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ISSUE 063 · FUN FACTS · USELESS BUT FASCINATING

On the morning of 28 January 1896, a motor dealer named Walter Arnold drove through the village of Paddock Wood in Kent at roughly eight miles an hour. The limit was two. A police constable saw him pass, got on his bicycle, and gave chase. He caught Arnold about five miles later. It is the first speeding conviction in recorded history, and the offender was travelling slower than a modern jogger.

The two-mile limit sounds like pure Victorian absurdity, and it isn't quite. The Locomotive Acts had been written in the 1860s for steam traction engines — machines weighing several tonnes, with brakes to match, sharing narrow roads with horses. The same law required a man to walk ahead of the vehicle; the red flag he was originally obliged to carry had been dropped in 1878, but the walking man had not. These were rules for a technology that genuinely was dangerous to everything around it. The problem was that a different machine had arrived and nobody had updated the paperwork.

Arnold was fined one shilling plus costs, across four separate charges: speeding, operating a vehicle without a licence, having too few people in charge of it, and failing to display his name and address on it.

The law he broke had months to live. That November, the Locomotives on Highways Act raised the limit to fourteen miles an hour and abolished the walking attendant — a change the motor trade celebrated with a run from London to Brighton that is still re-enacted every year. Arnold was convicted under a rule the country was already in the process of repealing, and went on selling cars without much apparent difficulty.

Maine's overtime law listed the jobs that don't qualify for overtime pay. Among them: "the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of" perishable food. Read the end of that list again. There is no comma before "or distribution."

Delivery drivers at Oakhurst Dairy noticed. They drive milk around Maine; they do not pack it. Without the comma, they argued, "packing for shipment or distribution" is a single activity — packing, for either of two purposes — so the exemption covers packers, not drivers. The dairy argued the reverse: distribution was its own item on the list, and drivers were plainly exempt.

In March 2017 a federal appeals court sided with the drivers. The opinion's opening line, written by Judge David Barron, has been quoted in style guides ever since: "For want of a comma, we have this case." The court also pointed to a grammatical tell — every other item in the list is a gerund ending in -ing, while "distribution" is a plain noun, which reads more naturally as the object of "packing for." Oakhurst settled in February 2018 for five million dollars.

Two things complicate the idea that punctuation alone decided it. First, the court never ruled that the missing comma proved the drivers right; it ruled the sentence was genuinely ambiguous, and that Maine's wage law must be read in workers' favour when it is unclear. The tiebreaker did the real work. Second, the legislature had not been careless — Maine's own official drafting manual instructs lawmakers not to put a comma before the final item in a list. The state followed its house style into a five-million-dollar hole. And when it amended the statute afterwards, it did not add the comma. It replaced the commas with semicolons and sidestepped the rule entirely.

On 18 January 1943, Claude Wickard — Secretary of Agriculture and head of the War Foods Administration — made it illegal to sell sliced bread in the United States. Not bread. Sliced bread. A bakery could sell you a loaf. It could not sell you a loaf with the slicing already done.

The justifications moved around, which is usually a sign. First it was wax paper: a pre-sliced loaf goes stale faster, so it needs heavier wrapping, and paper was rationed. Then it was the steel in the slicing machines and the cost of maintaining them. Then it was prices — with a wartime ceiling on the cost of bread, bakeries absorbing the expense of slicing might push for an increase. Each argument was plausible on its own. None was ever backed with a published figure.

The reaction was immediate and loud. Newspapers printed letters from households doing the arithmetic on hand-slicing bread for a family three times a day. Bakers, who had already bought the machines, objected too. On 8 March — seven weeks in — the order was rescinded, with the administration conceding that the savings had not turned out to be what it had expected.

What makes the fury make sense is how new sliced bread was. The first slicing machine went into a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1928. Within fifteen years, roughly four-fifths of American bread was sold pre-sliced. A convenience nobody's grandparents had known had become, in a decade and a half, completely non-negotiable — which is also roughly when people started saying "the best thing since sliced bread."

In November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness brewery, was at a shooting party in County Wexford. He took a shot at a golden plover and missed. An argument followed about whether the golden plover was in fact the fastest game bird in Europe, or whether that honour belonged to the red grouse. Nobody could settle it. The house's reference books were no help at all.

Beaver drew a commercial conclusion. If a room full of educated men could not resolve a simple factual dispute, then every pub in Britain and Ireland was having the same kind of argument nightly — and a book that ended them would be welcome in all of them. It would also, conveniently, carry the brewery's name into each one.

He hired Norris and Ross McWhirter, twin brothers who ran a fact-finding agency in London. The first edition appeared in August 1955, a slim volume of under two hundred pages, and was Britain's best-selling non-fiction book by Christmas. It has since sold well over a hundred million copies and holds a record of its own: the best-selling copyrighted book series in history.

The original question was never cleanly answered. Whether the golden plover beats the red grouse still depends on what you mean by fastest — level flight or a dive — and on measurements that have never been consistent. The most successful reference book ever published was built on a dispute it could not settle.

Speeding: contemporary press reports of the Paddock Wood prosecution, 28 January 1896, as preserved in British motoring and police historical archives; the Locomotive Act 1865 (the "Red Flag Act") and the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896.

The comma: O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, 851 F.3d 69 (1st Cir. 2017); the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual on serial commas; reporting on the February 2018 settlement in the New York Times and the ABA Journal.

Sliced bread: the War Foods Administration order of 18 January 1943 and its rescission on 8 March 1943; contemporary New York Times coverage; Smithsonian Magazine on the ban and on Otto Rohwedder's 1928 slicing machine.

Guinness World Records: the publisher's own account of its founding; obituaries of Sir Hugh Beaver and of Norris McWhirter; first edition, August 1955.

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