Just the Job QI

Gooooooooooood evening, good evening, good evening,

good evening, good evening, good evening

and welcome to an episode of QI that's all about inventions

and discoveries, in fact anything that's "just the job".

They say that the greatest of all inventors is accident.

With that in mind, let's meet the tremendously timely, Jason Manford.

APPLAUSE

The consistently coincidental, Jeremy Clarkson.

APPLAUSE

The stupefyingly serendipitous Sandi Toksvig.

APPLAUSE

And an accident waiting to happen, Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

So, let's hear your Alexander Graham Bells.

Jason goes...

OLD-FASHIONED PHONE RINGS

-It's all right.

-Jeremy goes...

Is it going to be a car horn?

MODERN PHONE RINGS

-No.

-Surprising. Sandi goes...

I want something trim.

ELECTRONIC PHONE RINGS

Good guess. And Alan goes...

MUSIC: "Ride Of The Valkyries" By Wagner

Oh.

Oh.

-I could listen to this for ever.

-He loves this one.

It's a 14 and a half hour...

-Orgasm.

-It's a Wagner ring tone.

Isn't that wonderful? I could listen to that for ever.

Anyway, so, let's begin with an interesting question.

What were chainsaws originally invented for?

Proctology.

-Wow! That's scary.

-SANDI: Yeah, that's a...

-Slicing an arse in half.

-Yeah.

-Well, do you know, you were in the right area.

-SANDI: Really?

-I have to say. I mean...

-Circumcision.

What I mean is, you began straight away with medicine.

You didn't say trees or, you know, cutting down, you know, buildings.

-Oh, cutting off legs.

-So, like bones and...

Bones is the right answer.

Yes, in particular it was a rather unpleasant procedure.

Oh, don't, it'll be a boy thing against a girl thing. It will be.

-Well, not against, in order to...

-Well no, no, but it...

It was doctors trying to help.

Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is.

It'll be a boy thinking a woman's taking far too long over labour

going, "Oh, I can't stand all that panting, I know,

"we'll get a chain saw and just cut that baby out." That's what it is.

Do you know, you're absolutely right.

APPLAUSE

Oh, my God!

It was in...it was in 1783.

That's no excuse.

It was two Scots doctors called John Aitken and James Jeffrey,

and it was called a symphysiotomy and it was a procedure

to widen the pelvis if the baby's head was too large to pass through.

Oh, can you hear the high tone of all those sighs in the audience?

-What I like about this picture...

-It's a bit eye-watering.

It's a ladies' ward, so of course there is some baking going on

-on the left-hand side.

-Yes.

Oh, that's right, there is.

A little cake display case of buns in the oven, Stephen,

-you see what I did there.

-Buns in the oven!

-They didn't really, darling?

-I'm afraid they did.

When I say chain saw, it was literally a chain,

-it was like a watch chain in fact.

-Ah, right.

-It was an up and down...

JASON: So it wasn't a full lumberjack giving it...

IMITATES CHAIN SAW NOISE ..it's a boy!

They hadn't yet invented the internal combustion engine.

And caesarean sections, they were...

-Caesarean sections have replaced the same idea, that the...

-Phew.

Yes, quite, exactly. It's a bit of a relief.

It would have been easier to do the caesarean section, I think.

Sawing the pelvic bone in half is not as easy as maybe just

-a small incision in...

-I know, you would have thought they have...

Pop it out of the sun roof.

But this was before antiseptic surgery

and of course it was before any kind of anaesthetic.

Was there not a meeting? You know what I mean?

There was not a meeting where someone goes, "I've got it."

And they go, "What?" And they go, "Chain saw, isn't it?"

Well, they looked at a watch chain and they said, you know, if you can,

we could sort of ease away the bone like that, rather than using a saw.

I know, everyone's wincing.

Have we got another question that isn't about that?

Would it heal? Presumably not very well.

Well, they then went on to use the same thing, for example,

if someone had a bit of diseased bone, they would do the same thing,

they would sort of take it and they'd go up and down like that,

and then they'd do it lower down and the two bits would fuse together,

and they'd have a stiff arm, but it would get rid of the diseased bone.

It was called an osteotome.

It eventually became like a chain saw, you can see one here.

-That is more like a chain saw.

-My God! You don't want that...

-But pretty unpleasant.

-You don't want that coming at you.

You really don't. You really, really don't.

I remember my wife had a baby, I remember it well...

-I was going to say.

-Yeah...

-Kind of thing you wouldn't forget.

