Call to correct Gulliver’s Travels food estimates
Researcher finds famous satirist made mistakes on Lilliputian physiology.
Calculations in Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric masterpiece written by Jonathan Swift in the early 18th century, are incorrect, according to a researcher from Japan’s University of Tokyo.
The novel, as most people know, details the travels of Lemuel Gulliver through a number of lands populated by tiny people, giants, scientists, immortals and talking horses.
It’s a great piece of writing, but Toshio Kurkori identifies some problems with the mathematics – in particular Swift’s precise calculation that Gulliver needed the food of 1724 little Lilliputians to satisfy his hunger.
Kurkori compiled a multi-factorial analysis based on the heart and respiration rates, life spans and blood pressure of the people of Lilliput and found the real number was a much more conservative 42.
At the other end of the scale, he found that Swift’s hero would need just oneforty-second of a typical Brobdinagian meal to fill his belly.
“Based on the above findings, the food requirement of Gulliver in the original text should be corrected after almost three centuries,” Kurkori concludes in a paper published in The Journal of Physiological Science.