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  Douglas Adams refused to allow his scripts to be novelised for the regular small fee on account of his ‘tendency to be a best-selling author’. The doctor during the time of Douglas Adams’ work on the series was played by Tom Baker who held the role for the longest duration, seven years, using up no fewer than seven human ‘companions’ and a Timelady who was at a loose end. The dream-team pairing of having Douglas Adams do Dalek dialogues doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone.

  Reverse Logic

  Douglas Adams enjoyed telling people that he had been born in Cambridge with the initials DNA (middle name Noël) a year ahead of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule also in Cambridge. Arthur Dent in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, shares reversed initials with his creator and when he had to use a pseudonym writing for Doctor Who he chose David Agnew. A consideration in a search for the origin of 42 is that left-handed Douglas Adams was 24 when his idea for writing a radio series called The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy was commissioned and could have reversed the digits.

  The First UK Mac…

  Douglas Adams is sometimes reported as having owned the first Apple Mac in the UK but this could well be apocryphal. Just five weeks before his death his friend Stephen Fry gave a humorous speech at a computer event in which he announced that he believed he had bought the third Apple Mac in the UK because ‘Douglas Adams had bought the first two’. This was in part a joking reference to Douglas Adams’ nature with regard to the acquisition of multiple instances of desirable gadgets; these included 24 left-handed guitars (a pleasing symmetry with 42 right-handers) with one stashed at the home of Ian Gilmour of Pink Floyd, a fine selection of expensive cameras and lenses, no shortage of mobile phones and more computers than their owner claimed to be able to count.

  The Best Selling Humorous Book…On This Planet

  Exactly how many Douglas Adams books have been sold seems impossible to know. A figure not un-adjacent to 20,000,000 might be in the zone. The original guide is listed by one source as being the 37th best-selling adult fiction written in English but significantly The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to The Galaxy is almost certainly the world’s best selling humorous book written for adults.

  The Forty two card was played to promote a number of editions. A 25th anniversary edition included 42 pages of Douglas Adams related material with 21 writers adding 42 words each about memories of first the guide. The price of the collected works in the United States was $42 and the ISBN number of the US illustrated edition ended with 42.

  * Mr Simonyi amassed a fortune working for Microsoft and has a Wikipedia biography that lists a single notable work: Microsoft Office. The next time a table in Microsoft Word extends itself unbidden five metres to the right of your screen and effects introductions with the desks and chairs next door, this is apparently the man to thank.

  A is for Americana

  The Forty-Second Floor

  The first building to have a lift to the forty-second floor was New York’s Singer Building. It was also the first building with a forty-second floor. Built in 1908 by the sewing machine company of the same name it was the first skyscraper to be taller than both the Great Pyramid and the cathedrals of Europe. A posthumous fifth record also belongs to the ex-Singer: it was the world’s tallest peacefully deconstructed building, being succeeded in 1968 by a roomier structure on its former site which was alongside the World Trade Centre’s Twin Towers.

  Isaac Merritt Singer the company founder had died thirty-two years earlier but is more than notable for his industrial capacity for simultaneously aggregating families. Having perfected the low-priced sewing machine, and its marketing, Singer became very wealthy, very quickly. Resembling in appearance the well-upholstered English king, Edward VII, Isaac Singer was living in considerable comfort with his second wife and family on New York’s Fifth Avenue until a day in the early 1860s when his wife saw him out driving in a carriage with the mother of one of his three other contemporaneous families. His domestic world went spinning; his legitimate wife had him arrested for bigamy, and in disgrace he went to Europe with another ‘wife’ and five children. In Paris this relationship ended when he became well acquainted with Isabella, who then became his third legal wife.

  He took Isabella to England when war threatened Paris and wanting a single home large enough for all of his children he set about building a one hundred room mansion, as one did, near the sea in rural Devon and which he called ‘The Wigwam’. He died in 1875 shortly before the building was completed. His will left fourteen million dollars (comparable with $1.2 billion in 2011) and acknowledged 22 children. Isabella Singer took the children back to Paris where she married a Dutch violinist who utilised his wife’s fortune, amongst other things, to collect superior tools of his trade including Strads (around ten) and Guarneris (several). For a wedding present (according to Indiana’s Crawfordsville Weekly Argus) Isabella paid $10,000 to buy her new husband the Italian title of Duke of Camposelice, with Isabella styling herself the Duchess of Camposelice under the buy-one-and-receive-one-gratis rule. The marriage was unhappy, and short, and then he died. Isabella Singer remarried (to a second violinist) and was then to provide the Singer name with a further and positively un-improveable connection with New York by becoming it is believed, the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi’s model for the Statue of Liberty whose statistics—in case anyone is considering I may be drifting from the plot—include a very healthy forty two feet of right arm.

  In The Dawn’s Early Light

  On 9/11 the fourth target had either been the White House or the Capitol Building. The heroism of the people on Flight 93 saved Washington from murder and destruction. Few people know that the devastation intended for the fabric of the nation’s capital would have been a repetition of a successful attack by a 42-year-old Englishman. The first attack on Washington happened during the ‘Second War of Independence’ or War of 1812 against Britain, which had been failing to respect American sovereignty.

  In the summer of 1814 British troops commanded by Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn had entered Washington and torched the White House, the Library of Congress, the Capitol Building and the Treasury Building before raising the British flag over the American capital. The destruction galvanised the American forces and resulted in a second flag being raised—now immortalised in song and probably the most famous flag in the world.

  The Great Garrison Flag at Fort McHenry on the entrance to Baltimore harbour was then the largest battle flag ever flown. An early example of the American confidence that best is biggest, the garrison commander, one George Armistead, had commissioned the flag to signal America’s hold of a key defensive position to any approaching British. Costing $405.90 with dimensions of 42ft by 30ft the 15 Stars and 15 Stripes were stitched together in 42 days from 400 yards of cloth by Mary Young Pickersgill, her daughter, two nieces, and a servant.

  After the burning of Washington the British sailed further into Chesapeake Bay planning to capture Baltimore. They landed a few miles from Fort McHenry on the 12th September but quickly lost their commanding general who was one of the 42 British killed at the battle of North Point. The advance was halted while Fort McHenry was bombarded by naval cannons and rockets to remove the defensive lynchpin.

  Under a flag of truce on a British ship were three Americans. One was Francis Scott Key who had been parlaying for the release of a captured friend. He had feared that Fort McHenry would not withstand the British assault but to demonstrate their apparent invulnerability, overnight Major Armistead had raised his Giant Garrison Flag in the place of a regular-sized version. The words of the Star Spangled Banner are Francis Scott Key’s on seeing that the Stars and Stripes still flew over the fort, and America:

  O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

  The attack had failed and the British were to shortly sign a peace treaty declaring the war over. The giant flag—slightly foreshortened by early souvenir hu
nters—is now displayed in the Smithsonian, close to where Cockburn had dared to fly a British flag over the home of the brave.

  B Minus

  A smaller facsimile of the historic Star Spangled Banner still flies over Fort McHenry and shows the unusual 15 stars and 15 stripes that represented the fifteen states of the 1814 union. It is unique in being the only US flag, either previously or since, with 15 rather than 13 stripes. Each time a new state had joined the union a new flag was required. The most recent occasion was in 1960, when Hawaii joined, and the designer was a 16 year old Ohio junior school student, Bob Heft who had been born in 1942 in Saginaw, Michigan. He chose the idea of designing a new flag in a school project and made a prototype fifty star design using the forty-eight star family flag. His teacher was under-impressed and awarded Bob’s flag a B minus. This was retrospectively upgraded to an A after President Eisenhower had agreed that the new design could shortly be viewed flying everywhere across America and around the world.

  Yours very truly (Leó Szilárd)

  In 1933 the Nazis under Adolf Hitler passed a law banning Jews from teaching at universities, or holding any position of authority. Einstein*, although now a Swiss citizen, was listed as an enemy of the Nazi regime with a bounty of $5000 on his life, so like many other German scientists Einstein fled to the United States, arriving in 1935. Just before the start of WW II in 1938 the atom was first knowingly split in Germany, being discovered by Lise Meitner who had fled from Germany to Sweden but had continued working with Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßman who had stayed in Berlin (Only Hahn was to receive a Nobel Prize for the achievement).

  The Nazi War Ministry had been informed in April 1939 that there might be the potential for a nuclear weapon and work began. Aware of developments Einstein signed a letter in August 1939 to President Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany might develop an atomic bomb and that the United States should therefore consider also investigating nuclear weapons.

  The writer was not Einstein but a 42 year old Hungarian, Leó Szilárd, who was also a Jew and had also escaped from the Nazis. Together with Enrico Fermi he had already enterprisingly patented the nuclear reactor. Just before the start of WW II while working in New York Szilárd and Fermi made the discovery that nuclear weapons could almost certainly be manufactured.

  It took the United States and her allied workers six years and an intensive programme to successfully test the first nuclear bomb. The German programme did not get close to producing a bomb. In 1942 the German effort was scaled back on the grounds of not being likely to help win the war while at the same time in the US the Manhattan Project had conducted the first controlled nuclear reaction in the world.

  Tellingly for what-if alternatives to the history of the world a key to the very different outcomes of the two programmes was a single discovery made by one man—who might have been working on the German bomb if the Nazis hadn’t been anti-Semitic. An impurity, boron, had been stopping supposedly pure carbon from working properly in the production of explosive bomb material. The Germans had to use a big work-around that needed heavy water as an alternative to the much simpler carbon. Making heavy water in turn needed a massive amount of energy and could only quickly be done in a single requisitioned plant in Norway where production was successfully sabotaged (as shown in the 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark).

  The person responsible for solving the boron problem for the United States rather than Germany was Leó Szilárd who had, of course, drafted the famous Einstein letter to Roosevelt that began the whole US nuclear programme.

  Looking for America

  ‘Larry, what say we stop and eat?’ said Sergey. The Google Street View Camera Car had been following the 42 into the Appalachians and the guys had worked up a serious appetite. They pulled up and, sighing ever-so-slightly, Sergey muted Bohemian Rhapsody and, for what seemed like the millionth time, reminded Larry to press the camera’s Big Red Stop Button.

  Standing on the corner in Centralia, Pennsylvania they took in the scene on Locust Avenue. It was foggy and it was raining but Sergey immediately identified a problem. Centralia was short of things. Most importantly somewhere two hungry Google guys could refuel before continuing on the great road trip to film all of America. No Arby’s. No McDonald’s. No Wendys. No Taco Bell. Nada. Getting back in the car and slowing only momentarily as Sergey waited for Larry to remember to press the camera’s Big Green Go Button, they set off to look for the rest of America.

  Tracking over to Centralia, PA in Google Earth confirms Larry and Sergey’s story. It is a fall day in 2009 and it is foggy and it is raining. Traffic is running with its lights on. Shuffle around and you see roads connecting lots aplenty with almost none bearing any sign of a house. Nor are there any stores, garages, or oases for seekers of good food, for Centralia is almost a ghost town, created by an underground coal fire started in 1962 and causing the relocation of eleven hundred people and their supporting businesses at a cost of $42 million in 1984.

  Two facts I found moderately alarming when reading about Centralia are a) that underground coal fires are natural, some coals can spontaneously combust in thin air at a midge’s over blood heat, and b) that there are many thousands of coal fires all round the world combining to puff out CO2 on an epic scale. The pioneering Lewis and Clark saw coal burning in Wyoming in 1804. Germany has a Burning Mountain near Dudweiler that has been aflame since 1688. Australia has another Burning Mountain which is the world’s oldest, alight for 6000 years. In North Dakota there is a Burning Coal Vein Campground for the vacationer interested in conflagration. An international body is dedicated to sharing information on ways of eliminating and controlling underground coal fires.

