A cynical critic returned the manuscript of friend with the remark, ‘It will be read when Shakspere and Milton are forgotten;’ and he cruelly added, ‘but not till then.’
— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World, Dec. 10, 1881
The hedge maze at Hampton Court has been entertaining visitors since 1695, occasionally belying its reputation for ease. In Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), Harris says, “We’ll just go in here, so that you can say you’ve been, but it’s very simple. It’s absurd to call it a maze.” Then, after two miles of wandering:
‘The map may be all right enough,’ said one of the party, ‘if you know whereabouts in it we are now.’
Harris didn’t know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to go back to the entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part of it there was not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability of going back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite direction. About ten minutes more passed, and then they found themselves in the centre.
Mazes have exercised a peculiar fascination for the mathematically minded. The young Lewis Carroll composed this one for a family magazine — the object is to make your way from the outside to the central space; it’s acceptable to pass over or under another path, but a single line means your way is blocked.
Cambridge University mathematician W.W. Rouse Ball constructed this maze in his garden. He notes that unless a loop surrounds the goal, the wanderer can defeat any maze by trailing one hand along a wall, and “no labyrinth is worthy of the name of a puzzle which can be threaded in this way.”
Hampton Court is modest in comparison to the modern hedge maze at Longleat, a stately home in Somerset. Its 16,000 English yews enclose 1.75 miles of paths that require an hour and a half to traverse; the course includes six wooden bridges from which to plot a path to the goal, an observation tower.
In solving any of these, as Harris discovered, the chief danger is overconfidence:
Said a boastful young student from Hayes,
As he entered the Hampton Court maze:
“There’s nothing in it.
I won’t be a minute.”
He’s been missing for forty-one days.
— Frank Richards
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” — Robert Oppenheimer
A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and tissue-paper and penny whistles was given by the [British] Guards in the front-line trenches near Loos. They played old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion and technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. The Germans crowded into their front line — not far away — and applauded each number. Presently, in good English, a German voice shouted across:
‘Play “Annie Laurie” and I will sing it.’
The Guards played ‘Annie Laurie,’ and a German officer stood up on the parapet — the evening sun was red behind him — and sang the old song admirably, with great tenderness. There was applause on both sides.
— Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, 1920
Mount Everest rises 29,029 feet above sea level, and Ecuador’s volcano Chimborazo rises only 20,702 feet. But because Earth bulges at the equator, Chimborazo is actually farther from the center of the planet. If we could connect the two peaks with a water pipe, in which direction would the water flow?
H.G. Wells demonstrates how to dismount a bicycle, June 1895:
“Observe when your left foot is descending & about 30° from the nadir. Stand on left pedal throwing up right leg. Bring this in a graceful curve over the hind mud guard & leap lightly to the ground. The treadle moves against your weight & assists the leap. Then smile. Thus.”
That’s from a letter to an old college friend. “The bicycle in those days was still very primitive,” Wells recalled of the bicycle craze of the 1890s. “The diamond frame had appeared but there was still no freewheel. You could only stop and jump off when the treadle was at its lowest point, and the brake was an uncertain plunger upon the front wheel. … Nevertheless the bicycle was the swiftest thing upon the roads in those days … and the cyclist had a lordliness, a sense of masterful adventure, that has gone from him altogether now.”
“I learnt to ride my bicycle upon sandy tracks with none but God to help me; he chastened me considerably in the process.”
From Pedro A. Pisa in Scripta Mathematica, September 1954 — this identity:
1234 + 2484 + 3674 = 1254 + 2444 + 3694
… remains valid when the digits in each term are permuted in the same way:
1234 + 2484 + 3674 = 1254 + 2444 + 3694
1243 + 2448 + 3647 = 1245 + 2444 + 3649
1324 + 2844 + 3764 = 1524 + 2444 + 3964
1342 + 2844 + 3746 = 1542 + 2444 + 3946
1423 + 2448 + 3467 = 1425 + 2444 + 3469
1432 + 2484 + 3476 = 1452 + 2444 + 3496
2134 + 4284 + 6374 = 2154 + 4244 + 6394
2143 + 4248 + 6347 = 2145 + 4244 + 6349
2314 + 4824 + 6734 = 2514 + 4424 + 6934
2341 + 4842 + 6743 = 2541 + 4442 + 6943
2413 + 4428 + 6437 = 2415 + 4424 + 6439
2431 + 4482 + 6473 = 2451 + 4442 + 6493
3124 + 8244 + 7364 = 5124 + 4244 + 9364
3142 + 8244 + 7346 = 5142 + 4244 + 9346
3214 + 8424 + 7634 = 5214 + 4424 + 9634
3241 + 8442 + 7643 = 5241 + 4442 + 9643
3412 + 8424 + 7436 = 5412 + 4424 + 9436
3421 + 8442 + 7463 = 5421 + 4442 + 9463
4123 + 4248 + 4367 = 4125 + 4244 + 4369
4132 + 4284 + 4376 = 4152 + 4244 + 4396
4213 + 4428 + 4637 = 4215 + 4424 + 4639
4231 + 4482 + 4673 = 4251 + 4442 + 4693
4312 + 4824 + 4736 = 4512 + 4424 + 4936
4321 + 4842 + 4763 = 4521 + 4442 + 4963
And everything above holds true if each term is squared.
With the “smoker’s hat,” patented by Walter Netschert in 1989, you can finally interact with nonsmokers without giving offense. A visor will intercept your smoke and direct it to a filter, and you can add a clip to hold the cigarette and a cup to catch ashes so that there are no waste products. The exhaust can even be scented.
This seems like a lot of trouble, but for some it’s worth it. “When I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living,” wrote Russell Hoban in Turtle Diary. “I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.”
English was Joseph Conrad’s third language. Born in Poland, he learned French as a child but heard no English until he went to sea as a teenager. In 1874 he had just rowed a dinghy alongside an English cargo steamer at Marseilles when a deck hand threw him a rope and called, “Look out there.” “For the very first time in my life, I heard myself addressed in English — the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions — of my very dreams!”
His captivation with the language, he would later say, was “too mysterious to explain,” “a subtle and unforeseen accord of my emotional nature with its genius.” He made his way to England and began to puzzle out newspaper articles with help from a local boat builder. “I began to think in English long before I mastered, I won’t say the style (I haven’t done that yet), but the mere uttered speech,” he wrote to Hugh Walpole in 1918. “You may take it from me that if I had not known English I wouldn’t have written a line for print in my life.”
Though he spoke with a strong Polish accent throughout his life, with “years of devoted practice” his writing advanced him to the first rank of English novelists. Graham Greene declared him the best English stylist of the 20th century; T.E. Lawrence called him “absolutely the most haunting thing in prose that ever was.” Here’s his memory of that morning in Marseilles as he watched the English steamer depart:
Her head swung a little to the west, pointing towards the miniature lighthouse of the Jolliette breakwater, far away there, hardly distinguishable against the land. The dinghy danced a squashy, splashy jig in the wash of the wake and turning in my seat I followed the James Westoll with my eyes. Before she had gone in a quarter of a mile she hoisted her flag as the harbour regulations prescribe for arriving and departing ships. I saw it suddenly flicker and stream out on the flagstaff. The Red Ensign! In the pellucid, colourless atmosphere bathing the drab and grey masses of that southern land, the livid islets, the sea of pale glassy blue under the pale glassy sky of that cold sunrise, it was as far as the eye could reach the only spot of ardent colour — flamelike, intense, and presently as minute as the tiny red spark the concentrated reflection of a great fire kindles in the clear heart of a globe of crystal. The Red Ensign — the symbolic, protecting warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof over my head.
“The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born,” he wrote in A Personal Record. “I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head.”
