AI or A1?

Just recently it has been impossible to get away from AI (artificial intelligence), because it is being used, abused and debated the world over. Reading about AI is disconcerting, because at a glance it looks like A1, and with some typefaces it is impossible to distinguish between the letter ‘I’ and the numeral ‘1’ (and to add to the confusion, I is the Roman numeral for one).

Classification of ships

In maritime history, A1 referred to the highest classification of seagoing vessels. Lloyd’s Register was founded as a classification society in 1760, and surveyors recorded the condition of vessels. The information was printed in annual Lloyd’s Registers of Shipping, whose abbreviations and symbols changed over the years. The earliest known Register covered 1764–6, when top-quality vessels were classed as AG – the hull being A and the equipment G (for ‘good’). AG later changed to ‘a1’, but the Register for 1775–6 used A1.

In order to keep their class, ships had to be well maintained. Although classification was not compulsory, it was highly desirable, as it facilitated insurance and was a reliable sign of quality, reassuring underwriters, merchants, passengers and crew. Disasters could still happen to A1 shipping, but the risk was reduced.

A1 advertising

Time and again A1 was used to promote ships. An advertisement in September 1800 in the Hull Packet newspaper stated that the John & Sarah, bound for St Petersburg, ‘stands A.I at Lloyd’s, Will sail with the Convoy expected the first week in October’. This was wartime, when the Royal Navy protected convoys of merchant ships. For decades such advertisements were commonplace, as in The Times newspaper for April 1830, when the Mary, A1, at London Docks was seeking extra cargo and passengers for a voyage to Australia (she safely reached her destination on 31st December with a general cargo and 29 passengers ready to start a new life).

 

Even billboards along the waterfront at New York used A1, including the ‘Good American Clipper Ship, Glory of the Seas, Captain Freeman … rated A1 at Lloyd’s, now loading at Pier 19 East River’.

Advertisements sometimes gave the term of years allotted to a ship’s A1 status, such as in The Times in May 1868, when the Agra (A1 13 years), Belvidera (A1 13 years) and Sunbeam (A1 12 years) were said to be leaving soon for Madras, India.

 

At a celebratory dinner in 1884, the Liverpool shipowner Sir Thomas Bland Royden spoke of the value of ships having a Lloyd’s Register class:

‘I venture to say that wherever a British ship goes, bearing the classification of Lloyd’s Register, in whatever part of the world, she is accepted as being fit to carry any cargo offered.’

A first-class expression

The adjective A1 became widely used in everyday language to mean first-class, excellent, outstanding or tip-top. The expression A1 at Lloyd’s meant the same, and in 1934 the Annals of Lloyd’s Register noted:

‘The character “A1 at Lloyd’s” has obtained popular currency wherever the English language is spoken, but among the millions who use the term, comparatively few have any clear idea either of its real significance or of its history. This history, tinged as it is with the glamour of romance which attaches to everything connected with the sea and seafaring people, would form a fitting subject for the inspired pen of a poet.’

In 1895 The Sketch magazine published a poem called ‘Day-Dreams’, a nostalgic view of childhood. One verse was:

And when I sailed my paper boats

Across a big tureen,

I knew not what “A 1” denotes––

“A 1” at Lloyd’s, I mean.

At Halifax, Nova Scotia, an early mention of A1 was published in 1836 by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. In his The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, Sam Slick talks about one politician: ‘He is a splendid man that––we class him No. 1, letter A.’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens (better known as The Pickwick Papers) appeared in monthly parts in 1836 and then in book form in 1837. When Samuel Pickwick and his servant Sam Weller are being shown the meagre lodgings in London’s Fleet Prison by the turnkey Tom Roker, Sam asks if the other inmates in the room are gentlemen. Roker confirms that they are:

‘One of ’em takes his twelve pints of ale a-day, and never leaves off smoking, even at his meals.’

‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam.

‘A,1,’ replied Mr. Roker.

The publisher of Dickens was Edward Chapman, who may have been a distant relation of Thomas Chapman, the chairman of Lloyd’s Register from 1835. Charles Dickens was a friend of Thomas Chapman and visited him at the Lloyd’s Register premises in White Lion Court, off Cornhill in London. The idea for the surname of Augustus Snodgrass, a member of the Pickwick Club and a poet, is thought that to have come from Dickens seeing in the boardroom an oil painting of Gabriel Snodgrass (1719–99), a renowned shipbuilder and surveyor to the East India Company.

A1 or A1 at Lloyd’s was used in all sorts of situations, as in 1875 when the Journal of Horticulture, Cottage Gardeners, and Country Gentlemen was discussing auriculas at the Royal Nurseries in Slough: ‘Colonel Champneys stood up grandly amongst the others … from a decorative point of view it is A1.’

In 1887 a children’s magazine adopted the title “A.1.” and contained illustrated short stories, puzzles, history, science and moral advice. These images are from the very first bound volume, the “A.1.” Annual, dating to 1887–8, rather tatty now. After three volumes it was not so A1 and ceased publication.