The Second Book of General Ignorance (11 page)

It isn’t fifty–fifty.

If the coin is heads up to begin with, it’s more likely to land on heads. Students at Stanford University recorded thousands of coin tosses with high-speed cameras and discovered the chances are approximately fifty-one–forty-nine.

The researchers showed that coin tossing is not a strictly random procedure, but a measurable event that obeys the laws of physics. If each coin is subject to exactly the same initial conditions and exactly the same initial force, then its spin will produce an even chance of landing on heads or tails.

However, the slightest difference in the conditions – speed and angle of spin, height of the coin from the ground, which side is facing up to start with – will affect the result. The Stanford research showed that, averaged over many tosses,
these changes were significant enough to prevent a fifty–fifty probability.

The toss of a coin can be a serious matter. In the third European Football Championships in 1968, Italy and Russia drew 0–0 in the semi-final. There were no penalty shoot-outs in those days (and there was no time in the schedule to fit in a replay), so the result was decided by the toss of a coin. Russia lost and Italy went through to the final and won the Championship.

In cricket, although winning the toss doesn’t seem to affect the results of daytime cricket matches, statistical analysis from University College London suggests that, in day–night games, winning the toss and batting first (during daylight) increases the chances of victory by almost 10 per cent.

Under British electoral law, if a vote finishes in a dead heat, the result is determined by lot.

In the 2010 UK council elections, there were tied votes in Great Yarmouth and Bristol. In one, the victory went to the candidate who drew the highest card from a pack; in the other, the returning officer drew the name from a hat.

Perhaps they’d seen the Stanford research and decided to give the coin-toss a miss …

It wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton.

It’s an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. Sadly, the evidence doesn’t stack up.

To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes
in the door of his lodgings – a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens. The story plays on a classic stereotype, the genius with no common sense – because there’s no need for the smaller door. But we know it never happened. Newton’s secretary and distant relative, Humphrey Newton, was explicit: his master ‘kept neither dog nor cat in his chamber’. Also, the doorways of most Cambridge lodgings of the period had a system of double doors. The outer doors were thick and heavy, and usually carved from a large piece of oak. The inner door acted as a draught excluder. Sawing holes through both would have been a major DIY project. And a self-defeating one – turning Newton’s rooms into a wind tunnel.

Nobody knows where the catflap myth started, but we do have a source for the legend of the apple tree: Newton himself. Never one for self-deprecation, he likened his discovery of gravity to Adam being expelled from the Garden of Eden, as both featured the sudden acquisition of knowledge through an apple.

Newton often told the story during his lifetime, but, over a century later, the German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) offered his own version of events. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘the occurrence was something of this sort: There comes to Newton a stupid importunate man, who asks him how he made his great discovery. Newton wanted to get rid of the man, told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.’

Newton certainly had a reputation for grumpiness. He didn’t suffer fools (or anyone else) gladly, and preferred solitary study to human company. At times his eccentricities seem to have shaded into genuine mental illness, particularly in 1692, when he complained of ‘great disturbance of mind’. Historians have variously ascribed the other symptoms he
exhibited – insomnia, obsessive behaviour, lack of appetite and the delusion that his friends were turning on him – to depression, Asperger’s syndrome and even mercury poisoning. Recent tests on a lock of his hair showed abnormally high levels of mercury, perhaps caused by decades of secret alchemical experimentation.

Whatever afflicted him, it didn’t prevent Newton from producing
Principia Mathematica
(1687), the most influential scientific book of all time, or from building a successful second career as a civil servant and administrator. He lived until he was eighty-four and died a very wealthy man, leaving assets worth £31,821 (equivalent to £49 million in today’s money).

Molotov didn’t invent his ‘cocktails’. They were named after him as an insult.

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin (1890–1986) took the pen name ‘Molotov’ (
molot
means ‘hammer’ in Russian) as a young Bolshevik party organiser and underground journalist in pre-Revolutionary Russia. He became Stalin’s most loyal deputy, and was one of only four members of the 1917 revolutionary government to survive Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.

The story of the Molotov cocktail begins in 1939 when, as Soviet foreign minister, Molotov secretly authorised the illegal invasion of Finland, weeks after the Second World War had started. In the early phases of the invasion, he claimed in radio broadcasts that the cluster bombs Soviet planes were dropping were actually food parcels for starving Finns.

