion, which led to a smoky, flickery flame. Bunsen conceived a burner where oxygen was mixed with gas before combustion in order to make a very hot, blue flame. He took his ideas to Desaga, who built the prototype in 1855.

Within five years, Bunsen and Kirchoff had used the combination of their new burner and spectroscope to identify the elements caesium and rubidium. Their lab became famous, and Bunsen’s modesty and eccentricity (he never washed) brought him international renown. Mendeleev, the Russian inventor of the periodic table, was one of his many devoted pupils.

Although he didn’t get to give his name to the burner he built, Desaga did get the rights to sell it, which his family did very successfully (and profitably) for several generations.

Despite its iconic status, the Bunsen burner has now largely
been replaced in chemistry labs by the cleaner and safer electric hot plate.

Ping-pong balls and collar stiffeners.

Film isn’t made of celluloid any more. The main ingredient of celluloid is cellulose nitrate; modern film is made from cellulose acetate.

Celluloid is generally regarded as the first plastic. In technical terms, it is a thermoplastic, which means it can be moulded each time it is re-heated.

It is made from cellulose nitrate and camphor. Cellulose occurs naturally in the cell walls of plants. Camphor comes from the camphor tree and smells distinctively of the mothballs into which it is also made.

Celluloid was first manufactured in Birmingham, England by Alexander Parkes who patented it for use in waterproofing clothing in 1856. Another early use was as a cheap ivory substitute: for billiard balls and false teeth.

Celluloid made the movies possible because of its flexibility. Rigid glass plates don’t run through projectors. But it is both highly flammable and quick to decompose, so it is difficult to store and is now rarely used.

It has largely been replaced by more stable plastics such as cellulose acetate (made from wood pulp) and polyethylene (a by-product of petroleum).

Cellulose nitrate (or nitrocellulose) was invented by accident in 1846 by Christian Schönbein, the man who, six years earlier, had discovered ozone.

Experimenting in his kitchen with nitric and sulphuric acid, he broke a bottle, wiped up the mess with his wife’s cotton apron, and put it on the stove to dry. It immediately burst into flames: Schönbein had discovered the first new explosive since gunpowder was invented by the ancient Chinese.

The new explosive was called ‘guncotton’. It was smokeless and four times as powerful as gunpowder. Schönbein patented it at once and sold the exclusive manufacturing rights to John Hall and Sons. The next year, it blew up their factory in Faversham, Kent, killing twenty-one people.

Lethal explosions followed in France, Russia and Germany. It was forty years before a stable use was found for cellulose nitrate when James Dewar and Frederick Abel created cordite in 1889.

Seven years earlier, Dewar had invented the Thermos flask.