It was a grand day, but when she had a baby,

and there's a point where you go in to see the fella

-who's going to sort it out on the day.

-Obstetrician?

That's him, yeah, he's got an official title.

And you go and see him, and as the husband, he says,

"Right, you sit there on a chair."

And then he pulls the curtain across

while him and your wife are in this thing,

while he has a little dabble, or whatever he's doing.

-It's a bit intimate, isn't it?

-You go, "I've seen it, mate."

Do you know what I mean? There's nothing...this is why we're here.

Well, you don't look when that happens though, do you,

at the moment of conception? Do you actually have a look?

You're looking into...

Surely... Surely... Sorry.

I think I was watching...

Stephen doesn't need to know, Jason, he doesn't need to know.

Well, I thought you were gazing lovingly into her eyes while...

Gazing lovingly...gazing lovingly at the Bourne Identity,

which is still on the television.

-As you reach for your drink.

-Oh, I'm...

What do you think, darling, that he's got a periscope at the moment of...?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, look...

I don't know why you and I are having this conversation.

It's true.

APPLAUSE

After the invention of the internal combustion engine,

where we're getting Jeremy to his home territory now,

eventually by 1920 they were small enough

-to be able to have a hand-powered... chain.

-Cut down trees.

-And then they cut down trees. Exactly.

-Yes.

Well, anyway, there you are.

Chainsaws were originally invented for midwives.

Staying in that general area, unfortunately,

explain how an electric jockstrap works.

Is there going to be a demonstration?

-Do you know, I kind of wish there were.

-JASON: Is that what this is?

-No.

-Argh, oh! That's what this is.

Is it a warming thing, or...?

An electric anything takes us into a period of time.

-Galvanism. It's Victorian, galvanism.

-Galvan, exactly.

Everybody thought electricity would cure everything,

stimulate everything and achieve everything.

And so at the back of every newspaper there was an electrical

something, a galvanic bath, but these were electric jockstraps.

Well, presumably, because they had all sorts of things to stop boys

playing with themselves, it must have been...

that would stop you, wouldn't it? It would stop you, wouldn't it?

-If you had a shock in your pants.

-No, I'm thinking it might be nice.

-Yes.

-Oh, really?

-You're spot-on. We men know that.

Because there are certain code words in Victorian English.

"Nervous and general debility, lost vigour, decline,

"and the whole train of gloomy attendants,"

was standard code for impotence.

Enter the Heidelberg electric belt.

There it is.

-It's a bit high up, isn't it?

-Yes.

Oh, I see, so actually there's the thing down there.

That's really kind of buzzing away in the important area.

And that is actually going to cause you to, well, I'm afraid

the phrase is probably embarrassing, they advise seminal economy.

-They're advising against...

-Is that with easyJet?

-Yeah.

They're advising against

"wantonly jettisoning too much nervous substance."

-Which basically...

-Is that what they called it?

That's code for semen. In other words, it's essentially a sex toy.

-"Wantonly jettisoning."

-It is...

Don't wantonly jettison your nervous substance.

I like the idea of nervous semen just coming out going...

"Woaaah."

SANDI: He's quite camp.

Perhaps he's having problems with his virility

-cos he's sleeping with the wrong sex.

-Well, it might be that.

But there genuinely was an item, as you can see, hugely advertised,

there were lots of different...

So is it designed then to lift the dormant chap or to de-nervify

-the semen?

-It's basically designed saying,

"Would you like to enjoy the experience of a little bit

"of a tingling down there that maybe has disappeared?"

But it probably was just like,

"That's a damn good thing to take to a hotel room."

-Why have they gone out of fashion?

-I know.

Are these still for sale?

I feel like if Ann Summers did them, you could see,

not in the upstairs bit, the downstairs bit of Ann Summers...

Tell me about this, Jason, because I...

Upstairs is like, just like chocolate willies and that.

Downstairs...someone's going to get hurt, Stephen.

Really? I've never been in an Ann Summers. You'd think it would be

-the other way round, you'd have to go upstairs...

-No, you come in

at ground floor level. I'm only going off our nearest twelve branches.

Yes, right.

But, yeah, that's the normal one.

And then you sort of pop downstairs, you know, anniversary, or whatever...

Good gracious.

But the other thing about that is you got ten days free trial.

-Wow!

-I don't know if you can see, but it's actually printed there.

What if you send it back and it goes to somebody else?

That's what I'm worried about with the free trial.

I know, exactly. You're using a used one.

