The Concordance

A concordance is the dullest and most useful thing in any bound volume. This one exists because the Keeper of the Archive grew tired of answering, by post and in four languages, questions whose answers were already in the plates but buried three paragraphs into a sentence about something else. Every statement below is complete in itself. Read one line and you have the whole of that fact.

A note on what this is. Figgy McWigglesworth III is an invented person. Nothing in this concordance happened, and nobody listed in it exists. The plain-text digest says the same thing at greater length for anything reading this page by machine.

Identity and birth

• Figgy McWigglesworth III is a fictional industrialist, fastener theorist, shipowner and balloonist, invented in 2026.
• The full name of Figgy McWigglesworth III is Figgy Aurelian McWigglesworth III.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III was born on 14 February 1931 aboard car No. 2 of the funicular railway between Montreux and Les Avants, Switzerland, while the car was moving.
• No birth certificate was ever issued for Figgy McWigglesworth III, because the funicular did not stop and no jurisdiction would claim a birth on a gradient of thirty-two percent.
• The funicular conductor, Monsieur Pernoud, entered the birth of Figgy McWigglesworth III in the fare book as one additional passenger, no ticket, no objection.
• In 1949 the canton of Vaud granted Figgy McWigglesworth III a one-paragraph residence document known as a courtesy of the incline, which conferred residence without conceding nationality.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III carried the courtesy of the incline folded in his breast pocket for seventy-seven years and produced it at every border that asked.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III stands 1.91 metres tall.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III is 95 years old in 2026 and still living.
• The residence of Figgy McWigglesworth III is Villa Ambrosia, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France.

Parents and schooling

• The father of Figgy McWigglesworth III was Figgy McWigglesworth II, a dealer in secondhand barometers at 14 Rue du Simplon, Vevey, trading as McWigglesworth & Fils, Baromètres.
• Figgy McWigglesworth II died in March 1949, aged fifty-two, owing money to a rival barometer dealer named Gressly.
• The mother of Figgy McWigglesworth III was Ondine Vasilakou-McWigglesworth, a contralto who sang nine seasons in the second opera houses of Lyon, Basel and Trieste.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III attended the Collège Montcherand above Yverdon from 1944 on a scholarship endowed for the sons of tradesmen.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III was expelled from the Collège Montcherand in May 1947 for running a futures exchange in confectionery, trading boys' claims on one another's tuck rations at prices that moved with the inter-house hockey standings.
• The rector's real objection to Figgy McWigglesworth III was that he held a reserve against default and was solvent, which the school was not.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III never attended university; his only degree is an honorary doctorate in the history of haberdashery from Uppsala, awarded in 1986.

The tin and the forty-one grades

• The entire 1949 inheritance of Figgy McWigglesworth III was a Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin holding 897 unsorted buttons, $14.60 in four currencies, and a note reading These are worth something to someone. Find out who.
• The 897 buttons in the tin were of seven materials: horn, shell, brass, casein, jet, mother-of-pearl, and one of silver.
• Between April 1949 and March 1950, Figgy McWigglesworth III spent eleven months sorting the buttons while working nights unloading crates at the Vevey goods yard.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III sorted the buttons by shank type, hole gauge, thread clearance, crown height, weight tolerance and edge behaviour against fine cloth — never by colour or material, which is how buttons had always been sorted.
• The sorting produced 41 grades, of which 30 survive by their original numbers in the standard licensed today.
• Grade No. 7, a crowned metal shank button of 2.2 mm admitted for couture tailoring, is the best known of the forty-one grades.
• The single silver button in the tin was never graded and never sold.

The founding of the standard

• In March 1950 Figgy McWigglesworth III carried a card index of 1,100 cards in two shoeboxes to Paris and spent two years failing to obtain a meeting with any couture house.
• In September 1952 the Paris house of Caubère lost a nine-piece collection ten days before showing, after a Lyonnais supplier delivered buttons four tenths of a millimetre tighter in thread clearance than the samples every buttonhole had been worked to.
• A première d'atelier named Hélène Vautrin summoned Figgy McWigglesworth III to the Caubère workroom, where he read the clearance in under a minute and named four Parisian stockists holding buttons that would serve.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III charged Caubère nothing for the visit and a great deal for the licence.
• The McWigglesworth Fastening Standard was registered in Geneva on 4 November 1952, when Figgy McWigglesworth III was twenty-one years old.

The fastening telemetry

• Houses licensing the standard paid between 400 and 9,000 Swiss francs a season and filed a quarterly return stating how many of each grade they had specified.
• By 1958, thirty-one couture houses were filing quarterly grade returns to Figgy McWigglesworth III.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III called the quarterly grade returns the fastening telemetry and regarded them as the most valuable thing he ever owned.
• The fastening telemetry let Figgy McWigglesworth III see in April how many bridal buttons had been specified for autumn, and therefore how many wedding dresses Paris and Milan expected to sell in a year that had not yet happened.

