Borrowed Time

A striking detail from Martha Tyson’s Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker (1854):

Whilst they were conversing his clock struck the hour, and at their request he gave an interesting account of its construction. With his imperfect tools, and with no other model than a borrowed watch, it had cost him long and patient labor to perfect it, to make the variation necessary to cause it to strike the hours, and produce a concert of correct action between the hour, the minute, and the second machinery. He confessed that its regularity in pointing out the progress of time had amply rewarded all his pains in its construction.

This seems to be at least plausibly true: In 1753, the 21-year-old Banneker, who had never seen a clock, borrowed a watch from a trader, made drawings of its workings, and designed a wooden clock of his own. Peter N. Stearns writes in Time in World History (2020), “Banneker, the son of former slaves, borrowed a watch from an acquaintance, took it apart, ultimately using this as a model to build an impressively accurate clock entirely from carved wooden pieces, and then capitalized on the notoriety of this product to set up his own repair operation.” The clock continued to operate until Banneker’s death more than half a century later.

| History · Technology

Twilight

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We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.

— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925

| Quotations

Hidato

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hidato-Puzzle.svg

This logic puzzle game was invented by Israeli mathematician Gyora Benedek. The task is simple: Write a number in each blank square so that, in the finished diagram, a continuous chain of consecutive numbers connects the lowest number, 1, to the highest, 40. The numbers can connect horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. For example, the number 8 must go in the square above 7 because 7, 8, and 9 must occupy adjacent squares. Can you complete the rest of the diagram?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Ready to Hand

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Synonyms for WRITER’S CRAMP collected by Dmitri Borgmann in 1987:

CHIROSPASM
WRITERS’ PALSY
GRAPHOSPASM
SCRIVENERS’ PALSY
MOGIGRAPHIA or MOGOGRAPHIA
PENMAN’S SPASM
WRITERS’ NEUROSIS
HYPERKINESIA
DYSGRAPHIA
WRITERS’ SPASM
A STUTTERING OF THE HAND

MOGIGRAPHIA has four principal forms: SPASTIC, PARALYTIC, NEURALGIC, and TREMULOUS. Borgmann wrote, “No longer need you suffer from the WRITER’S CRAMP of the masses — you can, instead, discourse eloquently and frequently about the plethora of more elegant-sounding ailments that I have made available to you!”

(Dmitri A. Borgmann, “Quelque Chose,” Word Ways 20:1 [February 1987], 44-53.)

| Language

Intermission

You’ve dealt about half the cards for a bridge game when you’re momentarily called away. When you return, no one can remember where you left off dealing. Without counting cards, how can you finish the deal accurately, so that each player receives the cards she’d have got if you hadn’t been interrupted?

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| Puzzles

Ghost Tint

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

There’s no blue circle here. The space among the lines is white. In the presence of black lines, the hue of a colored object seems to bleed into the surrounding background.

The phenomenon was first discovered in 1971. It’s known as neon color spreading.

| Oddities · Science & Math

Inksmanship

The most prolific author in history may be Charles Hamilton (1876-1961), who could turn out 80,000 words a week writing long series of stories with recurring casts of characters, often set in boys’ public schools. Hamilton wrote under a variety of names and occasionally employed other writers to help with the work, but his own lifetime output has been estimated at 100 million words.

In his 1940 essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell writes, “The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank Richards’ and those in the Gem, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.”

He was forced to add a footnote: “This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’, who are one and the same person!”

| Literature