It is going to get much more acceptable and decent,

this programme, I promise you, as we move on. So anyway,

what was your great-grandmother doing down the back of the sofa?

Was she, was she a Borrower?

Was she a Borrower? No, she wasn't a Borrower.

I come from a particularly small family,

and we lost many, in various pieces of furniture.

I had an aunt went through a cane chair, we never saw her again.

JASON: Was she dead and been cremated and you spilt it?

What was happening around the time of one's great-grandmother,

-what sort of...?

-They were using the elderly to stuff sofas.

About a hundred years ago families began to do a thing in order to

register their lives and formalise their existences, after weddings.

-Photographs.

-Photographs, exactly.

-So Victorian...

And particularly their babies,

they liked to have their babies photographed,

but exposure times were quite long and how do you keep a baby still?

-Oh, I've seen this! This is this weird thing.

-Heroin.

There's loads of pictures of them.

-They've got like sheets over their head.

-Yes.

-And they're sort of holding the child in place.

-Exactly.

They're called "hidden mother photographs".

-They're terrifying, there's a website of them.

-Yes.

-And they're terrifying, yeah. Look at that.

-Look, there's one.

-Oh, wow!

-That's horrible!

-It's like a woman in a burqa.

Yes. It's horrible. Extraordinary.

There's the mother pretending to be a sofa or an item of furniture,

keeping her baby quiet and still enough

for the exposure time of the photograph.

We've got another one where the mother looks a bit like a carpet.

I mean it's really. There...

-That's not even a baby!

-I know, it's a young girl.

-There is a whole class of these.

-Yeah.

"Don't move, you bitch, don't move."

And you, Jason, definitely get the points there

-for having known about them.

-It's terrifying.

-They are rather peculiar.

It's brilliant though, there's hundreds

and they're all sinister, like, rather than just let the kid

-stand by itself, you've gone, "Go and stand with that ghost."

-Yes.

-It's weird.

-Well, the mother will be talking to the child,

saying, "It's all right, darling, sit still, I'm going to hold you."

The chair's talking!

"I am a sofa, ha-ha-ha!"

We have for you probably the first ever photograph of a human being,

which is rather exciting.

It's from the 1840s and it's by Louis Daguerre himself.

He took a photograph, in those days very long exposure,

and all the people who were there would have moved through as a blur,

you wouldn't have seen, but there is a boot boy

with a customer with his leg up as it were, and you can see that

and we can probably circle it for you and give it a little bit of a...

And that is the first human being,

or pair of human beings, ever photographed.

-It's rather wonderful, isn't it?

-How long's he take doing them shoes then?

Yeah, I know. It's surprising.

-It was a ten-minute exposure, in fact.

-Oh, OK.

That's not too bad then.

-It was in 1838, that's how long ago it was.

-Wow.

And we have a photograph for you and you have to identify

who the person is in the photograph, which... Who's that?

Is that Bruce Forsyth?

-It's not Bruce Forsyth, no.

-SANDI: In the early years.

It's quite surprising,

it's someone you would not imagine there would be a photograph of.

-OK. Can you give us a country?

-He's British.

He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Oh, Prime Minister of Britain.

But he was from an Irish family. Actually the Duke of Wellington.

-Wow!

-Duke of Wellington.

-Yeah. The victor of Waterloo.

As an old man. He looks surprisingly benign, considering his reputation.

-But isn't it amazing there is a photograph of him?

-I had no idea.

-Yeah. It's rather fabulous.

-That's a great picture.

-It is actually a lovely picture, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

Anyway, let's move onto something very, very different.

Name something interesting you can do with a Slinky.

-Well, it's a...

-Well, you can't untangle it.

That's certainly... Oh, God, I got through so many as a child.

-They're the most, it is the most...

-Wasn't it? Oh.

You go to the top of the stairs, and go, "Look at this, it's, oh, no!"

-And then that would be it and your toy.

-We've given you some stairs,

you can take your stairs and your Slinky out and demonstrate.

-Oh, wow.

-There may be young people in the audience

-who've never had the excitement.

-You're going to love this.

-You can attach it to your...

-This is, I'm going back, look at that!

Yeah!

-Isn't that fun?

-They're the best things.

Oh, dear, you may have pointed it in the wrong direction.

-I'm literally the happiest man in the world.

-Brilliant.

Hey! That was a beauty.

But he invented this out of, he was a suspension designer, wasn't he?

He was a naval officer, his name is Richard James.

And it was in 194...

It's called the Alan Effect.

No! You don't do it like that.

You lift the top.

