Gooooooooooood evening, good evening, good evening,
good evening
and welcome to an episode of QI that's all about inventions
and discoveries, in fact anything that's "just the job".
They say that the greatest of all inventors is accident.
With that in mind, let's meet the tremendously timely Jason Manford.
APPLAUSE
The consistently coincidental Jeremy Clarkson.
APPLAUSE
The stupefyingly serendipitous Sandi Toksvig.
APPLAUSE
And an accident waiting to happen, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
So, let's hear your Alexander Graham Bells.
Jason goes...
OLD-FASHIONED PHONE RINGS
- It's all right. - Jeremy goes...
Is it going to be a car horn?
MODERN PHONE RINGS
- No. - Surprising. Sandi goes...
I want something trim.
ELECTRONIC PHONE RINGS
Good guess. And Alan goes...
MUSIC: "Ride Of The Valkyries" By Wagner
Oh.
- I could listen to this for ever. - He loves this one.
It's a 14-and-a-half hour...
- Orgasm. - It's a Wagner ring tone.
Isn't that wonderful? I could listen to that for ever.
Anyway, so, let's begin with an interesting question.
What were chainsaws originally invented for?
Proctology.
- Wow! That's scary. - SANDI: Yeah, that's a...
- Slicing an arse in half. - Yeah.
- Well, do you know, you were in the right area. - SANDI: Really?
- I have to say. I mean... - Circumcision.
What I mean is, you began straight away with medicine.
You didn't say trees or, you know, cutting down, you know, buildings.
Oh, cutting off legs. So, like bones and...
Bones is the right answer.
Yes, in particular it was a rather unpleasant procedure.
Oh, don't, it'll be a boy thing against a girl thing. It will be.
- Well, not against, in order to... - Well, no, no, but it...
It was doctors trying to help.
Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is.
It'll be a boy thinking a woman's taking far too long over labour
going, "Oh, I can't stand all that panting, I know,
"we'll get a chainsaw and just cut that baby out." That's what it is.
Do you know, you're absolutely right.
APPLAUSE
Oh, my God!
It was in...it was in 1783.
That's no excuse.
It was two Scots doctors called John Aitken and James Jeffrey,
and it was called a symphysiotomy and it was a procedure
to widen the pelvis if the baby's head was too large to pass through.
Oh, can you hear the high tone of all those sighs in the audience?
- What I like about this picture... - It's a bit eye-watering.
It's a ladies' ward, so of course there is some baking going on
on the left-hand side. Yes.
Oh, that's right, there is.
A little cake display case of buns in the oven, Stephen,
- you see what I did there. - Buns in the oven!
- They didn't really, darling? - I'm afraid they did.
When I say chainsaw, it was literally a chain,
- it was like a watch chain in fact. - Ah, right. - It was an up-and-down...
JASON: So it wasn't a full lumberjack giving it...
IMITATES CHAINSAW NOISE ..it's a boy!
They hadn't yet invented the internal combustion engine.
And Caesarean sections, they were...
- Caesarean sections have replaced the same idea, that the... - Phew.
Yes, quite, exactly. It's a bit of a relief.
It would have been easier to do the Caesarean section, I think.
Sawing the pelvic bone in half is not as easy as maybe just
- a small incision in... - I know, you would have thought they have...
Pop it out of the sunroof.
But this was before antiseptic surgery
and of course it was before any kind of anaesthetic.
Was there not a meeting? You know what I mean?
There was not a meeting where someone goes, "I've got it."
And they go, "What?" And they go, "Chainsaw, innit?"
Well, they looked at a watch chain and they said, you know, if you can,
we could sort of ease away the bone like that, rather than using a saw.
I know, everyone's wincing.
Have we got another question that isn't about that?
Would it heal? Presumably not very well.
Well, they then went on to use the same thing, for example,
if someone had a bit of diseased bone, they would do the same thing,
they would sort of take it and they'd go up and down like that,
and then they'd do it lower down and the two bits would fuse together,
and they'd have a stiff arm, but it would get rid of the diseased bone.
It was called an osteotome.
It eventually became like a chainsaw, you can see one here.
- That is more like a chainsaw. - My God! You don't want that...
- But pretty unpleasant. - You don't want that coming at you.
You really don't. You really, really don't.
I remember my wife had a baby, I remember it well...
- I was going to say. - Yeah... - Kind of thing you wouldn't forget.
It was a grand day, but when she had a baby,
and there's a point where you go in to see the fella
- who's going to sort it out on the day. - Obstetrician?
That's him, yeah, he's got an official title.
And you go and see him, and as the husband, he says,
"Right, you sit there on a chair."
And then he pulls the curtain across
while him and your wife are in this thing,
while he has a little dabble, or whatever he's doing.
- It's a bit intimate, isn't it? - You go, "I've seen it, mate."
Do you know what I mean? There's nothing...this is why we're here.
Well, you don't look when that happens though, do you,
at the moment of conception? Do you actually have a look?
You're looking into...
Surely... Surely... Sorry.
I think I was watching...
