Popular Misconceptions

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.

The title for this post comes from the ‘list of facts’ email that I’ve been slowly dissecting. One of these supposed ‘facts’ is simply that:

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

I’ve not been able to find any argument either way on this one, which might be down the vagueness of the statement. What does it mean that women can hear better? That they can make out sound at lower volumes than men? That they can better distinguish sounds? That they can recognise different types of noises more easily? This field of science, of cognitive perceptions of the senses, is pretty complicated, and I’d be surprise if either of these two claims could be easily answered, one way or the other.

Perhaps a more interesting question is how this claim arose, and why has it spread? Is it something to do with our ongoing fascination as to the differences between the sexes, and the mystery of what this differences might mean? Maybe that Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus book has a lot to answer for.

If you have any further ideas, or research, on this apparently popular misconception, post a comment below…

Next on the list of ‘well i never’ facts that I’m looking at is a claim over the amount of Monopoly money printed:

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

I couldn’t find any existing research already online as to whether this or true, so have attempted some rough estimations using available figures below. On face value it does, however, seem initially plausible that Monopoly prints more money than the treasury. After all, Monopoly money is clearly worth far less than real money, whatever the currency.

There’s probably a few similar type claims you could make about toy and board game manufacturing. Lego have long claimed, for instance, to be the world’s largest producer of rubber tyres - if you count them by number - at 306 million per year (see their company profile 2006 [PDF]). I can invent a few more, which may or may not turn out to be true:

• Cluedo produces more sections of lead piping than all the plumbing firms put together
• If you added together all the sets of Risk owned by everyone in the world, it would be the world’s biggest army.
• Rubber ducks are manufactured at a faster rate than natural duck breeding.
• The world’s most mass-produced clothing line was for a Barbie doll

Clearly, the amusing and surprising element in all of these types of facts is the way that toy manufactures seem to be about to out-produce big established industries. In reality of course, its only down to the fact that the toy versions are so much smaller.

Back to the Monopoly question. The official Monopoly website has a list of fun Monopoly facts, including the following:

The total amount of money in a standard MONOPOLY® game is $15,140.

Over 250 million sets of the MONOPOLY® game have been sold worldwide.

Monopoly was first launched in 1935 (and depicting the American Atlantic City, not London, as people in the UK might assume). So if you multiply $15,140 by 250 million, divide that by the 71 years that the Monopoly game has been selling (the Monopoly fact page is dated at 2006), and we get a very rough average of $146 million worth of Monopoly money printed a day.

How about the US Treasury then? Well their currency production faq page has the following answer to the ‘How much paper currency does the Treasury Department print every day?’ question:

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) … [produce] approximately 37 million currency notes each day with a face value of about $696 million, and 45 percent of these notes are the $1 denomination. About 95 percent of the currency notes printed each year are used to replace notes that are already in circulation.

So, on these estimations, the US treasury prints almost five times more money (by face value) per day than is printed for Monopoly (which is used across the world).

Of course, the figures I’ve based this estimation on might now be wildy out, but even so, Monopoly has some catching up to do.

If you think you can do a better calculation - let me know in the comments below!

Incidentally, you can now, if you so wish, print your own Monopoly money.