Somebody go and get him a Raleigh trike.

How can you not work a Slinky?!

How can you not do that?

Yeah!

APPLAUSE

Can you imagine giving this to a child now and going,

"That's it, that's your gift. Have a toy, happy Christmas."

JASON: Whatever you do, don't attach it to your electric jockstrap.

-No, absolutely.

-Didn't he invent it by accident?

-Yes.

He was making coiled springs and he invented...

He was an American naval officer and he literally knocked over

a spring, and it went for a walk, and he thought,

"Oh, that's interesting." And so he developed and he experimented

-and he came up with the Slinky. And more than...

-Look, to be fair,

-it was his wife who thought it would make a good toy.

-Yes, it's true.

Let us remember that sometimes women get overlooked in these things.

More than 300 million were sold, which is an incredible number.

All to me, because I kept breaking them.

Yeah, I know, because they tangle up. Now if you'll put them away...

Do you mind if I keep the stairs?

Because there's a few shelves in the kitchen that I still can't reach.

You're very welcome.

But what we do have is a very extraordinary effect that happens

if you drop a Slinky, which is that when you let go of it,

the bottom does not move.

Watch the film and you'll see what I mean.

It's actually really astonishing.

It's a very peculiar effect.

Watch the bottom of the Slinky, as it actually happens,

in very high speed camera.

-The bottom is completely still. Isn't that amazing?

-Oh, wow.

-Wow!

-That is a really bizarre effect.

And they can't really explain quite why that happens.

Oh, I bet James May could.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

"No, no, you see, the thing is..." Oh, God!

Is there a use for this discovery?

Maybe Jason's idea of crossing it with

the Heidelberg electric jockstrap

may result in a really quite remarkable experience.

-You'll see me on the next series of Dragons' Den.

-Yeah.

"I have jettisoned wantonly, but it hasn't hit the floor."

It is a great phrase, wantonly to jettison, isn't it?

It really is marvellous. Anyway.

Now, we've got more toys to play with, so put the Slinky away.

I'm going to ask you, basically this simple question,

-why are jerries better than flimsies?

-Jerry?

-When we say a jerry, there are jerries, jerry...?

-Jerry cans.

Jerry cans. Jerry cans.

-And what were jerry cans?

-Well, it's for petrol.

-It's a thing that was used in the war, wasn't it?

-By whom?

Well, presumably by the Germans.

That's... We eventually used them, but firstly by the Germans.

And we had something else called the flimsy.

And unfortunately, the flimsy was absolutely cack.

But didn't the name give it away?

We only won the war by nicking all their ideas.

Yeah. On the left is a jerry can.

And there on the right is a flimsy.

And General Auchinleck, who was the predecessor of Montgomery

in the Eighth Army, actually said this about the flimsy. He said,

"The flimsy is an ill-constructed container for carrying fuel,"

he said, "leaked 30% of its fuel between base

"and consumer, with huge consequences in lost lives,

"battles and shipping."

So British soldiers basically spent their life

trying to steal the jerry can.

To the extent the Germans started booby-trapping them,

cos they knew that the British wanted to steal them,

cos they were the most desirable object, the jerry can.

I have two of them for you.

They are absolutely astonishing, incredible inventions.

Basically they're a single weld, like this.

They have this fabulous cap, they have an inner lining,

which means they can carry water or petrol.

This thing opens and what's called a donkey dick comes out.

-It was nicknamed the donkey dick. But rather cleverly...

-So similar.

It's been a hell of a show for me, I tell you.

But even, I mean they have this little indentation here.

-What do you think that does?

-Strength.

-It strengthens it,

-but also in heat, it...

-It allows it to expand.

-It allows it to expand.

And the handles are absolute genius, because if you have two empty ones,

you can hold them together using the handles.

-One here... I'm going to stand up like so...

-Standing.

So you simply hold them like that, using that, but also,

when you're holding it, you hand it to someone else, there's a handle.

-You simply take it, like that.

-Oh, I see.

-And they are...

Getting the donkey's dick out now, sir.

You won't be able to, it's really, really stiff.

APPLAUSE

God!

It's amazing! It's a real talent.

-I'm so sorry. How do I do it?

-I don't know how you do it.

-It's amazing.

-I love it.

But that is genuinely one of the most brilliant designs ever made.

-It's never been improved.

-But they still lost.

-They still did lose.

One of the reasons they lost is that by the end of the war,

we produced 21 million of the jerry cans, and I will quote

President Roosevelt, who said, "Without these cans, it would

"have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France

"at a lightning pace which exceeded even the German blitzkrieg of 1940."

