In the fourth episode (1978-03-29) of Douglas Adams’ BBC Radio 4 radio series The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer Deep Tought hesitatingly gives its famous answer ’42’. That triggered the never ending discussion about what meaning that number might have. And as Lewis Carroll too had a thing with the number ’42’, there also are assumptions that in his Hitchhiker Adams’ ’42’ might be a nod to Carroll.
«In July 1973, Adams was working on a business training film by John Cleese. There were discussions about selecting the plainest, most boring number related to the sentence “Well, it’s got to fit under a work surface.” Then a ’42″’was inserted into that sentence, which then became “Well, it’s got to fit under a 42″ work surface.”
In the Hole in the well Gang (1974) of the comedy trio Adams-Smith-Adams (Will Adams, Martin Smith, and Douglas Adams) there is a segment of a sketch where the “minutes of the 79th meeting of the Crawley and District Paranoid Society” are mentioned. It was handwritten by Will Adams (no family relations with Douglas Adams), who then replaced (in handwriting as well) the ’79’ by ’42’.
Kevin Jon Davies wrote that Adams might have been inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alices Adventures in Wonderland, where a ‘Rule 42’ means “All persons more than a mile high [have] to leave the court.” Adams was well aware of his own hight, even though the rule would not apply to his 6 feet 5 inches.
Davies also wrote that «in January 1977 the Hole in the Wall Gang was modified for The Burkiss Way radio series, admitting that ‘the number 42 has greatly increased its popularity’. Adams-Smith-Adams also used it towards the end of the sketch, as part of an address: ’42 Logical Positivism Avenue’.»
(Source for this paragraph: 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. Edited by Kevin Jon Davies, 2023)
«The Hunting of the Snark is subtitled An Agony in Eight Fits (from “Fit the First” to “Fit the Eighth”), “Fit,” writes Martin Gardner in The Annotated Snark, “has the double meaning of a convulsion and a canto.” But this sense is all but obsolete; the OED quotes Samuel Johnson and Lord Byron. It seems unlikely that it was by chance that Douglas Adams titled the episodes of the Hitchhiker radio series (on which the books were based) from “Fit the First” to “Fit the Sixth”.
If you’re still not convinced, compare the White Queen’s line in Through the Looking-Glass (“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”) to the end of Chapter 15 of Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (“If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?”).»
(Source for this paragraph: Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams by Will Nediger, 2005, the journal Word Ways)
All that still doesn’t tell us whether ’42’ is (or isn’t) a code for some more or less deeper meaning. Adams firmly asserted (alt.fan.douglas-adams, 1993-11-03): «It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.» With regard to what Kevin Jon Davies told us, I am not so sure about whether that assertion is true or not. But the number 42 has greatly increased the popularity of Adams’ guide too, and, of course, of Adams himself. It worked quite fine as a marketing tool.
Thus, if a ’42’ came to me, and told me it has no meaning, I at least could say “With what purpose?”, because there is an observable purpose; the number keeps and will keep the debate simmering (and sometimes even boiling) for a very long time (until Deep Tought will have computed the question to the answer ’42’?).
➜ Bluesky
2026-05-12, update: 2026-09-15