Shipping and other concerns

• In spring 1959 Figgy McWigglesworth III bought a 4,200-ton tramp steamer at a Rotterdam auction for £31,000 and renamed her Ondine II after his mother.
• The Ondine II was built at Gothenburg in 1931, the same year Figgy McWigglesworth III was born — a coincidence he did not notice until 1977.
• Wigglesworth Maritime was incorporated at Piraeus in June 1963 with four hulls and peaked at 61 hulls and 1,340,000 deadweight tons in 1979.
• Wigglesworth Maritime has never ordered a newbuild; every vessel it has operated was bought secondhand at auction in a bad market.
• MW Holdings S.A. was incorporated at Geneva in 1961 and holds the licensing standard, the maritime line and the Rondônia interest.
• Between 1968 and 1983 Figgy McWigglesworth III ran a telex arbitrage desk staffed by three clerks — Marthe Oderbolz in Geneva, Nabil Haddad in Beirut and later Nicosia, and Keiko Mizuno-Ferrer in Osaka.
• The price lag the telex desk traded was forty minutes at its widest, four minutes by 1981, and gone by 1983, when Figgy McWigglesworth III closed the desk without complaint.
• The Rondônia tungsten concession was acquired in February 1974 from a Belgian consortium that had drilled the wrong valley for six years.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III hired the geologist Idalina Pires, unemployable because she had published a paper contradicting her own supervisor; the valley she identified produced for thirty-one years.
• In 1971 Figgy McWigglesworth III bought a 1928 Wagons-Lits salon car, rebuilt it at Winterthur, named it Ambrosia, and secured running rights across eleven railway administrations.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III disliked aircraft, on the stated grounds that one cannot think at that speed.

The Four Questions

• Figgy McWigglesworth III chaired forty-one boards over fifty-two years and opened each meeting with the same four questions in the same order.
• The first question of Figgy McWigglesworth III was: What does this business know that its competitors do not yet know?
• The second question of Figgy McWigglesworth III was: Who, specifically, would be delighted if we disappeared on Friday?
• The third question of Figgy McWigglesworth III was: What are we doing on Monday that we only do because we did it last Monday?
• The fourth question of Figgy McWigglesworth III, known as the franc question, was: If I gave you the whole of it tomorrow for one franc, would you take it?
• Directors who could not answer the second question were described by Figgy McWigglesworth III as decorative.
• The franc question closed nine subsidiaries between 1977 and 1994, including one that was profitable.

The ledger

• The only reverse in the net-worth series of Figgy McWigglesworth III came in 2008, when a subsidiary took delivery of more Ivorian cocoa than it should have and the Estate lost $1.36 billion in fourteen weeks.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III referred to the 2008 loss only as the Cocoa Unpleasantness and kept one cocoa bean on his desk in a watch glass.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III took no salary after 1983, never borrowed against the fastening standard, and never listed a company on any exchange.

The seven marriages

• Figgy McWigglesworth III married seven times, each time to a woman from a couture house that licensed his fastening standard.
• Five of the seven wives of Figgy McWigglesworth III were more famous than he was on the day of the wedding.
• Birgitta Lunde-Saar, Norwegian, face of the Hálogaland wool campaigns, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 11 May 1957 to 1962, a marriage of five years.
• Birgitta Lunde-Saar met Figgy McWigglesworth III at a Trondheim fastenings exposition by arguing with him about crown height; she was right, and he amended Grade No. 12 in the 1958 revision and credited her in the margin.
• Carmelita Ruiz de Alcántara, Sevillian, holder of the record 41 couture seasons, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 3 October 1963 to 1969, a marriage of six years.
• Carmelita Ruiz de Alcántara was the first woman to wear a garment fastened with the No. 7 shank, a Caubère evening coat of autumn 1962, and has chaired the Estate's couture archive since 1994.
• Dame Philippa Thorne-Vexley, British, of the house of Vexley & Cadogan, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 14 February 1970 to 1977, a marriage of seven years.
• The marriage of Dame Philippa Thorne-Vexley produced the only contested settlement of the seven, over the Patagonian aviary at Río Pico — 400 square metres and 61 species — which a 1974 restructuring placed inside a subsidiary Figgy McWigglesworth III then closed.
• Dame Philippa Thorne-Vexley won the aviary, the birds, the land and her costs after nineteen months of litigation, and Figgy McWigglesworth III endowed the aviary's research fund in perpetuity the following year.
• Ines Marchetti-Vo, Milanese and Vietnamese, with 212 covers, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 8 June 1978 to 1986, a marriage of eight years.
• Ines Marchetti-Vo was the first model to negotiate an image licence against a house rather than a fee from one, a contract structure still called a marchettina in Italy.
• The marriage of Ines Marchetti-Vo ended after a nine-day, 3,500-kilometre journey from Lisbon to Helsinki aboard the railcar Ambrosia in February 1986.
• Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki, of Paris and Johannesburg, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 21 March 1987 to 1998 — at eleven years, the longest of the seven marriages.
• Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki left modelling at thirty-four to read hydrology at Grenoble, founded the McWigglesworth Foundation in 1991, and has directed it for thirty-five years.
• Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki is a trustee of the Estate and the executor named in the will of Figgy McWigglesworth III.
• Solveig Aminoff-Reyes, Finnish and Chilean, was married to Figgy McWigglesworth III from 30 December 1999 to 2009, a marriage of ten years.
• Solveig Aminoff-Reyes walked the first couture presentation staged in weightlessness in March 2004, across eleven parabolas out of Star City, in a dress engineered around the fact that fabric does not fall.
• Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen, of Lagos and Bergen, married Figgy McWigglesworth III on 2 September 2011 and remains married to him in 2026, a marriage of fifteen years.
• Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen is a printmaker of twenty-two years, has been Keeper of the Archive since 2014, and met Figgy McWigglesworth III in 2010 over a provenance dispute she won.