So basically we won the war by stealing the Germans' jerry can,

because the movement of vehicles

and therefore of petrol, is absolutely essential in war.

-So is that where the word, so the word flimsy has come from that?

-No.

-No. Flimsy existed as a word.

-OK.

They were called flimsies because they were just so shite.

Oh, I see, right.

They were just square metal boxes that rotted and leaked

-and were useless.

-OK.

And these designs were, I mean almost every aspect of them...

and not only that, they floated, which the British ones didn't do.

So the Germans could drop them at sea or in rivers,

I mean, they were kind of the iPod of the day,

they were just the most perfect design imaginable.

On the other hand, what's the least promising invention in history?

Something that people thought wasn't going to be a success?

Yeah, least welcomed and then turned out to be most successful.

It wasn't the energy-saving light bulb?

Because that's one, that's an invention that for me...

-Yeah, but that's been forced upon us, hasn't it?

-Yes.

And it's the worst invention.

-"I need this room to be light in about an hour."

-Yeah.

I leave them on 24 hours a day so that I can read a book

when I go to bed at night.

This was invented by a man called Sylvan Goldberg,

but you wouldn't think of it as an invention

and yet I suppose it is, and it's the shopping trolley.

And men thought it was effeminate to walk around a shop

pushing a trolley, and women thought it was an insult

to their ability to carry a basket.

"Perfectly capable of carrying baskets, I don't need you to do it."

So he invented it in 1938, and for two years

he paid people basically just to wander round supermarkets.

Or the early shops wheeling them, so people got used to the sight of it.

-And then he died in 1984.

-Did he pay them to wear those clothes?

Someone must have paid her to wear that outfit, I would have thought.

Sylvan Goldberg died in 1984 worth 400 million.

-That's a lot of pound coins.

-So, he kept the... Yes.

-Very good.

-It's a lot of clogged canals, is what it is.

It's a lot of clogged canals as well, yes. So it did work.

Another example was bubble gum,

which was invented by a man called Frank Fleer in 1906.

He called it "Blibber-Blubber."

But unfortunately, his particular recipe meant that once

the bubble had burst, you had to use turpentine to get it off.

-Which is in itself toxic anyway.

-JASON: That's brilliant.

So if you've ever got any form of gum, particularly nicotine gum...

-In your hair?

-No, on the screen of an iPhone.

-Oh, no. Is that...?

That's what I want an invention for, I've just decided.

If you get the gum on the front of an iPhone,

there is no way of removing it. Hammer, chisel.

There must be an app.

APPLAUSE

-The nicotine gum removal app.

-Very good. Very good.

And I think Sandi will approve of this as well,

we ought to hear it for Mary Anderson. 1903.

-Ah, Mary Anderson.

-Do you know about Mary Anderson?

-I do.

-Tell me about her.

-She invented the windscreen wiper.

You're absolutely, you are a fountain of...

Well, what I love about that is that it had to be a woman who

invented the windscreen wiper, because up until then

men had been going, "Don't be silly, dear, I can see perfectly well."

So, of course it was a woman who invented it.

Unfortunately, yes, she noticed tram drivers,

street car drivers, having to stop and move snow away

and she invented it in 1903,

and really there just weren't enough cars.

And by the time it was useful, her patent had elapsed,

-so she made not a cent from it.

-Oh.

It's the same as Dorothy Levitt, who invented the rear view mirror.

So women enabled you to see where you were going and where you'd been.

Oh, they did it to do their lipstick, come on.

Dorothy Levitt recommended that you take your compact mirror

and place it on the dash so that you could see behind you

and she was the person who invented the rear view mirror.

But again, she didn't make any money out of it,

because there was no patent available for it.

-I'm very impressed you knew about Mary Anderson.

-Thank you very much.

And we should indeed pay due courtesy to her.

Anyway, what about the dry-ear ear dryer?

It's a machine to dry your ears. OK.

"Drying your ears has never been simpler or more effective,

"the device blows hot air into your ear."

Although the instructions advise you to dry your ears first with a towel.

-Is this contemporary, this is modern?

-Yes, it's a real invention.

-All you need is a tube, don't you?

-But it's modern?

-Modern, yeah.

-You just need a tube.

-Yeah. Or a hairdryer would do the job.

You don't even need that, Stephen, you just need a tube.

-But most people have hairdryers.

-Yeah, but a tube, just a tube!

A tube would do it. I know, you're right.

