When Rafa Nadall beat Roger Federer last July in the longest final in Wimbledon history, he became the first Spaniard to win the Major on grass in 42 years. This sent Spain into total celebration mode. It also caused great consternation among Federer fans who were set to witness a sixth consecutive victory at Wimbledon. I suspect, however, that most people stumbled on yawning in their kitchens for another cup of coffee. I do not. I ran to my computer and opened a folder labeled “42”, where I have been collecting significant occurrences of the number for years. Before posing as a total madman, remember that “42” was revealed by the late British science fiction satirist Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001), as the answer to the fundamental question of life, the universe, and everything.
Adams’s science fiction “trilogy”, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” consisting of five novels, began as a BBC radio series in 1978. The story begins with the destruction of planet Earth to make way for a new intergalactic detour. Dismayed humans receive little sympathy: the ad, after all, had been displayed for millennia in the basement of a public building. Where? Well, not Earth.
The search for the meaning of life, the universe and everything is carried out by a long-suffering computer called Deep Thought, built by mice. In a show of unprecedented perseverance, he worked on the problem for 7.5 million years before concluding that the answer was number 42.
From the number of the first African American in major league baseball, Jackie Robinson, to the pound weight of the lump of granite used in the ancient Scottish sport of ice, curling, 42 shows up a lot in sports, even without considering scores. The New England Patriots waited 42 years to win a national championship; – It was 20-17 over the St. Louis Rams in the first Super Bowl won by a field goal. In October 2002, their forty-second season, Gene Autry’s now Anaheim Angels won their first World Series.
2009 started out as a full year of 42. Three of the biggest stories, the Hudson River Hero, the peanut butter recall and the California octuplets, are inexorably connected to the number. Captain Sully Sullenberger had 42 years of flying experience before landing safely on the Hudson. As of January 10, when King Nut issued its full peanut butter recall, 399 people in 42 states had been infected with salmonella. When Nadya Suleman gave birth to eighths, increasing the number of her offspring to fourteen and sparking a fierce debate about the unfair burden on taxpayers, California was embroiled in a budget crisis. The deficit? $ 42 billion.
Deaths from traffic accidents have decreased in 42 states. As I do my final edit of this article, I hear Charles Gibson say that 42% of prostate cancers are overdiagnosed. I wonder, will the 2009 government list contain 42 foreign terrorist groups as of April 2008?
This pop culture, the Holy Grail of numbers, makes many appearances in history. Napoleon Bonaparte graduated from military school in the forty-second of fifty-eight, proving once again that you don’t have to be top of your class to make history, although a higher ranking may have helped a bit at Waterloo. .
Ben Franklin completed 42 years of public service. Our youngest president, Teddy Roosevelt, was 42 when he was sworn in. Rosa Parks was 42 years old in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on the bus. 42 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, China became the third nation to send a man into space. Jung Lee Way, aboard the Shun Jo 5, orbited the Earth 14 times. I feel compelled to point out that fourteen is one third of 42.
42,000 feet is the ceiling for commercial aircraft. Captain Cook’s voyage spanned 4,200 miles of ocean. $ 4,200 was the average annual income in Hoover’s day, and there are 42 gallons in a barrel of crude oil. And who could forget 42nd and Broadway?
Not all significant instances of Adam’s favorite number are happy. In February 2003, NASA’s 42-year history of having no problem re-entry ended with the loss of the shuttle Columbia. Lenny Bruce, Gilda Radner, and Elvis Presley all died at age 42. By the way, Elvis made $ 42 million in 2006.
It’s even in the Bible; Matthew lists 42 generations between Abraham and Jesus, separated into three groups of fourteen. Furthermore, the fourth century Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, places the birth of Jesus in the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus.
For the state of Florida! There are 42 bridges in the Florida Keys. National Geographic reported on the relocation of a 350-ton Florida oak tree. Its root ball was 42 feet in diameter. In October 1995, the 42-member Governor’s Commission for Sustainable South Florida issued a unanimous statement denouncing the state of the Everglades.
Literature also has its 42. The wedding cake in Charles Dickens’s “The Magic Fishbone” has 42 yards in all directions. In “Tolkien’s Two Towers”, Gimley the Dwarf killed 42 Orks at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. There are 42 chapters in “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller. That makes me particularly happy. JK Rowling finished the Harry Potter series in her 42nd year.
My list contains many items that I suspect are no longer true. A 2001 study stated that 42 percent of women thought their dogs listened better than their husbands. In 2004, we heard that 42 percent of NASCAR fans were women. In 2007 we learned that 42 percent of blind American adults are married. In fact, I got so tired of recording survey data that I began to suspect that their authors were staunch Adams fans.
My research has left me with many questions. Do red blood cells still last only 42 days as Discover was reported in 2002? Is the secret writing embedded in our coin still 1/4 inch tall like PBS’s Nova told us in 2002? Are there still 42 political parties in Iraq as in 2004? Does the United States government still own 42 percent of Wyoming and New Mexico? Does Hewlett Packard still derive 42% of its corporate profit from ink sales, as reported in 2007? Didn’t you always know that they were hitting us with those cartridges?
And my personal life? A treasure trove of 42. That was how old my sister was when I was finally able to email her on her birthday. 42 degrees is the magic temperature at which our cold weather dehumidifiers no longer work. Our piano tuner says that the ideal humidity for a piano is 42 percent; he doesn’t know about my obsession. The addition my father built to our childhood home was 42 feet deep. 42 was also the number of items on the Hospital Patient Rights and Responsibilities List when my gallbladder was removed in 2006.
When my husband Googled my second album released under my maiden name, there were 42,000 hits, the first of which was a heavy metal website in Everitt, Pennsylvania, that wanted $ 50 for “Harvest,” which they were selling as a rare Christian CD. I resisted the urge to write to you and tell you that I had a few left that I would be happy to drop you for the bargain price of … oh, let’s say $ 42.
And then there is astronomy itself. How many years does daylight last at the poles of Uranus, for example? And nights? 42. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the planet’s axis is almost perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.
I wanted our closest star to be 4.2 light years away. At first, I thought I was going to be disappointed. The twin stars of Alpha Centauri, after all, which are often referred to as the closest outside our own solar system, are 4.3 light years apart. But wait! The famous twin star system contains a third smaller star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years from Earth; well, 4.22, if you want to be a technician.
Two of the most intriguing cases in astronomy of Adams’s favorite number arose after his death. In 2007, scientists discovered the Canis Major dwarf galaxy, named for the constellation in which it is found, is located 42,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. The forty-second entry on my list is the Allen Telescope Array in the Cascade Mountains of Northern California, which has 42 plates each twenty feet in diameter. Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, he began his search for alien life in 2006. In a way, I think Adams would like that.
copyright 2009 by Donna W. Hill