The Finnish resistance was stronger than the Soviets had anticipated and the invasion lasted through the bitter winter of 1940. The Finns’ secret weapon was a handmade incendiary device made from a bottle filled with flammable liquid and stoppered with a wick. They had borrowed the idea from General Franco’s Fascist troops, who had recently emerged as victors in the Spanish Civil War. The Fascists had produced these hand-held bombs to disable the Soviet-built tanks used by the left-wing Republican government forces. The Finns christened them ‘Molotov’s cocktails’, the joke being that they were ‘a drink to go with his food parcels’. They used a government vodka distillery to produce more than 450,000 of them. Their fame spread and, by the end of the War, combatants on all sides knew them as ‘Molotov cocktails’.

The disinformation about food parcels was typical of Molotov. He wasn’t a soldier; he was a bureaucrat, skilled in the use of propaganda. The Finnish war resulted from the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact that he had signed with the Nazis in August 1939. (Von Ribbentrop was Molotov’s opposite number, the German foreign minister.) This was a secret agreement for the USSR and Germany to carve up Poland and the Baltic states between them. It wasn’t made public until
after war had ended – Molotov went to his grave denying it had ever existed – but it made possible the German invasion of Poland (which began the Second World War) as well as the Soviet invasion of Finland. It also allowed Molotov to destroy Polish resistance by authorising the murder of all 22,000 members of the Polish officer corps at Katyn forest in March 1940.

The short-lived pact with Germany wasn’t Molotov’s only legacy. During the Soviet purges of the 1930s, it had been his idea to use lists to sentence people to death, greatly speeding up the process. In 1937–8, he personally signed 372 orders for mass executions – more than Stalin himself – leading to the murder of more than 43,000 people.

Vegetarian, teetotal and a studious collector of first editions (many were dedicated to him by authors he later sent to the Gulag), Molotov was the last surviving Bolshevik. He died, an unrepentant Stalinist, in 1986, just after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the
perestroika
(restructuring) reforms that would lead, five years later, to the dissolution of the USSR.

It was designed to speed cars up, not slow them down.

A Dutch engineer called Maurice Gatsonides (1911–98) devised the first speed camera. Far from being a road-safety campaigner, Gatsonides was Europe’s first professional rally driver. The pinnacle of his career came in 1953 when he won the Monte Carlo Rally in a Ford Zephyr by just three seconds.

His world-famous invention was driven by a desire to improve his speed round corners. The first ‘Gatsometer’
consisted of two pressure-sensitive rubber strips stretched across the road. Driving over the first strip started a stopwatch; crossing the second stopped it. This was the world’s first reliable speed-measuring device. Gatsonides then added a flash camera which made it even more accurate. It enabled him to see just how much extra speed he could squeeze out of a corner by approaching it along a different line.

Gatso soon realised that his camera could also be used to catch speeding motorists. He founded Gatsometer BV in 1958 and over the next twenty years gradually refined his invention, introducing a radar beam to replace the rubber pressure strips in 1971. The ‘Gatso 24’ is now installed in more than forty countries. In many languages, speed cameras of any kind are simply known as ‘Gatsos’.

The first Gatsos in the UK were installed in Nottingham in 1988, after a triple fatality at a traffic-light-controlled junction. Having been slow to adopt the new technology, the UK now leads Europe in the use of speed cameras. In 2007 the UK had 4,309 of them (compared with 1,571 in 2001), more than France and Italy combined.

Do they work? The evidence suggests that they do. A four-year survey by the UK Department for Transport, published in 2006, reported that the overall speed past camera sites was reduced by an average of 6 per cent, and the number of people killed or seriously injured by 42 per cent. While the motoring lobby points out that driving too fast is the main cause in only 14 per cent of fatal accidents – compared with ‘driver distraction’ which accounts for 68 per cent – the enforcement of speed limits has had a massive impact on the number of collisions. In the ten years since 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour) limits were introduced in London, the number of accidents has halved.

Dislike of speed cameras is nothing new. The Automobile Association was established in 1905 to help motorists avoid
police speed traps which (then as now) many felt were more to do with extorting money than road safety. All drivers speed at some point: 75 per cent admit to doing it regularly. But for all the grumbling, according to the Department for Transport, 82 per cent of us think speed cameras are a good thing.

Gatsonides certainly thought so. ‘I am often caught by my own speed cameras and find hefty fines on my doormat,’ he once confessed. ‘I love speeding.’