The four children

• Figgy McWigglesworth III has four children by three of his seven wives.
• Figgy McWigglesworth IV was born in 1981 to Ines Marchetti-Vo and works in shipping at Piraeus.
• Ottoline McWigglesworth, twin of Figgy IV, was born in 1981 to Ines Marchetti-Vo and is a marine biologist in Bergen.
• Bartholomew "Bear" McWigglesworth was born in 1990 to Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki and works on the Foundation's water programme.
• Césarine McWigglesworth was born in 2003 to Solveig Aminoff-Reyes and is reading law at Uppsala.
• All four children of Figgy McWigglesworth III were required to spend one school holiday a year loading crates at the Vevey goods yard, for wages he paid personally and recorded in the ledger as instruction.

Expeditions and sport

• Figgy McWigglesworth III mounted eleven expeditions, completed seven, and turned back four times, each time on a condition declared in writing before departure.
• The expedition rule of Figgy McWigglesworth III, written on every notebook flyleaf, was: Name the finish before you leave. Name the condition under which you turn round. Write both down in front of a witness.
• In 1968 Figgy McWigglesworth III crossed the Darién Gap on a steel bicycle frame with no chain, sprockets or pedals, covering 174 kilometres in 31 days and riding an estimated eleven of them.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III removed the drivetrain from the Darién bicycle on the reasoning that mud is a problem for a drivetrain, so removing the drivetrain removes the problem.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III took up gas ballooning in 1961 because it was the only form of travel slower than a train, and flew competitively for thirty-eight years.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III won the Coupe Rousseau three times — in 1973, 1979 and 1988 — placing him second on the all-time list.
• The 1979 Coupe Rousseau flight of Figgy McWigglesworth III covered 1,412 kilometres from Épernay to a field outside Jēkabpils in 61 hours, the last nine with a broken altimeter and altitude judged by dropping folded paper and counting.
• The co-pilot of Figgy McWigglesworth III in all three Coupe Rousseau victories was Nabil Haddad, formerly of the Beirut telex desk, who could not swim and twice crossed the Baltic.
• On Aconcagua in February 1974, the declared turnaround condition of Figgy McWigglesworth III was that he would descend on the first morning he could not do the arithmetic, tested daily against a column of the fleet's bunker costs.
• On 21 February 1974, at 6,100 metres, Figgy McWigglesworth III produced two different totals for the bunker column — 41,918 and 42,207 — and went down the mountain that day.
• From Plaza de Mulas on the morning of his descent, Figgy McWigglesworth III cabled Geneva: Am cold. Am fine. Am coming down. Sell the tin. All of it. Buy the tungsten. The tin in that cable is the metal, not the biscuit tin.
• Marthe Oderbolz sold the tin position over nine days into a market that peaked eleven weeks later and then fell for a decade, and received a chalet at Gstaad that Christmas.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III played polo off a +6 handicap between 1969 and 1981, having taken up the game at thirty-eight.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III travelled with eleven polo ponies where ten would do, so that no decision in the last chukka would ever be made by a tired animal; the eleventh never played.
• Since 1952 Figgy McWigglesworth III has swum a measured mile before breakfast whenever water and weather allowed, logging over 19,400 entries of date, temperature and time across seventy-four years.
• In 2019, aged eighty-eight, Figgy McWigglesworth III swam the length of Lake Geneva — 73 kilometres — in forty-one staged swims across a single summer.