Anyway, here's a marvellous question,

what was wrong with the first sound recording device?

-Didn't work?

-Didn't have any speakers?

Well, it was that it recorded sound perfectly well...

-But you couldn't play it back.

-Yes.

-Play it back.

You couldn't play it back. A man called Martinville,

he was a Frenchman,

he used burnt soot and it registered sound waves on it.

But they sort of scratched it out, didn't they?

But recently it was reverse engineered and engineers

managed to get the sound back of him singing Au Clair de la Lune.

Is that the thing they played on Radio 4 and Charlotte Green

-cried with laughter, was it?

-Would you like to hear that moment?

It was one of my favourite moments of all time.

Unfortunately, she had to announce the death of Abby Mann

and she couldn't help corpsing, bless her.

So listen to this, because you'll hear the oldest-ever sound recording

plus the unfortunate event that followed.

Charlotte Green: 'American historians have discovered what they think

'is the earliest recording of the human voice, made on a device

'which scratched sound waves onto paper blackened by smoke.

'It was made in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison first demonstrated

'the gramophone, and featured an excerpt from a French song,

'Au Clair de la Lune.'

DISTORTED WARBLING

WARBLING CONTINUES

SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'The...the award-winning screenwriter,

-'Abby Mann, has died at the age of 80.'

-Oh, no.

'He won an Academy award in 1961 for Judgment at Nuremberg.

'Excuse me, sorry.

'Abby Mann also won several Emmys, including...'

SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'Including one in 1973 for...

'For a film which featured a...'

SUPPRESSING LAUGHTER: 'A police detective called...'

SHE LAUGHS UNCONTROLLABLY

'The character, on whom a long-running TV series

'was eventually based.'

Charlotte Green's great contribution.

There's somebody in the corner of the room going...

HE WARBLES

"We haven't got it, we're going to have to go with the item anyway.

"I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it, I know what it sounds like."

HE WARBLES

"They'll never know, they'll never know. Don't laugh."

HE WARBLES

-So this one you could record into it, but then nobody could hear it?

-Yes.

Could you not just get that for Jedward, like for their next album?

-They have a lovely day out, that's fine.

-Everything would be perfect.

-Nobody has to suffer.

-You're right. You're absolutely right.

OK, so now we're going to go for a jolly jape,

and I have an extraordinary pendulum swing that my friends here

are going to bring on and I'm going to show you a remarkable action.

It's handmade by our chief science elf, Will Bowen,

who's a bit of a genius, and it's an effect that was first noted

by Galileo, that's how old it is. But you don't see many of these

and I think it would make a great executive toy.

So I'm going to lay this down here,

and push it and let go.

And it will start to go in this rather beautiful...

-Look at that, isn't that lovely?

-Oh, wow.

But, it's better than that, because then it starts to get a bit,

get a bit ordinary.

And then it starts to move into a different sort of rhythm

and then they start to get in step, like that.

Ooh, look at that, they're starting to move together again.

But then something really amazing happens as well,

which is they go back into their wave formation,

which is about to happen.

It's a whole long process, but it's utterly predictable

and it follows very specific laws of physics.

And here it goes back into its waves again.

Look at that.

I think that's pretty amazing, isn't it?

APPLAUSE

And it will carry on doing that, and as you can see,

it will carry on going through those cycles behind us,

and it's a principle, as I say, that Galileo worked out.

The central bob makes 60 swings in a minute.

The one to its left does 59 in 60 seconds, and so on.

And it means after one minute they're back to where they started.

It doesn't matter how far you push a pendulum,

it still takes the same amount of time

to swing from one side to the other.

And it's using that that makes it go in and out of sync

in these different ways. There it is. It's the Galileo Pendulum

and wouldn't it make a great executive toy?

Well, that's all the inventions we've got time for this week,

except of course for the scores.

And believe me, these are not invented,

much as though people may believe it, the scores are rigorously

and scientifically worked out.

And in first place, with an extraordinary plus 13

is Sandi Toksvig.

Wow!

APPLAUSE

And only ten points behind in second place with plus three,

-Jeremy Clarkson.

-A plus!

APPLAUSE

Why am I clapping?

And very impressive from Jason Manford, with plus two! Wow!

I don't know how I got that.

APPLAUSE

And I'm afraid the smallest swing of the pendulum, minus eight,

Alan Davies.

APPLAUSE

And that's all from Jason, Jeremy, Sandi, Alan and me.

Thank you, be extremely kind to each other for ever and good night.

Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd