1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off Read Free Page B

Hickok’s brother Lorenzo
    was nicknamed
    ‘Tame Bill Hickok’.
     

    From 1912 to 1948,
    painting was an Olympic event.
    In 1924, Jack Yeats,
    brother of the poet W. B. Yeats,
    took the silver:
    Ireland’s first-ever Olympic medal.
     
    William Blake’s one-man exhibition
    of paintings in 1809
    received only one review.
    The critic described him as a lunatic.
     
    In 1891, Claude Monet won 100,000 francs
    in the French national lottery.
     
    Pigeons can tell the difference between
    impressionist paintings by Monet
    and cubist works by Picasso.
    They can even tell when
    the Monets are hung upside down.
     

    There are no cubes in Cubism.
    Cézanne’s theory was that everything
    could be broken down into
    cylinders, spheres and cones.
     
    Tour de France riders
    need to eat the equivalent of
    27 cheeseburgers a day.
     
    Lightning strikes the Earth
    8.6 million times a day or
    about 100 times a second.
     
    A single bolt of lightning
    contains enough energy
    to cook
    100,000 pieces of toast.
     

    Bovril
    was originally called
    ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef ’.
     
    Hovis
    was originally called
    ‘Smith’s Patent Germ Bread’.
     
    7-Up
    was originally called
    ‘Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda’.
     
    The Bank of America
    was originally called
    the Bank of Italy.
     

    Reducing the voting age to 18,
    the introduction of 24-hour licensing
    and passports for pets
    were all policies initiated by
    the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.
     
    The smallest known dinosaur
    was about four inches tall
    and weighed less than
    a chihuahua.
     
    Each year, drug baron Pablo Escobar
    had to write off 10% of his cash holdings
    because of rats nibbling away
    at his huge stash of bank notes.
     
    The first-ever edition of the
Daily Mirror
    came with a free mirror.
     

    After two weeks of wear
    a pair of jeans will have grown
    a 1,000-strong colony
    of bacteria on the front,
    1,500–2,500 on the back
    and 10,000 on the crotch.
     
    If all the salt in the sea
    were spread evenly over the land,
    it would be 500 feet thick.
     
    The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883
    was the loudest sound in recorded history.
    It was heard 3,000 miles away
    in Mauritius.
     
    Summer on Neptune lasts for 40 years,
    but the temperature is minus 200°C.
     

    Summer nights in the Faroe Islands
    are so well illuminated that
    between May and July
    the lighthouses are turned off.
     
    In the 1st century ad most ships
    in the northern hemisphere only sailed
    between May and September.
     
    William Carstares (1649–1715)
    was the last man in Britain
    to be given the thumbscrew.
    As torture was illegal in England,
    he had to be taken to Edinburgh.
     
    Mussolini tortured his enemies
    by forcing them to swallow
    massive doses of castor oil.
     

    The second-largest lake in Bolivia
    is called Lake Poopó.
    It’s not a freshwater lake.
     
    The whole of Shakespeare
    contains only about 20,000
    different words –
    less than half the vocabulary of the
    average English speaker today.
     
    The whole of Liechtenstein
    can be rented for $70,000 a night,
    for a minimum of two nights.
    It sleeps 900.
     
    St Vitus
    is the patron saint of oversleeping.
     

    The International Space Station
    is as roomy as a five-bedroom house
    and travels at 17,500 mph.
     
    A marshmallow travelling at sea level
    would not begin to melt
    from friction caused by air resistance
    until it reached Mach 1.6
    (1,218 mph).
     
    When a medium in a trance
    offered to answer any question,
    Groucho Marx asked,
    ‘What’s the capital of North Dakota?’
     
    The popular Los Angeles beverage
    Original New York Express Iced Coffee
    is made in a factory in Singapore.
     

    Cameroon is home to the Eton tribe.
    The Eton word for ‘thank you’ is
    abumgang.
     
    Arabic words are written right to left, but
    Arabic numbers left to right.
    Arabic speakers reading anything
    with a lot of numbers in
    have to read in both directions
    at once.
     
    In 2010, the Catholic Church had an
    income of $97