The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
Authors: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson
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world’s first reliable speed-measuring device. Gatsonides then added a flash camera which made it even more accurate. It enabled him to see just how much extra speed he could squeeze out of a corner by approaching it along a different line.
Gatso soon realised that his camera could also be used to catch speeding motorists. He founded Gatsometer BV in 1958 and over the next twenty years gradually refined his invention, introducing a radar beam to replace the rubber pressure strips in 1971. The ‘Gatso 24’ is now installed in more than forty countries. In many languages, speed cameras of any kind are simply known as ‘Gatsos’.
The first Gatsos in the UK were installed in Nottingham in 1988, after a triple fatality at a traffic-light-controlled junction. Having been slow to adopt the new technology, the UK now leads Europe in the use of speed cameras. In 2007 the UK had 4,309 of them (compared with 1,571 in 2001), more than France and Italy combined.
Do they work? The evidence suggests that they do. A four-year survey by the UK Department for Transport, published in 2006, reported that the overall speed past camera sites was reduced by an average of 6 per cent, and the number of people killed or seriously injured by 42 per cent. While the motoring lobby points out that driving too fast is the main cause in only 14 per cent of fatal accidents – compared with ‘driver distraction’ which accounts for 68 per cent – the enforcement of speed limits has had a massive impact on the number of collisions. In the ten years since 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour) limits were introduced in London, the number of accidents has halved.
Dislike of speed cameras is nothing new. The Automobile Association was established in 1905 to help motorists avoidpolice speed traps which (then as now) many felt were more to do with extorting money than road safety. All drivers speed at some point: 75 per cent admit to doing it regularly. But for all the grumbling, according to the Department for Transport, 82 per cent of us think speed cameras are a good thing.
Gatsonides certainly thought so. ‘I am often caught by my own speed cameras and find hefty fines on my doormat,’ he once confessed. ‘I love speeding.’
JEREMY CLARKSON There’s a marvellous new club in Holland called the Tuf Tuf Club that goes around destroying speed cameras.
STEPHEN Oh, really?
JEREMY You get prizes if you can think of the most imaginative way. My favourite one was to put some of that builders’ foam in. It just bursts and then sets in a rather ugly, Dr Who-y special effect. Which is quite good.
What’s the word for a staircase that goes round and round?
It’s not ‘spiral’, it’s helical.
A spiral is a two-dimensional curve which radiates out from a fixed, central point. The longer it gets, the less curved it becomes, like a snail shell. A helix is a three-dimensional curve, like a spring or a Slinky, which doesn’t change its angle of curve no matter how long it gets.
In the Scottish Borders there’s a legend that the Kerr family built their castle towers with helical staircases that went round in the opposite direction to everybody else’s. Because most ofthe male Kerrs were left-handed, this gave them an advantage in defending the stairs against a right-handed swordsman.
Sadly, it isn’t true: Kerrs are no more left-handed than any other family. A 1972 study in the British Medical Journal reported a 30 per cent incidence of left-handedness among Kerrs against a 10 per cent incidence in the British population generally, but the research turned out to be flawed. It had been based on a self-selecting sample, i.e. left-handed people with the surname Kerr were encouraged to come forward, and so the results were badly skewed. A later and more careful study in 1993 found no such tendency.
What’s more, the staircase trick wouldn’t work: if a defender was left-handed then an anticlockwise staircase would indeed allow him to use
Gatso soon realised that his camera could also be used to catch speeding motorists. He founded Gatsometer BV in 1958 and over the next twenty years gradually refined his invention, introducing a radar beam to replace the rubber pressure strips in 1971. The ‘Gatso 24’ is now installed in more than forty countries. In many languages, speed cameras of any kind are simply known as ‘Gatsos’.
The first Gatsos in the UK were installed in Nottingham in 1988, after a triple fatality at a traffic-light-controlled junction. Having been slow to adopt the new technology, the UK now leads Europe in the use of speed cameras. In 2007 the UK had 4,309 of them (compared with 1,571 in 2001), more than France and Italy combined.
Do they work? The evidence suggests that they do. A four-year survey by the UK Department for Transport, published in 2006, reported that the overall speed past camera sites was reduced by an average of 6 per cent, and the number of people killed or seriously injured by 42 per cent. While the motoring lobby points out that driving too fast is the main cause in only 14 per cent of fatal accidents – compared with ‘driver distraction’ which accounts for 68 per cent – the enforcement of speed limits has had a massive impact on the number of collisions. In the ten years since 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour) limits were introduced in London, the number of accidents has halved.
Dislike of speed cameras is nothing new. The Automobile Association was established in 1905 to help motorists avoidpolice speed traps which (then as now) many felt were more to do with extorting money than road safety. All drivers speed at some point: 75 per cent admit to doing it regularly. But for all the grumbling, according to the Department for Transport, 82 per cent of us think speed cameras are a good thing.
Gatsonides certainly thought so. ‘I am often caught by my own speed cameras and find hefty fines on my doormat,’ he once confessed. ‘I love speeding.’
JEREMY CLARKSON There’s a marvellous new club in Holland called the Tuf Tuf Club that goes around destroying speed cameras.
STEPHEN Oh, really?
JEREMY You get prizes if you can think of the most imaginative way. My favourite one was to put some of that builders’ foam in. It just bursts and then sets in a rather ugly, Dr Who-y special effect. Which is quite good.
What’s the word for a staircase that goes round and round?
It’s not ‘spiral’, it’s helical.
A spiral is a two-dimensional curve which radiates out from a fixed, central point. The longer it gets, the less curved it becomes, like a snail shell. A helix is a three-dimensional curve, like a spring or a Slinky, which doesn’t change its angle of curve no matter how long it gets.
In the Scottish Borders there’s a legend that the Kerr family built their castle towers with helical staircases that went round in the opposite direction to everybody else’s. Because most ofthe male Kerrs were left-handed, this gave them an advantage in defending the stairs against a right-handed swordsman.
Sadly, it isn’t true: Kerrs are no more left-handed than any other family. A 1972 study in the British Medical Journal reported a 30 per cent incidence of left-handedness among Kerrs against a 10 per cent incidence in the British population generally, but the research turned out to be flawed. It had been based on a self-selecting sample, i.e. left-handed people with the surname Kerr were encouraged to come forward, and so the results were badly skewed. A later and more careful study in 1993 found no such tendency.
What’s more, the staircase trick wouldn’t work: if a defender was left-handed then an anticlockwise staircase would indeed allow him to use
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