Who Invented Straight Roads? | QI 

That reminds me of our New Year's Day 2011, when we drove from NYC to Florida Keys, which is like a 1000 miles on I-95 S. We departed deep snow on Manhattan and jumped into hotel's unheated outdoor pool 21 hours later somewhere south of Miami.

My stepdad's old car had a solution for that. I died of laughter once I was driving it alone and the GPS went "Keep straight on for ... a very long time". That is no joke. VW 4 prez.

I feel drowsy just thinking about it....

In Australia if you take the Stuart highway going from South Australia to the Northern Territory it's 2710km (1684 miles) long.

@@mikiqex in my State of Western Australia, I could play in the snow in the morning on Bluff Knoll, looking at the Southern Oceant further South. Then, jump in my car, drive North for 3 days, 12 hour days, at 100kmh with the Indian Ocean on my left. Eventually I would finish at the Pacific Ocean in the North, still be in the same State, and get to dodge crocodiles in 110F tropical rain forests. It is 1,000,000 square miles. Only 2,600,000 people inhabit the whole State. 2,100,000 of those live in the most liveable city on Earth, Perth. It is the wealthiest place in the world. It's cheaper and faster for us to holiday in Bali, Singapore etc than go to another Australian city. Google it.

You've figured out the show, yes.

I guess that would be the Etruscans then

@@Stroopwafe1 But could easily be a non-Italic iron age or even bronze age civilisation

@@christiankrarup6501 If either of those things existed, then yes, it could just of easily have been the Wombles...

It's the game show for equity and kindness. Kinda like sports when everyone gets a prize. The only acceptable answers are what or who it isn't. No one's ever wrong.

Thanks! Back at ya!

I dunno, I got a good laugh from it

they should go home. the famine is over

It's a pretty dangerous joke for an Englishman to make where the punchline is basically "because there aren't as many people in Ireland as there should be"

@@vacri54 perhaps if the irish had stayed out of britain then there would be more of them.

I had a lonely cop cuff me once and then chat me up for like half an hour before letting me go with a fine.

@@EebstertheGreat did he drug you as well? Or maybe you dont remember 🤔

@@EebstertheGreat a fine what?

Oh, 'pulled OVER'......Misread that the first time...

@@Tyrconnell You thought it just said "pulled"?

I was about to say the same thing :)

It's the other way around for boats, the steering oar stuck out on the right handed helmsman's right hand side so they passed port to port so we navigate on the right on rivers and canals.

Nice work. Thank you

You are out here making great comments!

The Romans rode / marched on the left hand side of the road. And, yes, this is because most people are right-handed and this puts your dominant hand facing on-coming traffic. This used to be the international standard. Like, everywhere. It's believed that America switched to the right-hand side with the influence of the wagon trains. When you've got a single horse in front of you, then you sit centrally and tend to hold the reins in both hands. But, with the wagon trains, they'd be two horses abreast - for more horse power - and, suitably, the driving seat was wider and could accommodate two people - bringing up the left / right issue. Now, if you're right-handed and you sit on the right, then the reins would be going across the horses at an angle. This could introduce a "bias" - tugging to the right - with the horses. But if you sit on the left, holding the reins in your right hand, you're holding them towards the centre. The "bias" is cancelled out. (And there's just a general thing that if you sit on the left, you drive on the right - and vice versa - so that you can see the oncoming traffic. I know a Brit who drove their UK car in Europe and, yes, being on the "wrong side" of the car is actually an impediment to driving, as you just can't see things as clearly.) It's them wagon trains being two horses abreast - but these folks were shifting their entire lives and all its possessions across a continent, so you needed the extra horse power - and then just think about the geometry of holding the reins. Left-hand seat, reins in your dominant right hand: the reins are in the middle, between the horses, where they should be. But right-hand seat and reins in your dominant right hand: Now the reins are crossing over the horses from the far right to the centre. That's awkward and means there's a right "bias". Napoleon, on the other hand, was just "T posing to assert dominance". His new Empire imposed its rules and regulations and the metric system on those it conquered, and switching from left to right asserts imperial dominance - because it doesn't matter if you drive on the left or on the right, so long as EVERYONE IS DOING THE SAME. So if you force the imperial standard to be on the right, everyone must conform to avoid collisions. Flipping it asserts dominance and forces the imperial standard. But, yeah, it was a conscious flip, as the French also, up to that point, followed the Roman international standard of driving / riding on the left. To be honest, the Brits maintain it by "tradition". Kind of like how the Romans buggered off, but yet the currency symbols remained "£, s, d" - Libra, solidus, denarii - right up to 1971. People might have said "pounds, shillings and pence" but the symbols remained "Cursive L, s and d" after the Roman currency. The "£" currency symbol is a crossed cursive "L". For libra, which is a pound (in weight) in Latin. The old Italian "Lira" has the same etymology. We kept the Roman currency symbols for almost two thousands years. We're going to keep "the Roman standard" on which side to drive as well. Because it's "tradition" and we're very bloody-minded like that. The Houses of Parliament used to be a royal palace. It's the Palace of Westminster. And the House of Commons has such a horrible seating arrangement - either side facing each other - because that building used to be the royal chapel at the palace. The MPs are, ironically enough, sitting where the choir boys would have sat and the Speaker's chair is kind of where the altar would have been. It's a converted chapel and it's a terrible adversarial seating arrangement. Almost every other Parliament / Senate on Earth (including the UK devolved nations) opts for the much more sensible semi-circle. But, no, it's "tradition", so watch Britain insist on maintaining this crap seating arrangement - which only exists because they hijacked the chapel of a royal palace and not for any actual good reason - for the next five thousand years. Doing the same ritual of a bloke in tights banging on the door with a stick to open the building. Because "tradition". Above all else, tradition. So, fuck off with your right hand side of the road, because we're sticking with the Roman standard, come hell or high water.