Stephen doesn't need to know, Jason, he doesn't need to know.
Well, I thought you were gazing lovingly into her eyes while...
Gazing lovingly...gazing lovingly at the Bourne Identity,
which is still on the television.
- As you reach for your drink. - Oh, I'm...
What do you think, darling, that he's got a periscope at the moment of...?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, look...
I don't know why you and I are having this conversation.
It's true.
APPLAUSE
After the invention of the internal combustion engine,
where we're getting Jeremy to his home territory now,
eventually by 1920 they were small enough
- to be able to have a hand-powered... chain. - Cut down trees.
- And then they cut down trees. Exactly. - Yes.
Well, anyway, there you are.
Chainsaws were originally invented for midwives.
Staying in that general area, unfortunately,
explain how an electric jockstrap works.
Is there going to be a demonstration?
- Do you know, I kind of wish there were. - JASON: Is that what this is?
- No. - Argh, oh! That's what this is.
Is it a warming thing, or...?
An electric anything takes us into a period of time.
- Galvanism. It's Victorian, galvanism. - Galvan, exactly.
Everybody thought electricity would cure everything,
stimulate everything and achieve everything.
And so at the back of every newspaper there was an electrical
something, a galvanic bath, but these were electric jockstraps.
Well, presumably, because they had all sorts of things to stop boys
playing with themselves, it must have been...
That would stop you, wouldn't it? It would stop you, wouldn't it?
- If you had a shock in your pants. - No, I'm thinking it might be nice.
- Yes. - Oh, really? - You're spot on. We men know that.
Because there are certain code words in Victorian English.
"Nervous and general debility, lost vigour, decline,
"and the whole train of gloomy attendants,"
was standard code for impotence.
Enter the Heidelberg electric belt.
There it is.
- It's a bit high up, isn't it? - Yes.
Oh, I see, so actually there's the thing down there.
That's really kind of buzzing away in the important area.
And that is actually going to cause you to, well, I'm afraid
the phrase is probably embarrassing, they advise "seminal economy".
- They're advising against... - Is that with easyJet? - Yeah.
They're advising against
"wantonly jettisoning too much nervous substance."
- Which basically... - Is that what they called it?
That's code for semen. In other words, it's essentially a sex toy.
- "Wantonly jettisoning." - It is...
Don't wantonly jettison your nervous substance.
I like the idea of nervous semen just coming out going...
"Woaaah."
SANDI: He's quite camp.
Perhaps he's having problems with his virility
- cos he's sleeping with the wrong sex. - Well, it might be that.
But there genuinely was an item, as you can see, hugely advertised,
there were lots of different...
So is it designed then to lift the dormant chap or to de-nervify
- the semen? - It's basically designed saying,
"Would you like to enjoy the experience of a little bit
"of a tingling down there that maybe has disappeared?"
But it probably was just like,
"That's a damn good thing to take to a hotel room."
- Why have they gone out of fashion? - I know.
Are these still for sale?
I feel like if Ann Summers did them, you could see,
not in the upstairs bit, the downstairs bit of Ann Summers...
Tell me about this, Jason, because I...
Upstairs is like, just like chocolate willies and that.
Downstairs...someone's going to get hurt, Stephen.
Really? I've never been in an Ann Summers. You'd think it would be
- the other way round, you'd have to go upstairs... - No, you come in
at ground floor level. I'm only going off our nearest 12 branches.
Yes, right.
But, yeah, that's the normal one.
And then you sort of pop downstairs, you know, anniversary, or whatever...
Good gracious.
But the other thing about that is you got ten days' free trial.
- Wow! - I don't know if you can see, but it's actually printed there.
What if you send it back and it goes to somebody else?
That's what I'm worried about with the free trial.
I know, exactly. You're using a used one.
It is going to get much more acceptable and decent,
this programme, I promise you, as we move on.
So anyway, unfortunately, we are staying in the nether regions.
Why would you want to wear your underpants inside-out?
And I'm not looking at you here, I have to say, Sandi.
This is a male question.
A cameraman I used to work with reckoned he could get five days
out of a single pair of underpants,
and I can't work out what the fifth is.
We know inside-out then back to front,
then back to front and inside-out covers all the important parts.
- But the fifth is a mystery. - He had a fifth day...
The fifth day, he wore them as a hat.
LAUGHTER
- Never quite understood it. - Look, he's got his glasses round his neck!
JASON: "I might do a bit of reading."
And a Martini! Yes, it's a very peculiar photograph.
I don't really understand it.
- But what sort of pants is he wearing? - Y-fronts.
Y-fronts, now, all Y-fronts are the same.
What is it about them that's the same?
Oh, is it because they've...one side?
- Yes, they're made for right-handed people. - The aperture.
So you might say, wear them inside-out
and then a left-handed person would be able to use that,
but the weird thing is, counter-intuitively,
and I have some Y-fronts for you...
- This may be your first time, Sandi! - I couldn't be more thrilled.
- Green for you. - Please don't pass me a pair of Y-fronts.
I'll take the pink one.