  Centralia’s double misfortune was first to have a fire that was self-inflicted (burning the garbage in a badly chosen landfill site that comprised unsealed coal workings had started the whole thing off), and then for that fire to spread with alacrity through old coal workings right beneath the town. But despite the 1984 relocation opportunity some residents chose to stay. At first patient, by 1992 the state of Pennsylvania declared ‘eminent domain’ which changed the status of the remaining residents into squatters in their own homes. In 2002 the postal zipcode was taken away—though slotting 17927 into one online property tracker indicates that 3-bed homes in Centralia are commanding prices of over $145,000.

  In the summer of 2010 nine Centralians remained in five houses, all under official orders to quit that had been received a while ago. Poignantly they maintain memories and links with family and friends from former, happier times by keeping their cemeteries in immaculate condition. And there is a new phenomenon, a growing stream of visitors. In summer there are enough to consider opening a burger franchise.

  The Elevator Pitch

  Working or living in taller and taller buildings never caught on until the invention of the safety lift. Elisha Otis began his Otis Elevator Company in New York when he was forty two. The first customer was a Benjamin Newhouse who had lost two employees to a fatal lift accident and in 1853 purchased an Otis Life-Saving Steam Elevator to lift materials in his furniture factory. The world’s first safety lift was built without the aid of drawings, blueprints or prototypes; Elisha Otis just made it. Business was slow at first but Elisha Otis had the cure. At the first world fair in New York in 1854 he would be lifted above the spectators in a demonstration model before asking a colleague to axe the rope. The regularly repeated demonstration—its safety mechanism always worked—drew attentive crowds, stimulated sales, and was a big draw for the Exposition.

  The first Otis passenger safety lift remains and is in working condition. It can be located at 488 Broadway, New York, behind the notable cast-iron façade of the E.V. Haughwout Building. This had been the premises for a popular store selling finest cut glass, china and porcelain goods. Customer footfall increased considerably when the novelty of a ride in a lift was added to the store’s proposition, even though the hydraulic mechanism took 64 seconds to lift the curious around 42 feet to the top fl
oor.

  Of a sudden safety lifts literally turned city property values upside down. The highest apartments and hotel rooms had traditionally had the lowest rents and rates just because of all the tiresome stairs. With a lift these became the most desirable because of the views and the pleasing separation from the noise and dust of the street. Before Elisha Otis a hotel penthouse had been somewhere interested guests might venture to admire the view from the janitor’s billet. Otis lifts are used by the Tower (Burj) Khalifa, the world’s tallest structure. The observation lifts are the fastest in the world carrying 42 people at 42 feet per 0.7 seconds—ninety times faster than the E.V. Haughwout building’s passenger lift #0000001.

  Junior President

  The youngest President of the United States was 42, VP Theodore Roosevelt (third from the left on Mt Rushmore) becoming the 26th President on September 14th 1901 following the assassination of the 25th President, William McKinley. McKinley was the third President to be assassinated. He was shot by a 28-year-old anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo, New York State. His killer refused to speak with defence lawyers and was electrocuted on the 42nd day after the death of the President (who had lived for several days after the shooting). A stone, now within a suburban housing estate, marks the place where the assassination occurred, 65 miles north of the 42nd parallel.

  Theodore Roosevelt was quickly a popular and famous President. ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’ he famously said and became the first American to win a Nobel prize, winning the 1906 Peace Prize for mediating the end of Russian-Japanese war. At 47 he was a year younger than Barack Obama was in 2009 when he also won the Peace Prize. TR did not accept the money, believing that it belonged to the office he held rather than himself.