There definitely are mountains in Poland, and not so many straight roads as you'd imagine

You should try driving in Saskatchewan.

In Western Australia we have a 91 mile stretch of straight road (147km) as a tiny part of the trip from Perth to our nearest neighbouring city, Adelaide. That particular drive is 2,695 km, or 1,675 miles in total across the flat Nullabor Plain. Those figures are correct, Perth is the most isolated city in the world. There is also a 297 mile (478km) of straight stretch of rail line along the same journey. There is a theory that, being Australian workers, they were too drunk to turn corners. That IS possible.

I mean even a continuously windy road has inflection points where there is no curvature. So unless the road is a loop or spiral, there is always going to be some straightness to it.

You're absolutely right

It's not like QI to make things up or ask silly questions...😂

aren't the majority of roads in the same land the same road? I same majority because I expect there's some roads scattered about that don't connect.

But what if we design roads that are not rectifiable? Then they might never have a defined curvature and also not be straight at any magnification! A Koch snowflakes-shaped road would be neat. Sadly, it would take forever to get anywhere.

The first humans who actually made a road would of been the first. The point is that Romans weren't the first to make a Road. The 'shortest' distance between 2 points is a straight line so it makes sense that the first roads built would be straight as that's probably the route people were 'walking', thus creating a pathway that became a road. Even if its just 100m between their 'shelter' and whatever they travelled to on a regular basis (the river/lake for fishing for example) it was still before the Romans - its a Nobody really knows but there is 'evidence' that Straight Roads existed before the Roman Empire came along and often built (and extended upon) existing roadways

I mean, there were relatively straight animal paths going back hundreds of millions of years. The first true "roads" built by humans are surely long gone, so we really have no idea who built them. The oldest remains of _constructed_ roads that we have actually _discovered_ date back to around 4000 BC in the Sumerian city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia. But that doesn't mean they are necessarily the oldest constructed roads in fact, just the oldest we have found. The oldest known still-existing _paved_ road is in Lower Egypt stretching from southwest Cairo to the Lake Moeris quay, and it dates back to around 2600 B.C. But of course, there were earlier paved roads as well (including in Egypt); they just haven't survived, or if they did, we haven't found them yet.

That we have evidence of, I'd say it's the Egyptians. There's a pretty sizeable ancient straight road running down Luxor that is like four or five thousand years old. But surely the first people to make roads at all in prehistoric sub-Saharan Africa would have made them straight out of convenience.

the iron age lads, do keep up.

@@runandjump13 You're the one who's got to keep up! Some bronze age roads are still around.

Dara, Rich, and Arthur

@@AndrewTBP The channel's own description says this clip is Lee Mack & Richard Osman.

@@decodolly1535 thanks for pointing that out I was confused by the original comment! “L” is certainly very cryptic…

Bad teachers make you not want to learn I was so lucky in that 90% of the people who taught me were amazing

I agree with you but I was also too focused on wanting to be the class clown in the hope of being popular. Now I couldnt care less, I just enjoy learning

Very straight roads in the United States weren't designed by civil engineers of any kind. They were simply built.

@@the-chillian we don’t have a lot of empty land laying around to just built some roads on :D

@@alexmontanus pretty civil of you to consider our density. Dankje

He's loud and unfunny.

I uploaded one of those nearly a decade ago, about three years ago Fremantle Media filed a copyright claim to remove it. The least they could do is put up one of their own! There's a "Phill Jupitus's Best Moments" that includes most of the clips, but it's interspersed with him teasing Stephen so not quite the same.

It also weighs 1000 times as much as Stonehenge although a little less than the Pyramids.

@@PanglossDr I told my friend that they built it indoors because of the Irish weather. Totally bought it. Although could be true!!!

@@Bl12zard Nice one.

@@Bl12zard Well the outdoor sun dials and stuff like that are quite common in sunny and warm countries, so maybe it was the weather, maybe it was so that the dim sunlight would appear brighter and more clear on the winter solstice

I think it's just about earned the honour of being called "New(ish)grange"

my kind of person

Actually he was invented by two Germans

I've only ever seen him on UK panel shows. To my knowledge, he's unknown in the US.

@@JackVermicelli Same, never heard of him, and can't say i'd elect him our American UK Panel show representative :p

I remember Rich Hall as a stand-up comic who was often a guest on Letterman. Pretty funny. He introduced “Snigglets” which were his made-up words to describe everyday items that didn’t seem to have commonly known names. One example is the line drawn on a check between the written out amount and the pre-printed word “dollars” as the mega-nega-bar. I actually use that term in my head when writing out checks.

Yep, he was great on Letterman. He's actually an SNL alumnus, albeit during the brief period without Lorne Michaels, so he wasn't around long. But he's reasonably familiar to Americans old enough to remember the 80s.

Henry Ford never claimed to have invented the car or the industrial age or even mass production. He did claim to pay his workers sufficient so they could afford to buy his cars

@@zapkvr I never said he did claim it. I just pointed out lots of Americans think the car was invented in America.

One of the few things the modern Americans invented was bad grammar.

@@googlecontrolled Really? Care to explain the origins of the word 'knight'?

The light bulb? Wasn't Edison American, or did he not invent it?

And because the Polish plumbers fix the pipes the grass doesn’t get “auto fertilized”

And yet you can watch any number of dashcam footage to see British motorists drifting off at the wheel, and literally drifting from lane to lane and running people off the road.

My favorite story to illustrate how big the US is, how flat the midwest is, and how boring and arrow-straight a lot of American roads are is the time my family moved from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon back in 2015. The route we took was about 2,140 miles. Up from Illinois into Wisconsin and then Minnesota, due west through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, and then down over the Columbia River and straight west across northern Oregon to Portland. It's about 31 hours of driving, so we broke it up into three and a half days: Chicago to Fargo, ND, Fargo to Butte, MT, Butte to Pasco, WA, and Pasco to Portland. We got into the car in Fargo on the morning of the second day and fired up the GPS/satnav. It directed us to take the on-ramp onto I-94, and then uttered the immortal line: "Continue straight for 760 miles."

I rather think our roads meander due to centuries old land disputes and ownerships Adds lots miles to the journey and significantly increases the chance of traffic jams

Not just land troops, but use parts of the interstate system as impromptu airfields in general. Eisenhower wanted the whole damn country to be an airfield. We now have the largest network of roads in the world. Suck it Germany! You may have invented cars, but we made them damn near mandatory!

@@porkcracklins630 lol seethe 🇩🇪>🇺🇸

@@nunyabusiness1846 I was joking man. The lack of public transit in the US sucks. In most of the US you have to have a car to get anywhere. Its really inefficient. I'm a big fan of Germany and German culture. Most of my family is originally from Germany.

Another internet urban myth that is false 🤔

I've heard the same thing about Emergency landing strips and while it does have some merit, I would be a bit concerned about an enemy force being able to do the same thing. Can you imagine being able to land Brigade sized forces all over the US at will. Thanks Google Earth for showing the way. 😉😉😁

he was talking about the tourists

Yh, would be lovely, all those drunken or texting drivers falling from the sky. xD

Should just replace every road with a train track. Much more expedient.

@@Jotari Imagine parking your locomotive in your garage.

@@EebstertheGreat Why would you do that?

@@Jotari Obviously you wouldn't; it's a joke. I was taking your comment to an extreme. We replace every road 1-for-1 with rails, including driveways, and everyone has a personal locomotive instead of a car.

It was a joke. He has a dry sense of humor.

Well that's just not true at all - you can pull up Google Maps and find straight sections far longer than 5 miles in just a couple minutes.

@@TonyYarusso , I have driven on many in Oklahoma and Kansas.

I hail from the Canadian Prairies, large parts of which are extremely flat and were surveyed (mostly in the 19th century, before there was much European settlement) in an almost perfect grid system - albeit with "surveyors' corrections" every so often to account for the curvature of the earth. When they got around to building roads, they tended to follow the survey boundaries (to avoid splitting properties in two with public rights-of-way). Hence the occasional sharp curves in many otherwise extremely straight municipal and regional roads even today. I have no reason to believe that the situation in the US's part of the Great Plains is any different, notwithstanding the much-later adoption of the US federal highway code's rules for building the Interstate system...