You'll take the pink one.
It's like Reservoir Dogs, isn't it? Go on, and you can be Mr Blue.
Now, you may say, "OK, so the right hand opens the flap there."
Turn them inside-out and it's still the right hand.
Show the audience. Those are inside-out.
And you would think, but they don't reverse in that sense.
They're magic pants!
- They're magic pants. - They're the same.
I'm actually left-handed, so...
You've got them on back to front.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
No, it's there! Look, it's there, there's the bit.
That's not helped me at all!
You would think that turning them inside-out
would move the right to the left, but it doesn't.
And you'd have to have a really good topological brain
to map that in your head.
I have a photograph of David Walliams on my telephone
in a pair of underpants. He's got two Ys going on.
Oh! That's odd.
That explains a lot about David Walliams.
LAUGHTER
As an individual, he's certainly not none-too-wise.
Day Five.
LAUGHTER
- I didn't mention, Alan, that we had to collect... - Oh, don't! Stop it!
..we had to collect these from the crew, because we didn't have any.
No, they are of course brand new and clean.
- They're rather good for a warm day. - They are.
That's why they were developed. And it started with the X-fronts,
which were in an X-shape. And they were reasonably successful.
And then, a man in America called Arthur Kneibler
came up with Y-fronts, or jockey shorts.
And it just took off enormously.
AMERICAN ACCENT: Jockey shawts! Jockeys!
- And they were an instant... - Jockey shawts!
"I'm turning my jockey shawts inside-out.
"But I still can't find my cock!"
LAUGHTER
Oh, dear. This really has probably begun
about as low as any programme we've ever done.
- It's going to rise, I promise you. - It's going to rise?!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
I swear, Stephen, it's a gift.
Your abilities for innuendo astound me every year!
I don't mean to, I know, I just have to whip it out
and stick a red pencil through it.
- Anyway... - I feel I've inadvertently arrived on a boys' night.
And now we come to our Dubious Theory, ladies and gentlemen.
- WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYS - 'A Dubious Theory from Stephen Fry.'
Yes. People who believe in "urotherapy"
claim that drinking your own urine can cure everything
from cancer to the common cold,
not to mention boosting your libido and generally pepping you up.
Others say, "That's a load of old widdle."
Look it up on "drinkmyurine.co.uk,"
and decide for yourself.
WHIMSICAL MUSIC 'A Dubious Theory from Stephen Fry.'
This is Hayley Mills' website, is it?
- Not Hayley Mills. - Sarah, wasn't it Sarah...?
- Sarah...? - Is it Miles? - Miles.
Sarah Miles is what I meant, not Hayley Mills!
Yeah, Sarah Miles, the actress, is a urinobibe.
She drinks her own urine.
What's the reason that it might make you better? Surely it's full of...
Let me give you the theory of a woman called Martha Christy.
She wrote, "Your own perfect medicine.
"The very first toilet visit of the day,"
she says, "..is the most beneficial."
She recommends starting
"with five drops of fresh morning urine under the tongue."
Urgh!
"Before gradually increasing the dosage
"to as much as a cupful morning and night."
Give over! Five drops, that's remarkable control!
LAUGHTER
I think the idea is to take a pipette.
A pipette! And put it in...?
Urgh!
No, not in your, no! You pee into a bowl or something,
- and then, I don't know. - A bowl.
"Your first toilet visit of the day," she likes to call it.
But Victorian women used to take warm boys' urine for freckles.
- Really? - It was thought to be, if you applied it to your face...
- It would give you freckles or take them away? - Take them away.
JASON: It's a wonder why...!
You may have noticed I have a completely freckle-free complexion.
- It's a wonder why we're still here sometimes. - It is, isn't it?
You read stuff, you think,
"Victorian women pissing on their own faces for freckles!"
SANDI: No, they didn't wee on their own faces, they got a boy to do it!
You'd have to be a contortionist to wee on your own face!
You really would, wouldn't you?
I'd have thought a headstand would probably do it, wouldn't it?
LAUGHTER
Gravity would take its course.
I get sent very odd things by members of the public. Thank you.
Erm, and, er, I got sent a thing to stand up weeing. And I thought...
- Oh, a funnel? - JASON: Oh, the She-Pee?
- It's the most marvellous thing. - It's Japanese, isn't it?
Oh, darling, I piss in all sorts of places now. I get out of the car,
I can't be bothered to pop into the service station, on the back wheel!
It is mostly for driving, I thought, the She-Wee.
Driving under the influence of the need for a wee
is the most dangerous thing a human being can do.
I have reached 170 miles an hour.
Disabled parking spaces outside motorway service stations,
they're mine, because I am disabled by the need...you are just...!
You become consumed with...!
JASON: I had a wee in a water bottle once, driving about 100 mile an hour,
- and, er... - But then it won't stop. - Well, I failed my driving test.
LAUGHTER AND CHEERING
Peeing in a bottle in a car when you realise
there's more than will fit in the bottle.
- Oh, that's the worst... - "No, no, no! What am I going to do now?!
"I can't empty it out of the window, you can't pinch it off!"
Just have a little sip!
LAUGHTER
Well, I feel better!
A coach full of schoolchildren just moves alongside,
they look down on you and you're going, "A-a-agh!"
What you need is a straw, see? Take it out as it goes in.
- Straight back in again. - And it'll cure your cancer as well.
And your freckles.
Do you know of any other urinobibes?
- SANDI: Er, no I don't. - JD Salinger, apparently.
And of course, Jennifer Saunders, not Jennifer Saunders herself,
but her character, Eddie Monsoon in Ab Fab.
"It's urine therapy, darling. It's not to be sniffed at," as she says.
The prime minister, Morarji Desai, of India, he was a urinobibe.
He was elected when he was 80 years old,
so it obviously didn't do any harm.
Helen Andrews of the British Dietetic Association says,
"There are no health benefits. In fact, it could be detrimental.
"Each time you put it back, it'll come out more concentrated."
And that's not good for health.
That first toilet visit in the morning,
sometimes you don't want to be in the same room as that!
Never mind putting it under your tongue!
Imagine if you've had asparagus the night before.
JASON: But sometimes it's got that Sugar Puff smell, hasn't it?
You know, on that day you might go, "All right, I'll risk it."
Anyway, that's probably enough about pee.
So, what was your great-grandmother doing down the back of the sofa?
Was she, was she a Borrower?
Was she a Borrower? No, she wasn't a Borrower.
I come from a particularly small family,
and we lost many, in various pieces of furniture.
I had an aunt went through a cane chair, we never saw her again.
JASON: Was she dead and been cremated and you spilt it?
What was happening around the time of one's great-grandmother,
- what sort of...? - They were using the elderly to stuff sofas.
About a hundred years ago families began to do a thing in order to
register their lives and formalise their existences, after weddings.
- Photographs. - Photographs, exactly. - So Victorian...
And particularly their babies,
they liked to have their babies photographed,
but exposure times were quite long and how do you keep a baby still?
- Oh, I've seen this! This is this weird thing. - Heroin.
There's loads of pictures of them.
- They've got like sheets over their head. - Yes.
- And they're sort of holding the child in place. - Exactly.
They're called "hidden mother photographs".
- They're terrifying, there's a website of them. - Yes.
- And they're terrifying, yeah. Look at that. - Look, there's one. - Oh, wow!
- That's horrible! - It's like a woman in a burqa.
Yes. It's horrible. Extraordinary.
There's the mother pretending to be a sofa or an item of furniture,
keeping her baby quiet and still enough
for the exposure time of the photograph.
We've got another one where the mother looks a bit like a carpet.
I mean it's really. There...
- That's not even a baby! - I know, it's a young girl.
- There is a whole class of these. - Yeah.
"Don't move, you bitch, don't move."
And you, Jason, definitely get the points there
- for having known about them. - It's terrifying. - They are rather peculiar.
It's brilliant though, there's hundreds
and they're all sinister, like, rather than just let the kid
- stand by itself, you've gone, "Go and stand with that ghost." - Yes.
- It's weird. - Well, the mother will be talking to the child,
saying, "It's all right, darling, sit still, I'm going to hold you."
The chair's talking!
"I am a sofa, ha-ha-ha!"
I'm afraid there's an even more macabre class of photograph.
Obviously, back in those days, infant mortality was very high
and families decided that it would be a good idea
to have a photograph of their dead child. And so they would be
as if asleep. We're not going to show them to you,
but there are lots of photographs of dead babies
made to look as if they're asleep.
- The Victorians were weird! - They were.
"I want to put a picture of my dead child on my mantelpiece.
"Then I'm going to drink some urine
"and pop my penis into this electrical thing."
Come to think of it, we beat ourselves up
for being a sort of morally corrupt generation.
SANDI: They used to take the hair of dead people
- and turn it into jewellery, didn't they? - Yes, they certainly did.
There was certainly a melancholy, macabre obsession with death.
Maybe it's not so much an obsession with death.
It's just that death was more present in people's lives.
You're quite right. We are probably amongst
the first generations of human beings ever,
most of whom have never seen a dead human body.
As it happens, I went to the body farm in Tennessee,
where I suddenly saw 200, never having seen a single one.
- SANDI: Sorry, the body farm? - It's called the body farm, yes.
Wow, we have the Body Shop, it's not quite the same thing.
No, it's forensic pathology, and they take bodies who volunteer,
and they're burnt and hidden in the trunks of cars.
- It's a study of decomposition. - They decompose.
A lot of murderers have been brought to book because of it,
because you've been able to prove they've been dead that long.
- SANDI: Where is this place? - In Tennessee.
You have the best holidays, honestly.
Did you hear about the auctioneer summoned to the big Scottish castle?
This is not a joke, by the way. But he was summoned
to a big Scottish castle, the lord had just died
and the family were selling off all the contents.
And he was looking around trying to find this hat stand,
and then finally he came across it and it was a German soldier.
