Popular Misconceptions

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.

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.

To start this blog off, I’ve been going through a list of list of ‘facts’ that has been circulating by e-mail. Third on the list is the apparent piece of trivia that:

The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV was Fred and Wilma Flintstone

A quick search shows that this bit of information has been repeated hundreds of times across the internet. Whether it’s true or not is harder to ascertain. There are few qualifiers missing from the statement. It presumably refers to American TV, and prime-time presumably the bulk of the evening. Nevertheless, the main message of the story, that couples weren’t originally shown to share the same bed on TV, is true.

The novelty of early movies and television, and their ability to appeal to large audiences, did cause great concern to the authorities, who were quick to impose rules of censorship. This was true in both America and Britain, although different systems of censorship arose. In America, The Motion Picture Association even went so far as to write a ‘code’, which explicitly defined what was and wasn’t permitted. Although this had somewhat dubious legal right of enforcement, the ideas within the code were largely followed, by the film and television industries. (Incidentally, I’ve often heard it reported that the code specified that if a man and woman were shown in the same bed together, they must each be seen to have one foot on the floor! However, as I can’t find any evidence of this so far, I’m wondering whether this might, too, be a popular misconception.)

The full text of the 1927 Code includes showing ‘man and woman in bed together’ as being something over which ’special care be exercised’. The revised 1930 code suggests that ‘the treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy’.

It was this context that caused early American sitcoms and dramas to show husband and wives sleeping in separate beds, odd as this may seem today.

The question of this post, though, is whether Fred and Wilma Flintstone really were the first to break this taboo? Well, the Flintstones originally aired on ABC, in ‘prime time’, from 1960-1966. And it seems that Fred and Wilma were shown to share a bed (presumably made of rock, in ‘Bedrock’). But the Internet consensus (whatever that’s worth) suggests that they weren’t, in fact, the first.

Instead, it appears that this liberal distinction goes instead to Mary Kay and Johnny, which aired between 1947 and 1950. Indeed, this is said to be the very first sitcom, which came so early in television’s history that it had to be broadcast live, as there was no easy way to pre-record it. According to a snopes.com’s page, they shared a bed, and a single one at that! The page goes on to ask why this was, when so many of the sitcoms that followed it had separated sleeping arrangements.

How do we explain this lack of the squeamishness about bedroom (if not bathroom) functions that was soon manifested in the television industry? Who knows? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the show was on Dumont, that it was live, or that in those days the production of shows was financed by sponsors rather than by the networks. Perhaps the medium was just too new for anyone to have grown uptight about such concerns yet. All that matters is that Mary Kay and Johnny were there first.

Whilst there appears to be no recorded evidence for this, enough people seem to have remembered it for it to be considered true.

Still, The Flintstones can still claim to have been the first animated show to depict a couple in bed together on prime time television. Although, as the first animated prime time show full stop, it did have a slight head start.

So why is this such a popular misconception? I guess this it’s down to the surprise factor marriage bed-sharing being such a late phenomenon to arrive on TV, and the sheer joyous triviality of The Flintstones having apparently been the first to cross this moral boundary.