Popular Misconceptions

An e-mail I received contained the following in a list of amazing facts:

Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter “A”?
A. One thousand

Basically, the fact points out the somewhat trivial observation that if you spell out all the numbers in plain english, in order, you don’t find the letter ‘A’ until you get to the number 1000:

1 - one
2 - two
3 - three
4 - four
5 - five
…
1000 - one thousAnd

The first thing any pedant would point out, is that this would only be true of English, or more precisely, standard English and standard spelling.

A more obvious response though, if you both to start to figure out the answer in your head, is that a much lower number than 1000 seems to contain an ‘A’: ‘one hundred and one’. Why doesn’t this count? It’s a good question, and the only possible retort is unbelievably pedantic:

The “and” is only used in naming numbers by placing it between a whole number and a fraction. For example 3 and 1/4. 101 is correctly written and spoken as “one hundred one”. (Taken from Yahoo! Answers but also given as a reason on numerous other pages)

This quote suggests that the ‘one hundred one’ usage is more correct, but notions of ‘correctness’ in language are notoriously misconceived. There’s no one authority telling people how they should and shouldn’t pronounce certain numbers, after all, language is governed by consensus, and even then there’s room for divergences (accents, dialects, and so on). Even if you replace ‘correctly’ in the quote with ‘more standardly’, it’s still patently wrong. Just about everyone would naturally say ‘one hundred and one’ rather than the cumbersome sounding ‘one hundred one’. The only exception might be in scientific or mathematical fields, but even there it’s more likely that numbers are written down and infrequently read out.

So, this is yet another popular misconception, and rather a boring one at that. After all, is it really all that significant that the letter A isn’t used in the standard spelling of the standard way of pronouncing numbers until you reach either 101 or 1000? One the surface it’s surprising, because that’s a lot of words, and ‘A’ is relatively frequent, but in speaking numbers you’re pretty much using the same words over and over again. In fact, with just 34 words, you can count all the way up to 1,000,000,000,000,000. Here’s the list of words, with the number indicating the point at which they’re first used:

1 - one
2 - two
3 - three
4 - four
5 - five
6 - six
7 - seven
8 - eight
9 - nine
10 - ten
11 - eleven
12 - twelve
13 - thirteen
14 - fourteen
15 - fifteen
16 - sixteen
17 - seventeen
18 - eighteen
19 - nineteen
20 - twenty
30 - thirty
40 - forty
50 - fifty
60 - sixty
70 - seventy
80 - eighty
90 - ninety
100 - hundred
101 - and
1000 - thousand
1000000 - million
1000000000 - billion
1000000000000 - trillion
1000000000000000 - quadrillion

(This is using the American style of numbering)

From this you can see that the letter ‘m’ isn’t used until we reach a million, the letter ‘b’ isn’t used until a billion, and the letter ‘q’ isn’t used until a quadrillion. By this point, you might think we’ve used all 26 letters of the English alphabet, but no, there’s still 5 unused. Of these, ‘p’ gets used in ’septillion (that’s 10²⁴, in case you didn’t know), ‘c’ gets used in ‘octillion’ (that’s 10²⁷) and ‘z’ can arguably be said to have been used in ‘zero’, but that still leaves j and k as unused. Sadly, there seems to be no ‘jillion’ or ‘killion’ numbers yet invented.

So there we go - not only have we dubunked a fairly trivial ‘fact’, we’ve also discovered a load of new ones. Interesting? Not hugely, but there we go…

An e-mailed ‘list of facts’ I received a while back (which I’ve been slowly deconstructing), contained the following claim:

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If
the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural ! causes.

This was one of the ‘facts’ in the e-mail that I’d already heard claimed several times before, by friends, and I think I can even recall it being debated on a TV show.

A quick Google brings up loads of web pages where the issue has been debated, and thoroughly debunked. My favorite is an ‘Ask Yahoo’ feature from back in 2001, where one ‘Larry’ from North Carolina asked whether the claim was true. The anonymous agony aunt style Yahoo! response outlines their findings, which they clearly also found through Googling (or Yahooing, I suppose). Here’s their conclusion:

While this statue code is oft-repeated and garners support from various sources, the stone cold truth is that the facts don’t support it.