And what had happened was that
the lord, or his ancestors, had been in the First World War
with his batman, who it was always supposed
- was a little more than his batman... - Right.
..who had looked over the trench and was shot by the Germans
on the other side, and this enraged the Scottish chap so much,
he ran across No-Man's Land, killed the German,
dragged him back to the British trenches,
sent him home with instructions
he be stuffed and used as a hat stand for the rest of time.
Only 80 years had elapsed, so it was as though,
his ancestors would still be around in Germany and they would...
and they had to go find them and say,
"Oh, did he have a dignified death?" "Not really, no."
LAUGHTER
- JASON: Umbrella in his mouth. - He's stood since 1917
in the hall of a Scottish castle, a stuffed German soldier.
That's not a bad idea when you die,
just to say, "Right, I'll be a hat stand now."
I'd do that, stand around the house.
SANDI: You could get a job in a photographer's, holding babies.
LAUGHTER
We have for you probably the first ever photograph of a human being,
which is rather exciting.
It's from the 1840s and it's by Louis Daguerre himself.
He took a photograph, in those days very long exposure,
and all the people who were there would have moved through as a blur,
you wouldn't have seen, but there is a boot boy
with a customer with his leg up as it were, and you can see that
and we can probably circle it for you and give it a little bit of a...
And that is the first human being,
or pair of human beings, ever photographed.
- It's rather wonderful, isn't it? - How long's he take doing them shoes then?
Yeah, I know. It's surprising.
- It was a ten-minute exposure, in fact. - Oh, OK.
That's not too bad then.
- It was in 1838, that's how long ago it was. - Wow.
And we have a photograph for you and you have to identify
who the person is in the photograph, which... Who's that?
Is that Bruce Forsyth?
- It's not Bruce Forsyth, no. - SANDI: In the early years.
It's quite surprising,
it's someone you would not imagine there would be a photograph of.
- OK. Can you give us a country? - He's British.
He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Oh, Prime Minister of Britain.
But he was from an Irish family. Actually the Duke of Wellington.
- Wow! Duke of Wellington. - Yeah. The victor of Waterloo.
As an old man. He looks surprisingly benign, considering his reputation.
- But isn't it amazing there is a photograph of him? - I had no idea.
- Yeah. It's rather fabulous. - That's a great picture.
- It is actually a lovely picture, isn't it? - It is, yeah.
Anyway, let's move onto something very, very different.
Name something interesting you can do with a Slinky.
- Well, it's a... - Well, you can't untangle it.
That's certainly... Oh, God, I got through so many as a child.
- They're the most, it is the most... - Wasn't it? Oh.
You go to the top of the stairs, and go, "Look at this, it's, oh, no!"
- And then that would be it, and your toy. - We've given you some stairs,
you can take your stairs and your Slinky out and demonstrate.
- Oh, wow. - There may be young people in the audience
- who've never had the excitement. - You're going to love this.
- You can attach it to your... - This is, I'm going back, look at that!
Yeah!
- Isn't that fun? - They're the best things.
Oh, dear, you may have pointed it in the wrong direction.
- I'm literally the happiest man in the world. - Brilliant.
Hey! That was a beauty.
But he invented this out of, he was a suspension designer, wasn't he?
He was a naval officer, his name is Richard James.
And it was in 194...
It's called the Alan Effect.
No! You don't do it like that.
You lift the top.
Somebody go and get him a Raleigh trike.
How can you not work a Slinky?!
How can you not do that?
Yeah!
APPLAUSE
Can you imagine giving this to a child now and going,
"That's it, that's your gift. Have a toy, happy Christmas."
JASON: Whatever you do, don't attach it to your electric jockstrap.
- No, absolutely. - Didn't he invent it by accident? - Yes.
He was making coiled springs and he invented...
He was an American naval officer and he literally knocked over
a spring, and it went for a walk, and he thought,
"Oh, that's interesting." And so he developed and he experimented
- and he came up with the Slinky. And more than... - Look, to be fair,
- it was his wife who thought it would make a good toy. - Yes, it's true.
Let us remember that sometimes women get overlooked in these things.
More than 300 million were sold, which is an incredible number.
All to me, because I kept breaking them.
Yeah, I know, because they tangle up. Now if you'll put them away...
Do you mind if I keep the stairs?
Because there's a few shelves in the kitchen that I still can't reach.
You're very welcome.
But what we do have is a very extraordinary effect that happens
if you drop a Slinky, which is that when you let go of it,
the bottom does not move.
Watch the film and you'll see what I mean.
It's actually really astonishing.
It's a very peculiar effect.
Watch the bottom of the Slinky, as it actually happens,
in very high speed camera.
- The bottom is completely still. Isn't that amazing? - Oh, wow.
- Wow! - That is a really bizarre effect.
And they can't really explain quite why that happens.
Oh, I bet James May could.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
"No, no, you see, the thing is..." Oh, God!
Is there a use for this discovery?
Maybe Jason's idea of crossing it with
the Heidelberg electric jockstrap
may result in a really quite remarkable experience.
- You'll see me on the next series of Dragons' Den. - Yeah.
