heuretic
adj. of or relating to discovery or invention
Sea travel is not kind to teapots, which tend to drip when pouring, tip over on tables, and chip in storage. Entrepreneur Robert Crawford Johnson solved all these problems by designing a pot in the shape of a cube, with the spout tucked into a corner. His invention, patented in 1917, was quickly adopted by Cunard, and it was still in use on the Queen Elizabeth 2 as late as 1968.
Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,” in effect creating a low-resolution visual telegraph. As a study he reduced this profile of a Greek girl to 271 coded dots, which he found yielded “a very creditable production.”
This had huge implications, he felt. In 1896 he imagined a whole correspondence with a civilization of intelligent ants on Mars; in three and a half hours they catch our attention; teach us their base-8 mathematical notation; demonstrate their shared understanding of certain celestial bodies and mathematical constants; and finally propose a specified 24-gon in which points can be situated by code, like stitches in a piece of embroidery.
That opens a limitless avenue for colloquy — the Martians send images of Saturn, Earth, the solar system, and domestic and sociological drawings, a new one every evening. Galton concludes that two astronomical bodies that are close enough to signal one another with flashes of light already have everything they need to establish “an efficient inter-stellar language.”
Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began to restrict the work of Jewish actors. So Reuss invented a new character. Retreating to a cabin in his native Austria, he grew out his beard, bathed in hydrogen peroxide to bleach his hair, studied the speech and mannerisms of farmers, and obtained new papers from a local peasant.
After a year’s effort he had recreated himself as Kaspar Brandhofer, a self-educated Tyrolian actor. When he returned to the stage, his former director Max Reinhardt failed to recognize him and in fact recommended him to Ernst Lothar in Vienna, where in 1936 Reuss played a featured role in the stage adaptation of Fräulein Else. The actors he worked among never suspected the ruse, despite their earlier work together.
Critics hailed the performance, calling Reuss “the humble peasant of the Austrian Alps, the finest natural actor of his generation,” and Lothar offered him a three-year contract. But his eventual confession brought on an uproar, and he decided that the Nazi regime had grown too strong. He emigrated to the United States, where he went on to an active movie career as Lionel Royce, appearing in almost 40 films before his death in 1946.
When E flat made its entrée into the drawing-room, C and G considered it a third person.
‘It’s a dominant,’ thought A flat, while E natural cried out, ‘I recognize it: it’s my leading tone.’
… But the same holds here as in music where the chord of G sharp has not the same meaning, depending on whether you reach it by way of the sharps or of the flats, and does not sound the same as that of A flat to the sensitive ear, though composed of the same notes.
— André Gide, journal, January 14, 1912
Mr. Smith goes to Atlantic City to gamble for a weekend. To guard against bad luck, he sets a policy at the start: In every game he plays, he’ll bet exactly half the money he has at the time, and he’ll make all his bets at even odds, so he’ll have an equal chance of winning and of losing this amount. In the end he wins the same number of games that he loses. Does he break even?
Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water.
In his Life of Artaxerxes, Plutarch describes an ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism in which vermin devour a victim trapped between mated boats:
Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lie down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, then forcing him to ingest a mixture of milk and honey before pouring all over his face and body. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed.
Happily Plutarch seems to have based his account on a report by the Greek historian Ctesias, whose reliability has been questioned, so perhaps this never happened.
In the 1970’s, a student of Maoist inclination asked [Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true or false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, ‘I do and I don’t.’
From Morgenbesser’s 2004 New York Times obituary.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980
Martin Gardner published this puzzle in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American in February 1979. You’re blindfolded and sitting before a lazy susan. On each corner is a glass. Some are right side up and some upside down. On each turn you can inspect any two glasses and, if you choose, reverse the orientation of either or both of them. After each turn the lazy susan will be rotated through a random angle. When all four glasses have the same orientation, a bell will sound. How can you reach this goal in a finite number of turns?
Grip, the talking raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, was based on a real bird, a pet who lived in the family’s Marylebone home, where she buried items in the garden, terrorized the dog, bit the children, and tore at the family carriage. She died in 1841 after ingesting some lead-based paint, and Dickens wrote her into the novel, which appeared later that year.
Interestingly, when Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the story for Graham’s Magazine, he remarked that “The raven … might have been made more than we see it … Its croaking might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.” In 1842, when the two authors met in Philadelphia, Poe was said to be “delighted” that Grip had been based on a real bird.
Poe’s famous poem appeared three years later, and scholars generally agree that Grip had inspired the “ebony bird” — in Dickens’ novel the raven had repeated the phrases “Never say die” and “Nobody” and is described as “tapping at the door” and “knocking softly at the shutter.”
Today Grip’s remains are on display in Philadelphia’s Parkway Central Library, where they may inspire yet more writings.
