12.5 — Firsts, Lasts and the Leftover Marvels

The end of the volume, and the shelf where everything went that was too good to drop and belonged nowhere else.

Firsts

What was the first of the things you use daily?

The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson to himself in 1971, on two machines standing beside each other. He chose the @ symbol because it was on the keyboard, was not used in names, and already meant "at". He said he could not remember what the message said, and that it was probably something like QWERTYUIOP.

The first text message was sent in 1992 by Neil Papworth, an engineer, to a colleague at a Christmas party. It said "Merry Christmas". He had to type it on a computer, because phones could not yet compose messages.

The first item sold on Amazon was a book about artificial intelligence, in 1995. The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer, for $14.83; the seller contacted the buyer to check he understood it was broken, and was told he collected them.

The first photograph of a person is in Daguerre's 1838 view of a Paris boulevard, which appears empty because the exposure took several minutes and moving traffic left no trace — except a man having his shoes shined, who stood still long enough to register.

The first video on YouTube, in 2005, is nineteen seconds of one of the founders at a zoo, saying that elephants have long trunks.

The first webcam watched a coffee pot at Cambridge, so researchers could avoid walking to an empty one. It went online in 1993 and was switched off in 2001; the pot was auctioned and sold for over £3,000.

Which "firsts" are commonly misattributed?

The first computer depends entirely on the definition. Colossus in 1943 was electronic and programmable but not general-purpose; ENIAC in 1945 was general-purpose but programmed by rewiring; the Manchester Baby in 1948 was the first to run a program stored in its own memory. Babbage's Analytical Engine was designed in the 1830s and never built.

The first film — 7.1. The first flight — 2.5, and several claimants dispute the Wrights.

The first person to reach the North Pole is genuinely unresolved; both Cook's and Peary's claims are doubted on navigational grounds, and the first undisputed surface arrival may be 1968.

The first vaccine is Jenner in 2.3, though variolation — deliberate infection with mild smallpox material — was practised centuries earlier in China, India and the Ottoman world, and was introduced to Britain by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had seen it in Istanbul.

Lasts

What are the notable last ones?

The last person to see the last of a species is almost never recorded, with a few exceptions. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914 — a species that had numbered in the billions and been the most abundant bird in North America within living memory of her death. Benjamin, the last known thylacine, died in Hobart in 1936, two months after the species was granted legal protection.

Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, died in 2012.

The last execution by guillotine in France was in 1977, which is later than most people guess — the same year Star Wars was released.

The last Morse code transmission by commercial maritime radio in the United States was in 1999, signing off with the same message sent at the end of the first commercial telegraph line.

The last man on the moon was Eugene Cernan in December 1972. His last words on the surface were about returning, with peace and hope for all mankind. Nobody has been back.

The last new letter added to the English alphabet was J, distinguished from I only in the seventeenth century. W is genuinely a double U, from a ligature of two U or V shapes.

Leftover marvels

The ones that are simply worth knowing

Honey does not spoil. Its low water content and high acidity make it inhospitable to microbes, and sealed honey found in Egyptian tombs has been reported edible after three thousand years.

Bananas are radioactive, from their potassium content, which includes a naturally radioactive isotope. The dose is trivial and is used as an informal unit — the banana equivalent dose — to make radiation figures intuitive.

Your stomach lining replaces itself every few days because it would otherwise digest itself.

There are more possible arrangements of a deck of 52 cards than there are atoms on Earth. The number is 52 factorial, about 8 × 10⁶⁷. Every properly shuffled deck in history has almost certainly been a unique arrangement, never occurring before and never again.

A day on Venus is longer than its year. It rotates once every 243 Earth days and orbits in 225.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid is about 2560 BCE, Cleopatra about 30 BCE, the landing 1969 CE — 2,530 years against 1,999.

The Ottoman Empire still existed when the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series before 2016, and Oxford University was already teaching when the Aztec Empire was founded.

Sharks predate trees. Sharks appear around 400 million years ago and trees around 350.

Nintendo was founded in 1889, making playing cards, and is older than the Nobel Prizes.

There is enough DNA in one human body, stretched end to end, to reach the sun and back several hundred times — because there are tens of trillions of cells and each contains about two metres of it.

Wombat droppings are cube-shaped, produced by variable elasticity in the intestinal wall, so they do not roll off the rocks the animal uses to mark territory. It won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.

The Eiffel Tower is about 15 centimetres taller in summer, because iron expands with heat.

A cloud weighs a great deal. A typical small cumulus contains around half a gram of water per cubic metre and is perhaps a kilometre across, giving a mass in the region of 500 tonnes — it floats because the droplets are tiny and fall very slowly through air that is rising.

Oxford's Bodleian Library holds a copy of nearly every book published in the UK by legal deposit, and it has never lent a book — not even to Charles I, who asked.

The world's oldest continuously operating company is generally given as Kongō Gumi, a Japanese temple construction firm founded in 578 CE, which operated independently for over 1,400 years before becoming a subsidiary in 2006.

The ones that change how you see something

A blue whale's arteries are wide enough for a human to swim through — an image that does more than the mass figure in 12.3.

All the gold ever mined would form a cube about 22 metres on a side. The entire history of an obsession that has moved empires fits in a large house.

If the Earth were shrunk to the size of a billiard ball it would be smoother than the ball, because the difference between Everest and the Mariana Trench is about 20 kilometres against a diameter of 12,742 — a proportion of about 0.15 per cent.

Every atom of carbon in you was made inside a star that ended before the sun existed. There is no other process that makes carbon.

The light hitting your eye from a distant galaxy has been travelling since before your species existed, and the last thing that happened to it was you.

The end of the volume

What was the point of all this?

Every page here started as somebody's ordinary question. Why is the keyboard like that. Why do shirts have collars. What is a neutrino. What is everybody doing right now.

Not one of those questions has a short answer, and none of them has a boring one. The keyboard leads to path dependence and to why bad standards survive. The collar leads to laundry, class and the phrase white-collar. The neutrino leads to a tank of water under a mountain in Japan and to a crack in the Standard Model.

That is the only claim this volume makes. Follow a small question honestly and it opens onto something large, every single time, because the world is connected and nothing in it is actually isolated.

What is worth carrying out of it?

Three habits, which are more useful than any fact on these seventy pages.

Ask where a claim came from. A very large number of the confident statements on this page's subjects turned out to be wrong — the goldfish, the Great Wall, the tongue map, the horned helmets, the eleven days. Not one of them was hard to check. They survived because nobody bothered.

Estimate before you look it up. 11.1 is the most practically useful page in the volume. A rough number produced in two minutes protects you from being told a wrong one, and it is a skill that improves with about ten attempts.

And say "I don't know" out loud. A striking number of entries here end in genuine uncertainty — why buttons differ by gender, why we hiccup, whether the Hanging Gardens existed, what the Indus script says. The people who admitted not knowing are the reason those questions are still open rather than falsely closed.

Where do you go now?

Back into the rest of the book, which is what this volume has been pointing at throughout.

A question here about resonance has a full derivation in Volume IV. A question about how a database stores a file has an entire Part in Volume I. The body's oddities open into Volume V; the myths into Volume VII; the years into Volume VIII; and the question of what to do when it all goes wrong is Volume IX.

Or stay here and open another page at random. That is what the volume is for, and it does not run out — because the supply of questions is not limited by this book, only by how long you are willing to keep asking them.