1227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off – Free Download PDF

• Title: 1227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off
  
• Writer : John Lloyd, John Mitchinson & James Harkin
  
• Publication Date: —
• Format: PDF
• Introduction: 

I am no poet but, if you think for yourselves as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.  -MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867)

Michael Faraday was one of the greatest scientists in history and the greatest experimentalist of them all. The son of a village blacksmith from a desolate part of Cumbria, he left school at 14 with only the most rudimentary education, and taught himself everything he knew by reading the books that passed through his hands during his seven-year apprenticeship to a London bookbinder.

At QI, we think a great deal of Michael Faraday, and we’re not the only ones. Albert Einstein kept a picture of him on his study wall, alongside Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell.

Like Faraday, we read a lot of books – on any and every conceivable subject, and the more madly random the better.
None of us claim to have an ounce of Faraday’s genius, but all three of us, despite the fact that we each went to university (43, 31 and 16 years ago respectively), count ourselves as essentially self-educated.

We have achieved this together over the last ten years by applying the QI Research Method, which can be expressed in a single line. It is to ‘read all of anything (even the footnotes) but only write down what you, personally, find interesting’. This not only reduces, by several orders of magnitude, the essentially infinite amount of available information in the universe, but it also has the delightful side effect that we really do ‘learn something new every day’….