The Yahoo gives as its first reference a link to the Snopes.com article Statue of Limitations, which is worth a read for its comprehensiveness, listing no less than 20 equestrian statues and their various positions.

I found another blog article, Horse Hooves and Myths, which also does a through deconstruction.

Finally, in perhaps the ultimate test of notoriety for a popular misconception, the Wikipedia article on Equestrian Sculpture has a section on the subject.

Of course, it’s fairly to debunk this misconception. The harder question is how it arose, and why it has been so popular. Here we can only guess. Perhaps the latter is answered by the way that this ‘fact’ seems to present us with a hidden piece of knowledge, a secret code hidden in statues, perhaps even a virtual ‘easter egg’ kept up by successive generations of horse statue sculptors. The Snopes article referenced above goes along with this idea, and even points to a similar (albeit less popular) misconception:

The crossing of the legs and/or arms of the effigies of certain Knights indicates that they were Crusaders and the number of crusades in which they took part.

The article also reminds us, that, for the horse statue myth at least, the probably of it being true by chance for any one statue is precisely one in three, a probability easily high enough to sustain the misconception.

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence as to exactly where the the horse statue myth originally came from - my guess is that it’s probably fairly old, possibly centuries, passed on orally from person to person. Alternatively, it could quite easily have arisen in a few places independently.

This mathematical equation appeared within the ‘list of facts’ e-mail I received a while back. Whilst many of the others have so far turned out to be popular misconceptions, this one is demonstrably true (it would have been fairly foolish to get it wrong!).

Whilst it might initially seem surprising that 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 - perhaps you might even wonder how such a mathematical oddity could exist - when you stop and think about it, the equation is less of a co-incidence than you might think.

Let’s look at the sequence of squaring ever longer strings of 1s:

1 x 1 = 1

11 x 11 = 121

111 x 111 = 12,321

1,111 x 1,111 = 1,234, 321

You can guess the rest…

Why should this be? Well it’s easier to see if you do the maths the high school way:

  111   x
  111
-----
  111
 111
111
=====
12321

Does that take the mystery out of it?

If you try 1,111,111,111² then the pattern is slightly messed up, as the middle number is forced to carry (although most calculators won’t show this, so you’ll have to do it on paper). However, if you want to try using base 11 or higher…

One of the items in a ‘list of facts’ e-mail I received a while ago contained this lesser-known claim to the history of the four suited kings in a pack of standard playing cards:

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king in history:
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs - Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

As usual, I’ve trawled the internet for existing refutations or confirmations of this supposed truth. It didn’t take too long to realise that the history of playing cards is pretty complicated, and disputed. Probably the best introduction to this subject comes from a essay titled The Introduction of Playing-Cards to Europe, which warns:

The history of playing-cards in Europe has been subject to a good deal of misinformation. You should evaluate all information about this subject cautiously because of this.

That essay, and the Wikipedia entry on Playing Cards, date the origin of playing cards to the 9th Century, in China. Whilst China is fairly geographically opposite from the domains of the kings listed above, playing cards clearly went on to circumvent the globe, getting adapted and changed along the way.

Even though we know that the original origin of the kings on playing cards cannot have represented David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of their identities having been assigned later. Looking into it, it’s not too hard to find scans of old cards with the four king’s names printed on them - see the Courts on Playing Cards webpage, for example.

The Wikipedia page on King (playing card) suggests that the David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar King combo were the traditionally-assigned personalities for the ‘French deck’, which was subsequently adopted in the UK due to the manufacture of playing cards being illegal in the UK during the Interregnum.

This explanation is the same as the one given on the Snopes.com page on The Four King Truth. On their comprehensive page (last updated 7 February 1999), they summarise that:

The assignation of identities to the kings (as well as the queens and knaves) was a temporary practice unique to French card masters that began around the mid-15th century, was not standardized for some time, and was discontinued at the end of the 18th century.

