On Saturday, 10 November 1951, a man stood on a mudflat in County Wexford and missed a bird.

The mudflat was the North Slob, on the River Slaney. The man was Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness. The bird was a golden plover, and it kept going.

That evening the shooting party sat down at Castlebridge House and the miss turned into an argument, the way misses do. Someone held that the golden plover was the fastest game bird in Europe. Someone else preferred the red grouse. The house had a library, which Beaver remembered as being full of very expensive books, and not one of them could settle it. The party went to bed unresolved.

Slow down here, because this is where an ordinary irritation turns into a business. Beaver did not decide he should go and find out about the plover. He decided that at that same hour, in something like 81,400 pubs across Britain and Ireland, other people were losing other arguments, and that no book on earth existed to stop them.

Then he did nothing about it for nearly three years.

What broke the silence was the argument coming back. In August 1954 the same dispute started up in front of him again, this time with somebody insisting the grouse were faster still. Three years, and the birds had not moved an inch. On 12 September he invited two men to lunch at the Park Royal brewery in north-west London.

They reached that lunch through a chain of coincidence no plan would have survived. Guinness employed, as an underbrewer at Park Royal, a young man named Chris Chataway, who happened also to be a serious runner. Chataway heard about the idea and knew exactly who to call: Norris and Ross McWhirter, identical twins, both Oxford sprinting Blues, who ran a fact-and-figure agency in London and had met him through athletics. Beaver wanted a book of settled questions, and the only reason he found the right people to make one is that his brewery happened to contain an athlete.

The commercial thinking underneath this has aged extremely well, and none of it was about publishing. Guinness was not entering the reference market. It was putting an object behind the bar, free, with its name on it, that made the bar a better place to spend an evening. This was marketing collateral. A beer mat with 198 pages.

The twins took an office at 107 Fleet Street and got to work. The printers bound the first copy on 27 August 1955. It was top of the British bestseller list before Christmas. The next year an American publisher took 70,000 copies, and the giveaway has since sold something north of 150 million, in 100 countries and 40 languages.

And it did not answer the question.

Not that year, and not for a long time afterward. The book that exists because two men could not settle the plover left the plover alone for thirty-four editions. A partial answer finally surfaces in the 36th, in 1989, and it is a small masterpiece of hedging: Britain's fastest game bird is the red grouse, with burst speeds of 58 to 63 mph over very short distances; speeds of 70 mph "have been claimed" for the golden plover, though it is "extremely doubtful" the bird exceeds 50 to 55, "even in an emergency."

So, the grouse. Except that other accounts of the founding argument quietly hand it to the plover, and the honest position now is that the two are close, the evidence is thin, and neither of them is the fastest game bird in Europe in any case. Beaver missed the wrong bird, argued about the wrong pair, and founded a global institution on a question with no clean answer.

None of which mattered, and that is the part worth keeping.

Look again at what Beaver actually had on that mudflat, because it was not a gap in the reference shelves. Gaps get filled, once, and then they are filled. What he had was a question nobody could close — two birds, no reliable figures, and an evening that ends with both men standing exactly where they started. Three years later the same row started up again in front of him with the birds not an inch further on, and he recorded that as an irritation. It was the asset. A question you can answer is worth one printing. A question you cannot answer is worth an annual edition, and that is the business he had walked into without noticing.

Then the thing went and did what nobody had designed it to do. Readers stopped using it to end arguments and started using it to start them. If the book named the largest ball of string, then a ball of string was suddenly a thing a person could go and be the largest of. Within a few years the office was fielding letters from men who had eaten improbable objects, sat on poles for weeks, and were now, in a sense that was entirely real, world record holders. A reference work commissioned to reduce the quantity of argument in Britain had instead manufactured an inexhaustible supply of it, and everybody involved was thrilled.

Beaver lived until 1967, long enough to watch all of it. He had gone out for an afternoon's shooting, hit nothing, lost a dinner-table debate about a bird he had failed to kill, and turned the whole sorry outing into the best-selling copyrighted book in the world.

It stands as the most productive miss in the history of British business.