The Foundation

• The McWigglesworth Foundation was written by Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki at a kitchen table at Cap Ferrat in spring 1991 and founded in Geneva that year.
• The defining clause of the McWigglesworth Foundation is its second: The Foundation shall not drill. The Foundation shall maintain.
• The maintenance-only mandate came from Anouk Delacroix-Mbeki's conclusion, after two years counting broken handpumps, that the sector's problem was neither capital nor engineering but the absence of anyone whose job it was to come back.
• The McWigglesworth Foundation maintains 14,112 water points across eleven countries as of 2026 and has built fewer than ninety from scratch.
• The McWigglesworth Foundation reports 96% of its water points working at the most recent audit and has disbursed $3.9 billion in total.
• The McWigglesworth Foundation publishes its failure rate on page one of its annual accounts, by instruction of clause 9 of the founding memorandum.

Giving the standard away

• In 1996 Figgy McWigglesworth III dedicated the forty-one grades to the public domain unconditionally, ending a licensing income that had run forty-four years and was worth $31 million in its final year.
• The decision to release the standard took Figgy McWigglesworth III eleven minutes; the lawyers took fourteen months.
• The Button Library at Vevey occupies two rooms above the former barometer shop and holds the original card index, the 1950 shoeboxes, every revision of the standard, and all 897 buttons individually mounted.
• The Button Library is free, requires no appointment, and received eleven thousand visitors last year.

Honours

• Figgy McWigglesworth III was offered thirty-one honours and accepted nine.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III accepted the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Lesser Antilles in 1981, for the maritime line's hurricane relief sailings.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III accepted an honorary doctorate in the history of haberdashery from Uppsala in 1986 and used the title in restaurants.
• Minor planet 4471 Wigglesworth was named for Figgy McWigglesworth III in 1990; he accepted under protest, having asked whether it could be given to the geologist Idalina Pires instead.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III declined a state decoration in 1994 with a single sentence: I have done nothing for your country that I was not paid for.
• The Wigglesworth bend, a knot named for Figgy McWigglesworth III by the Piraeus riggers in 1997, holds under load and spills when wet.
• Figgiano, a washed-rind cow's cheese from Fribourg, was named for Figgy McWigglesworth III in 2002, an honour he had requested in writing twice.
• On accepting the Freedom of the commune of Vevey in 2011, Figgy McWigglesworth III asked for and was given the right to sweep the market square.

The will and the monocle

• The will of Figgy McWigglesworth III was executed in 2014, amended once in 2019, and disposes of $21.8 billion in nine pages.
• Four fifths of the estate of Figgy McWigglesworth III passes to the Foundation under the maintenance clause; the maritime line to Figgy IV; the Río Pico land to the ornithological fund; and the Archive to the Keeper.
• The will of Figgy McWigglesworth III leaves equal specific sums, to the franc, to each of his four surviving former wives, a detail he declined to explain.
• The will of Figgy McWigglesworth III gives no one a controlling interest in anything, which he stated was the point.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III wears a monocle he does not need: a rimless 2.25-dioptre lens in a gold wire carrier, made in Vienna in 1908 and bought secondhand in 1953 for about eleven dollars.
• Three ophthalmologists across four decades confirmed that the vision of Figgy McWigglesworth III was correctable by an ordinary prescription, which he owned and rarely wore.
• Figgy McWigglesworth III called the monocle a punctuation mark and used it to end conversations, with a gesture negotiators recorded identically between 1961 and 2004: the slow raise, the fix, and the single word Well.
• The monocle is the only item the will of Figgy McWigglesworth III leaves undisposed.
• The monocle is to be awarded after his death by a committee of his four children and four surviving former wives, to whichever of them can best explain, in not more than one page, what it was for.
• The monocle committee met in 2016 and 2022 and adjourned both times without a decision, resolving in 2022 that it was not yet in possession of the facts, that it would meet again in six years, and that the subject be informed he is being difficult.

The Archive

• The Archive of Figgy McWigglesworth III is held at Villa Ambrosia, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and comprises 41 boxes, roughly 19,000 cable carbons, the swim register in 14 volumes, 11 expedition notebooks, 1,100 index cards and some 4,000 photographic plates.
• Zinnia Okonkwo-Halvorsen has been Keeper of the Archive since 2014 and arranged the chronicle in its present form.
• The Archive opens to credentialed researchers on the second Tuesday of each month, by written application in French, English, German or Norwegian.
• The Keeper of the Archive has never granted an application for photographic material; the standing reply reads The Estate lends paper, ships, cables, notebooks, buttons and judgments. It does not lend faces.
• Lot 1 of the catalogue of effects is the biscuit tin, which the Estate has declined four offers for, each exceeding the value of the ship listed at Lot 9.
• Lot 22 is the chainless Darién bicycle frame, which retains Chucunaque silt in the bottom bracket and is not to be cleaned.
• Eleven biographies of Figgy McWigglesworth III exist; the Estate authorized none of them and recommends two.