Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chazinski,
and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is Chazinski.
My fact this week is
that the rear view mirror was invented so that racing drivers didn't have to have a person sitting next to them in the car explaining what was going on behind them.
Yes, I think bizarrely I found this out because I saw a post from an insurance site or something, but anyway,
it was invented for the Indy 500 inaugural race in 1911, so the Indy 500 is that big race that happens in Indianapolis,
1911 it was won by a guy called Ray Haroon,
and basically the reason he won it was that he realized that the cars always had two people in them,
the driver, and then the person who had to do a number of things,
one of which included turning around and saying
if there were any cars behind them in dangerous positions to make sure there wasn't a pile up or a big crash,
and Ray thought that's a lot of extra weight, I wonder if I can avoid that,
and what he did was he got a mirror and placed it in the middle of his car,
hanging in the middle of his car on a pole, and then he won the race because he halved the weight in the car.
He did win the race, although we're not 100% sure that he actually won the race, as in he got given the prize,
but the truth was that no one really knew how to count all the laps or time things or anything like that,
and there were loads of pit stops, so really no one actually knew who won the race.