"I have jettisoned wantonly, but it hasn't hit the floor."
It is a great phrase, wantonly to jettison, isn't it?
It really is marvellous. Anyway.
Now, we've got more toys to play with, so put the Slinky away.
I'm going to ask you, basically this simple question -
- why are jerries better than flimsies? - Jerry?
- When we say a jerry, there are jerries, jerry...? - Jerry cans.
Jerry cans. Jerry cans.
- And what were jerry cans? - Well, it's for petrol.
- It's a thing that was used in the war, wasn't it? - By whom?
Well, presumably by the Germans.
That's... We eventually used them, but firstly by the Germans.
And we had something else called the flimsy.
And unfortunately, the flimsy was absolutely cack.
But didn't the name give it away?
We only won the war by nicking all their ideas.
Yeah. On the left is a jerry can.
And there on the right is a flimsy.
And General Auchinleck, who was the predecessor of Montgomery
in the Eighth Army, actually said this about the flimsy. He said,
"The flimsy is an ill-constructed container for carrying fuel,"
he said, "leaked 30% of its fuel between base
"and consumer, with huge consequences in lost lives,
"battles and shipping."
So British soldiers basically spent their life
trying to steal the jerry can.
To the extent the Germans started booby-trapping them,
cos they knew that the British wanted to steal them,
cos they were the most desirable object, the jerry can.
I have two of them for you.
They are absolutely astonishing, incredible inventions.
Basically they're a single weld, like this.
They have this fabulous cap, they have an inner lining,
which means they can carry water or petrol.
This thing opens and what's called a "donkey dick" comes out.
- It was nicknamed the donkey dick. But rather cleverly... - So similar.
It's been a hell of a show for me, I tell you.
But even, I mean they have this little indentation here.
- What do you think that does? - Strength. - It strengthens it,
- but also in heat, it... - It allows it to expand. - It allows it to expand.
And the handles are absolute genius, because if you have two empty ones,
you can hold them together using the handles.
- One here... I'm going to stand up like so... - Standing.
So you simply hold them like that, using that, but also,
when you're holding it, you hand it to someone else, there's a handle.
- You simply take it, like that. - Oh, I see. - And they are...
Getting the donkey's dick out now, sir.
You won't be able to, it's really, really stiff.
APPLAUSE
God!
It's amazing! It's a real talent.
- I'm so sorry. How do I do it? - I don't know how you do it.
It's amazing. I love it.
But that is genuinely one of the most brilliant designs ever made.
- It's never been improved. - But they still lost. - They still did lose.
One of the reasons they lost is that by the end of the war,
we produced 21 million of the jerry cans, and I will quote
President Roosevelt, who said, "Without these cans, it would
"have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France
"at a lightning pace which exceeded even the German blitzkrieg of 1940."
So basically we won the war by stealing the Germans' jerry can,
because the movement of vehicles
and therefore of petrol, is absolutely essential in war.
- So is that where the word, so the word flimsy has come from that? - No.
- No. Flimsy existed as a word. - OK.
They were called flimsies because they were just so shite.
Oh, I see, right.
They were just square metal boxes that rotted and leaked
- and were useless. - OK.
And these designs were, I mean almost every aspect of them...
and not only that, they floated, which the British ones didn't do.
So the Germans could drop them at sea or in rivers,
I mean, they were kind of the iPod of the day,
they were just the most perfect design imaginable.
Anyway, can you name an everyday object that was invented in a jail?
- Not a glider. - You don't really use a glider every day, do you?
- Oh, you use one every day? - Yes, that's the point.
You're told to use it every day.
- Toothbrush. - Yes! Is the right answer.
I will be very impressed if you get the name of the man who invented it.
Mr Toothbrush.
- No, because... - Mr Oral B.
- Toothbrushes...! - LAUGHTER
- You're on the right lines. - Mr Wisdom.
- There are still toothbrushes... - Gibbs. - ..under this name.
- Addis. - Yes, Addis! Addis is the right answer.
- He was in prison? - He was in prison, it goes all the way back to 1780.
He was in prison for rioting, and he was expected to clean his teeth
using a piece of rag and some soot scraped off the back of a chimney.
So he decided a scaled down broom would be better.
So he got some pieces of bone from the food
and he drilled little holes in it
and managed to blag some horse hair off a warder
and made a toothbrush. And then...
You open the door and go,
"Warder, you haven't got any horse hair, have you?"
In those days, those prisons,
you were allowed to have your own money in prison and so on.
They often had horses working as warders. Ah.
"Do you have any horse hair?" HE SNORTS
There is that possibility.
On his release, he decided to market it,
it coincided with the arrival of sugar from the West Indies
and the rise of tooth decay and was a gigantic success.
And to this very day, toothbrushes are marketed
under the name of Addis, as you know.
SANDI: There's a connection between toothbrushes and prison,
because the great Dame Ethel Smyth, the wonderful composer...
- Who wrote... - ..who wrote The March of the Women for the suffragettes,
she was arrested, also for rioting, and she was taken to Holloway Prison.