In conclusion, the Snopes article states that the ‘four kings truth’ is false, and that ‘the royal figures on modern playing cards no more represent specific persons than do the kings and queens in chess sets’.

That falsification didn’t seem quite so strong to me. Whilst the kings, queens and jacks in the picture cards don’t seem to have arisen with any particular historic figures in mind (clearly they’re there for the sake of the game rather than purely for symbolic reference), the connection with kings David, Charlemagne, Alexandar and Ceasar does seem to genuinely go back at least some way.

So perhaps it’s half true then?

One of the tidbits of information on a ‘list of facts’ that I was e-mailed at working is the following claim:

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer

A few minutes of Googling reveals dozens of web-pages on which this claim is repeated, but dozens more on which it is refuted, and it doesn’t take long to get to what looks like the most likely truth.

Tom Sawyer, or rather The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to give it its full name, was written in 1876 by Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Having worked as a typesetter, he was apparently a keen collector of new inventions, and thus one of the first to purchase a rudimentary typewriter.

Unusually enough, for a popular misconception, this claim seems to have arisen from the source itself, with Mark Twain having said:

I have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes. I will now claim - until dispossessed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in ‘72, the rest of it in ‘74. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ‘74, so I concluded it was that one.

That machine was full of caprices, full of defects - devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues.

(Source: [Mark Twain] and the Typewriter).

All of which would seem to be a fairly straightforward claim, although is as quoted in a newspaper advert for a typewriter.

However, it seems that academic opinion is that Mark Twain remembered it wrong. He was the author of the first novel written on a typewriter, it seems, but with Life on the Mississippi instead. (This counter-claim is widely credited to historian Darryl Rehr, who cites ‘careful research by Twain historians’)

Another blogger, David Peterson, summarised the same conclusion
, and also put together this neat timeline:

• 1874 - Clemens purchases his first typewriter for $125. His first two letters are written on December 9th, 1894.
• 1875 - Clemens writes to Remington declaring he is no longer using his typewriter as people keep asking him about it. In another letter he declares it is corrupting his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives it away twice that year and it is eventually returned both times.
• 1876 - ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ is published.
• 1883 - ‘Life on the Mississippi’ is submitted as a typewritten manuscript. Clemens did not actually type it himself, however. He dictated it based on a hand-written original draft.
• 1904 - Clemens writes in his ‘Unpublished Autobiography’ that he believes ‘Tom Sawyer’ was probably his first typewritten novel, dictated to a typist sometime during 1874.[1]

So there we have it.

Amusingly, when this question was posed at Yahoo! Answers, ‘Tom Sawyer’ was chosen as ‘best answer’, rather than the correct one, which just goes to show the power of a popularly repeated misconception. More amusingly still is this rather pedantic answer by seeinred06:

There was never a novel written on a typewriter. You don’t write on a typewriter, you type on one.

I’ve done a bit of research on this, and so far have found no strong evidence either proving or disproving this. I could simply say that the burden of proof should rest on the people making this claim, but that’s perhaps a bit of a cop out.

The most interesting response to this mystery is on an ‘ezine @rticles’ page, ‘Why Do Smart People Have More Zinc and Copper in Their Hair?’ by Lance Winslow, who starts by suggesting that this is a ‘commonly known fact’ (which always makes me suspicious):

If a pilot, soldier or racecar driver put copper and zinc in their helmet would that help make them smarter or is it from the body discharging the heavy metals easily from the body that makes the brain work better. If so, if you reduced you zinc and copper in your blood thru filtration, could you increase cognition? Are some blood types, which filter better causing this? Thus certain blood types are the cause of more intelligence and not necessarily the zinc or copper its self? Think on this in 2006.

Sounds a bit mad if you ask me, but that’s the internet for you.

Another website claimed that this is the cause of a blonde myth:

A silly story often ciculates that Intelligent People have more Zinc and Copper in their hair. Brown and Red is a Copper Color, so this explains why blondes are dumb? This myth is ridiculous.

