Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covert 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 for 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 one by a guy called Ray Haroon and basically the reason he won it was that

he realised 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 round 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.

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 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

...