And in order to support her, all the suffragettes came
and stood below her window and sang The March of the Women.
And she leant out and conducted with her toothbrush.
Oh, there you are. That is a very good connection. I like that.
APPLAUSE
What's the least promising invention in history?
Something that people thought wasn't going to be a success?
Yeah, least welcomed and then turned out to be most successful.
It wasn't the energy-saving light bulb?
Because that's one, that's an invention that for me...
- Yeah, but that's been forced upon us, hasn't it? - Yes.
And it's the worst invention.
- "I need this room to be light in about an hour." - Yeah.
I leave them on 24 hours a day so that I can read a book
when I go to bed at night.
This was invented by a man called Sylvan Goldberg,
but you wouldn't think of it as an invention
and yet I suppose it is, and it's the shopping trolley.
And men thought it was effeminate to walk around a shop
pushing a trolley, and women thought it was an insult
to their ability to carry a basket.
"Perfectly capable of carrying baskets, I don't need you to do it."
So he invented it in 1938, and for two years
he paid people basically just to wander round supermarkets.
Or the early shops wheeling them, so people got used to the sight of it.
- And then he died in 1984. - Did he pay them to wear those clothes?
Someone must have paid her to wear that outfit.
Sylvan Goldberg died in 1984 worth 400 million.
- That's a lot of pound coins. - So, he kept the...yes.
- Very good. - It's a lot of clogged canals, is what it is.
It's a lot of clogged canals as well, yes. So it did work.
Another example was bubble gum,
which was invented by a man called Frank Fleer in 1906.
He called it "Blibber-Blubber."
But unfortunately, his particular recipe meant that once
the bubble had burst, you had to use turpentine to get it off.
- Which is in itself toxic anyway. - JASON: That's brilliant.
So if you've ever got any form of gum, particularly nicotine gum...
- In your hair? - No, on the screen of an iPhone. - Oh, no. Is that...?
That's what I want an invention for, I've just decided.
If you get the gum on the front of an iPhone,
there is no way of removing it. Hammer, chisel.
There must be an app.
APPLAUSE
- The nicotine gum removal app. - Very good. Very good.
And I think Sandi will approve of this as well,
we ought to hear it for Mary Anderson. 1903.
- Ah, Mary Anderson. - Do you know about Mary Anderson? - I do.
- Tell me about her. - She invented the windscreen wiper.
You're absolutely, you are a fountain of...
Well, what I love about that is that it had to be a woman
who invented the windscreen wiper, because up until then
men had been going, "Don't be silly, dear, I can see perfectly well."
So, of course it was a woman who invented it.
Unfortunately, yes, she noticed tram drivers,
street car drivers, having to stop and move snow away
and she invented it in 1903,
and really there just weren't enough cars.
And by the time it was useful, her patent had elapsed,
- so she made not a cent from it. - Oh.
It's the same as Dorothy Levitt, who invented the rear-view mirror.
So women enabled you to see where you were going and where you'd been.
Oh, they did it to do their lipstick, come on.
Dorothy Levitt recommended that you take your compact mirror
and place it on the dash so that you could see behind you,
and she was the person who invented the rear-view mirror.
But again, she didn't make any money out of it,
because there was no patent available for it.
- I'm very impressed you knew about Mary Anderson. - Thank you very much.
And we should indeed pay due courtesy to her.
Anyway, you know how they used to have men with red flags
walking in front of cars?
- Well, yes. - Yes? - I've heard of such a thing.
- KLAXON BLARES - Oh!
LAUGHTER
- JASON: What a trick. - Because they never did.
No, they had a Red Flag Act, which was a little bit earlier.
And it meant, if you were in a steam...
See, he tricks you now. It doesn't feel like it's a question.
It feels like it's in the conversation.
It was a trap, it was a wicked trap, I'm very ashamed of myself.
So nobody ever had to follow a car?
I've seen a drawing of somebody doing it.
I know drawings aren't necessarily real.
I saw a drawing of a unicorn once.
The Red Flag Act of 1865
required men known as "stalkers" to walk 60 yards in front of a vehicle.
- 60 yards?! - Yes, carrying a red flag.
That's miles in front! "It's back there, it's coming."
- It lasted till 1878. - Any minute now.
So it was only relevant to traction engines and steam buses.
From 1878 to 1896 the flag was optional,
and in 1896 it was abolished.
By then there were no more than 80 cars in the UK.
So there was never a time when cars
were preceded by red flags in the UK.
There was never a time, yeah. But talking of useless inventions,
What about the dry-ear ear dryer?
It's a machine to dry your ears. OK.
"Drying your ears has never been simpler or more effective,
"the device blows hot air into your ear."
Although the instructions advise you to dry your ears first with a towel.
- Is this contemporary, this is modern? - Yes, it's a real invention.
- All you need is a tube, don't you? - But it's modern? - Modern, yeah.
- You just need a tube. - Yeah. Or a hairdryer would do the job.
You don't even need that, Stephen, you just need a tube.