Indeed.

Finally, the question of whether this ‘factoid’ is true or not was put to the community of student.com, with the response that 141 people (40%) thought it was true, and 211 (60%) thought it was false. They do claim that the ‘answer’ is that it is true, but then they could have just read that somewhere else on the internet.

So overall, this is so far inconclusive, rather annoyingly.

The case continues.

I’ve had a request from a reader to look into what could turn out to be a popular misconception. The question that they put to me was whether it is really true, as some people believe, that fridges and freezers are ‘more energy efficient’ when full?

I guess, in part, this comes down to what is meant by ‘energy efficient’, but the crux of the issue is whether it’s true that a full fridge or freezer uses more electricity than one pretty much empty. If so, this would seem to be counter intuitive (which is probably why the notion has spread, it has the ’surprising’ factor). After all, you’d reason, it takes longer to boil a full kettle than a one-cup-full kettle, and longer to freeze a big joint of meat than a tray of small ice cubes.

I can see some possible truth in the idea that a full freezer will, once cooled to the temperature on the thermostat, be less prone to suddenly warming up when you open the door than an empty freezer. But this is surely simply because opening a freezer door exposes it to a certain amount of heat, and with a full freezer this heat will be spread out amongst a bigger surface area of frozen foods. It must still have taken more energy in the first place to freezer the larger amount of food.

If my science is completely off, let me know.

Energy efficiency is a complicated issue (probably), and whilst I want to keep this blog on-topic to the discussion of popular misconceptions, it’d be good to get to the bottom of this question.

A related topic that I’ll return to in the future, which I also suspect could be a popular misconception, is the amount of electricity that appliances uses when on standby. Because I’ve heard people claim that it can be as high as 90% of the amount used when on full power, which can’t possibly be true, surely?

An e-mailed ‘list of facts’ which I received a few weeks back (and have been slowly going through here) contained the following claim:

The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000

Unfortunately, unlike some of the other ‘facts’ I’ve looked at so far, I’ve neither been able to verify nor disprove this one. As a simple statistic, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out, but that does require some good data (and a better head for maths than I’ve probably got).

Can you help?

The inclusion of this ‘fact’ within the e-mail circulated fact lists seems to be as much about the joy of making people try it for themselves as it is about anything else (and I bet you have a go whilst reading this!).

It is, of course, pretty tricky (as you’ll find), but by no means impossible. If you have a long tongue, or just flexible arms (or more grimly, a dislocated shoulder), you may just be able to manage it. There’s even plenty of videos on YouTube doing just such a demonstration:

The Guinness World Records organisation have even had the following statement on their website before:

Contrary to popular urban legend, it is quite possible to lick your own elbow. Guinness World Records receives about five claims a day for this and we would like to stress the following point: being able to lick your own elbow is not, in any sense, a world record.

If you’re one of the admittedly rare few who can lick your elbow, save it for the water cooler. Please don’t email us!

Of course, if you have a super-long tongue � longer than the current tongue world record � then we’ll be happy to get our tape measure out!

(The page is no longer on their website, but you can see an archived version of it from Jan 2006.)

Amusingly, this seems to be quite a popular internet topic. At the time of writing, Google estimates 369,000 results for lick own elbow…

If you can do it (or if you tried and failed), post your amusing story below. (Oh and I’m not responsible for any injuries you might sustain whilst attempting it).

I’ve been looking at a ‘list of facts’ e-mail sent to me at work. Most of the outlandish claims in it have so far proven to be false. This is perhaps the ‘fact’ that has been easiest to disprove however:

Coca-Cola was originally green.

A quick Google search instantly reveals a page on the Coca-cola Company’s website denying the rumour. In barely two lines of text, they say:

This is indeed just a rumor. Although the famous contour bottle is green, Coca-Cola has always been brown in color, since its start in 1886.

The rumour could perhaps be a confusion of the other common conception that the Coca-Cola ‘father Christmas’ figure used in early adverts wore a green coat. I’ll be looking at histories of this particular story in more detail at a later date.