It's not logical anyway. The curvature of the earth shouldn't force any curves in a road.

(I just looked in Google Earth and see that these two turns have been smoothed out since the late sixties when I travelled this route numerous times.)

I suppose Roman colonization wasn't quite as horrible as British colonization. For the longest time, integrated territories could essentially keep their customs and religion - well, until Christianity took hold, regions lost their autonomy and the empire fell apart. Both had slavery and genocide, but Roman slavery was at least de facto limited in time and they never forced people to plant inedible crops causing famines.

@@DrZaius3141 The Romans were better than the British!? I think you need more history.

I understand it from the point of view of a lack of architecture here. I think the colony part mightve been gallows humour though. Traveling in central europe and seeing how architecture from the 18th c on is as common as modern buildings really reminds me of what we lost because of the colony. Dublin was once the 6th largest city in Europe. A hub of culture and cosmopolitan life. Then the colony burned it, turned it in slums, and left the buildings to collapse on people. Travelling illustrates that gap in our architecture that doesnt exist in other capital cities. Its painful to become aware of it. Even if its a drop in a bucket of what the colony cost us and the pain its caused us.

@@Chebab-Chebab nah it's definitely you who needs more history. Do some research into Cecil Rhodes.

@@twojointsjay7330 I know the man. One person does not condemn a whole country.

road = Old English rād ‘journey on horseback’, ‘foray’; of Germanic origin; related to the verb ride. street = Old English strǣt, of West Germanic origin, from late Latin strāta (via) ‘paved (way)’, feminine past participle of sternere ‘lay down’.

also, if length doesn't matter, then the question becomes "who invented the road" - because any road is going to have a straight bit if you go short enough...

@@vacri54 I took the question to mean an intentionally straight road from one destination to another, not a random straight section between curves. The effort to build a straight road can be significant, if there is intent.

The Etruscans would be my assumption.

@@ManOrManatee That was my first thought, but it was just a guess. Would have been nice to have gotten an answer from the show.

Pity the british didnt think the same

It was classed as a steam-powered tricycle rather than a car. It also didn't really work that well. I suppose it would be truer to say Benz built the first fully-working car, although an electric car was successfully demonstrated in France in 1881, so it is debatable. The fairest thing to say would be that the Benz was the first production car, not just a proof of concept.

There were several earlier attempts at building steam powered cars, but it's probably true to say that Benz built the first petrol powered one.

And 7 years before the US existed.

@@DanDownunda8888 When was that built?

@@DanDownunda8888 just asking as I hadn't heard of it.

@@DanDownunda8888 not a place I am likely to visit. I stick to the civilised countries in the middle east.

Sadly, the Gunbarrel Highway isn’t straight as a gun barrel. 😉

The hay plain if I'm not mistaken

People.

Snails

@@danielburger1775 U eat crayons.

The Republic of Ireland would beg to differ.

Exceptions are some European islands which drive on the left: Britain, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta

Arthur Smith en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Smith_(comedian)

That is such a brilliant description of Arthur Smith.

Well considering they're not roads

Ley lines aren’t real, they are a 20th century invention.

@@AndrewTBP source?

Iron age.

It's purely a trap. Like the famous: "Which is the odd one out? None of them Bahh BAhhhh"

its a comedy show

WHAT

Lombard St. In San Francisco.

10/10 You win the vid's comment section.

Most roads are Bisexual, they go both ways.

Canal Street, Manchester?

I think they had their eye on scotland instead.

Well, Britain does drive on the right side of the road

@@PianoKwanMan Thank you for proving my point.

A lot more countries used to drive on the left, but switched for convenience in having parity with neighbours. Not having any land neighbours, Britain didn't see the point.

@@MPal24 You have land borders with Ireland, Spain and Cyprus though. :)

@@xaverlustig3581 Don't let reality get in the way of colonial fantasy.

The rest of the world drives on the left

@@zapkvr no they don’t

@@zapkvr Very much incorrect. Most of Asia, most of Africa and almost the entirety of the Americas drive on the right. Not to mention that even in Europe it's just a couple of islands that drive on the left, everywhere else people drive on the right.

@@zapkvr That's just not true. South Africa, Australia, Malta, the UK, Ireland, Cypress, and New Zealand all drive on the left. But the rest of the world drives on the right.

@@oshii3585 basically just British commonwealth countries

Can you please STOP WHINING?

What do you want them to do though?

@@zapkvr , noooooooooooooooo.