Eleanor's Little Book of Interesting Facts Part 1

When my daughter was a little girl and I was putting her to bed I would say "Jump into bed quick and I will tell you an interesting fact" My idea was to make knowledge the bribe so she would discover the pleasure of knowledge for it's own sake.

I think it worked and that she is a bright, clever, enquiring sort of person, as well as being good looking. When I told her that she said, "Dad, you're my father, you're supposed to think that, it doesn't mean it's true". What more proof could you require than such an astute observation?

These are a selection of the facts; they were told to her at all sorts of ages but date mainly from the later years, firstly because they were more recent and I recall them better, secondly a lot of the earlier facts were very short and simple.

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Sometimes facts change as I go along---

One night I said to her "You know that there are three states of being, solid liquid and gas. Like when water is very cold it is ice, a bit warmer it turns into water, then hot and it turns to steam. Most things go through those three states but some, like iodine, deliquesce, that means that they go straight from a solid to a gas and miss out the liquid bit. "What is iodine?" Ellie asked.

It's an element in a group called the halogens, a very useful group of chemicals that react with all sorts of things to make lots of useful compounds. From the most reactive to the least reactive they are fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine." And then in response to her next question about iodine, "Yes it condenses straight back to a solid again."

That was a fact that got carried away with itself, I started off intending to tell her that glass, at normal room temperature, is a liquid, but a very viscous one, explain what viscous meant, and tell her about panes of glass in very old churches which have run over the centuries so that the top is thinner than the bottom. I went back to that another night, that night we got into the way things joined chemically make something completely new and different, like chlorine and sodium making salt.

Since then I have heard the glass thing is a myth, glass is so viscous and old time glass making so inaccurate it would be just as likely to find the top thicker than the bottom and that plasma, which I thought of as de-ionised gas, should be seen as another state of being; I don't know. At the bedside facts come straight from my head, I can't go looking things up. Of course I wouldn't tell Ellie a deliberate lie, but I don't check, so don't depend on me.

This next one is not apocryphal (A word from Greek meaning "from false writings"), I checked in the dictionary before I put Ellie to bed.

"In France there is a city called Nimes. The people of Nimes discovered a way of weaving cotton cloth so that it is very strong. The cloth became well known and was called cloth of Nimes. In time the cloth bit got dropped and it became "Of Nimes" a bit like "A Wilton" might describe a particular sort of carpet in English. In French the word for "of" is "de", this got joined on to the Nimes bit and it became denimes, which became denim. Denim is not the only type of cloth to get its name from a city, damask, a sort of heavy cotton embroidered on both sides with silk and used for old fashioned tablecloths, originated in Damascus.

That day we had been shopping and Ellie got her first pair of proper jeans.

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Remember the fact about denim? I asked her. One good fact leads to another and talking about names reminded me---

"Most cheeses are named after the place where they are made, Cheddar from Cheddar where the Gorge is, Gloucester from Gloucestershire and so on. but not Stilton. Stilton cheese was made in the West Country but the farmer who made it lived next to the stagecoach route and used to put it on the coach to be taken to a big coaching inn he sold it to in Stilton. They found it very popular and bought his entire output so, although the cheese was not made in Stilton, that was where it came from as far as the people who bought it were concerned and that became its name.

If you go on too long following a train of thought like this it gets boring, better to make a break and come back to the subject later

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Alexander The Great has an epithet like no-one else. Titles like "The Pious" and "The Good" just aren't in the same class; I can't even remember the first names that go with them, so one night I told Ellie---.

"Phillip was king of Macedonia about 2,300 years ago and had a son called Alexander, when Alexander was about sixteen some horse traders from a place called Thesselay came to his fathers court. Thesselay was a country of grassy plains famous for its horses; maybe it was where the idea of the Mark in Middle Earth comes from. One of the horses they brought with them was a beautiful black stallion; the king wanted this horse but it would not let anyone ride it, as soon as they tried to mount it threw them.

Disappointed Phillip turned to go away and saw Alexander stood at the back of the crowd of men muttering, as boys do when they disagree with their elders. As fathers do he asked him if he thought he could do what grown men couldn't. Alexander said "yes" so his father told him to try and that he would buy the horse for him if he could ride it, I don't know if he said what would happen if he couldn't, but, of course, he did. Walking up to the horse the boy took the bridal turned the horse round and mounted. What Alexander had noticed was that the horse had his back to the sun and the change in the shape of his shadow as the man mounted was spooking him.