- But most people have hairdryers. - Yeah, but a tube, just a tube!
A tube would do it. I know, you're right.
JASON: Have you ever invented something that's already invented?
I've done that a few times. I invented the bike once.
And, erm, yeah, I saw someone on a unicycle and genuinely went,
"That'd be brilliant with two wheels."
I also invented glasses as well when I was at school.
- Really? - Yeah, I was doing some geography and so I had the map out.
I had a ruler and a pencil and I had to have a magnifying glass,
and I couldn't do all three at the same time. I was thinking,
"What'd be really good is some sort of magnifying device,
"but attached to your face."
It was a genuine "Eureka" moment, and I thought, "Oh, no, that's glasses."
Anyway, here's a marvellous question,
what was wrong with the first sound recording device?
Didn't work? Didn't have any speakers?
Well, it was that it recorded sound perfectly well...
- But you couldn't play it back. - Yes. - Play it back.
You couldn't play it back. A man called Martinville,
he was a Frenchman,
he used burnt soot and it registered sound waves on it.
But they sort of scratched it out, didn't they?
But recently it was reverse engineered and engineers
managed to get the sound back of him singing Au Clair de la Lune.
Is that the thing they played on Radio 4 and Charlotte Green
- cried with laughter, was it? - Would you like to hear that moment?
It was one of my favourite moments of all time.
Unfortunately, she had to announce the death of Abby Mann
and she couldn't help corpsing, bless her.
So listen to this, because you'll hear the oldest-ever sound recording
plus the unfortunate event that followed.
CHARLOTTE GREEN: 'American historians have discovered what they think
'is the earliest recording of the human voice, made on a device
'which scratched sound waves onto paper blackened by smoke.
'It was made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison first demonstrated
'the gramophone, and featured an excerpt from a French song,
'Au Clair de la Lune.'
DISTORTED WARBLING
WARBLING CONTINUES
SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'The... the award-winning screenwriter,
'Abby Mann, has died at the age of 80.' Oh, no.
'He won an Academy award in 1961 for Judgment at Nuremberg.
'Excuse me, sorry.
'Abby Mann also won several Emmys, including...'
SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'Including one in 1973 for...
'For a film which featured a...'
SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'A police detective called...'
SHE LAUGHS UNCONTROLLABLY
'The character, on whom a long-running TV series
'was eventually based.'
Charlotte Green's great contribution.
There's somebody in the corner of the room going...
HE WARBLES
"We haven't got it, we're going to have to go with the item anyway.
"I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, I know what it sounds like."
HE WARBLES
"They'll never know, they'll never know. Don't laugh."
HE WARBLES
- So this one you could record into it, but then nobody could hear it? - Yes.
Could you not just get that for Jedward, like, for their next album?
- They have a lovely day out, that's fine. - Everything would be perfect.
- Nobody has to suffer. - You're right. You're absolutely right.
OK, so now we're going to go for a jolly jape,
and I have an extraordinary pendulum swing that my friends here
are going to bring on and I'm going to show you a remarkable action.
It's handmade by our chief science elf, Will Bowen,
who's a bit of a genius, and it's an effect that was first noted
by Galileo, that's how old it is. But you don't see many of these
and I think it would make a great executive toy.
So I'm going to lay this down here,
and push it and let go.
And it will start to go in this rather beautiful...
- Look at that, isn't that lovely? - Oh, wow.
But, it's better than that, because then it starts to get a bit,
get a bit ordinary.
And then it starts to move into a different sort of rhythm
and then they start to get in step, like that.
Ooh, look at that, they're starting to move together again.
But then something really amazing happens as well,
which is they go back into their wave formation,
which is about to happen.
It's a whole long process, but it's utterly predictable
and it follows very specific laws of physics.
And here it goes back into its waves again.
Look at that.
I think that's pretty amazing, isn't it?
APPLAUSE
And it will carry on doing that, and as you can see,
it will carry on going through those cycles behind us,
and it's a principle, as I say, that Galileo worked out.
The central bob makes 60 swings in a minute.
The one to its left does 59 in 60 seconds, and so on.
And it means after one minute they're back to where they started.
It doesn't matter how far you push a pendulum,
it still takes the same amount of time
to swing from one side to the other.
And it's using that that makes it go in and out of sync
in these different ways. There it is. It's the Galileo Pendulum
and wouldn't it make a great executive toy?
Well, that's all the inventions we've got time for this week,
except of course for the scores.
And believe me, these are not invented,
much as though people may believe it, the scores are rigorously
and scientifically worked out.
And in first place, with an extraordinary plus 13,
is Sandi Toksvig.
Wow!
APPLAUSE
And only ten points behind in second place with plus three,
- Jeremy Clarkson. - A plus!
APPLAUSE
Why am I clapping?
And very impressive from Jason Manford, with plus two! Wow!
I don't know how I got that.
APPLAUSE
And I'm afraid the smallest swing of the pendulum, minus eight,
Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
And that's all from Jason, Jeremy, Sandi, Alan and me.
Thank you, be extremely kind to each other for ever and good night.