Author: Greg Ross
Cash and Carry
A favorite problem of Lewis Carroll involves a customer trying to complete a purchase using pre-decimal currency. He wants to buy 7s. 3d. worth of goods, but he has only a half-sovereign (10s.), a florin (2s.), and a sixpence. The shopkeeper can’t give him change, as he himself has only a crown (5s.), a shilling, and a penny. As they’re puzzling over this a friend enters the shop with a double-florin (4s.), a half-crown (2s. 6d.), a fourpenny-bit, and a threepenny-bit. Can the three of them negotiate the transaction?
Happily, they can. They pool their money on the counter, and the shopkeeper takes the half-sovereign, the sixpence, the half-crown, and the fourpenny-bit; the customer takes the double-florin, the shilling, and threepenny-bit as change; and the friend takes the florin, the crown, and the penny.
“There are other combinations,” writes John Fisher in The Magic of Lewis Carroll, “but this is the most logistically pleasing, as it will be seen that not one of the three persons retains any one of his own coins.”
Related: From Henry Dudeney, a magic square:
(Strand, December 1896)
Roughage
A shop in Herne Bay, Kent, advertised this specialty through the whole of the summer 1906 holiday season.
Reader John Day sent this photo to The Strand. “Herne Bay trippers are evidently careless of what they eat.”
Alternades
Interleave the letters in LUG and ONE and you get LOUNGE. Similarly:
SOT + PUS = SPOUTS
SHOE + COLD = SCHOOLED
CANES + HILT = CHAINLETS
CLIPS + ALOE = CALLIOPES
FETES + LENS = FLEETNESS
TINILY + RENAL = TRIENNIALLY
And three words can be merged to produce a fourth:
DOT + ERE + CAD = DECORATED
LET + ARE + CAD = LACERATED
LET + IRE + BAD = LIBERATED
MET + ORE + DAD = MODERATED
SAT + ERE + PAD = SEPARATED
SIR + ILL + MAY = SIMILARLY
TUT + ALE + BAD = TABULATED
Landscape or Portrait?
An engraving by Johann Martin Will, 1780.
Andrew Wyeth said, “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
Counter Play
A devilish puzzle by Lee Sallows:
In the diagram above, nine numbered counters occupy the cells of a 3×3 checkerboard so as to form a magic square. Any 3 counters lying in a straight line add up to 15. There are 8 of these collinear triads.
Reposition the counters (again, one to each cell) to yield 8 new collinear triads, but now showing a common sum of 16 rather than 15.
Unquote
“Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music, or pictures, or architecture, or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” — Samuel Butler
Evicted
A trap for gullible tapeworms, patented in 1854 by Alpheus Myers.
The capsule is baited and swallowed by the patient, after a fast “to make the worm hungry.” The worm seizes the bait, the trap closes on its head, and the doctor withdraws the whole length of the parasite from the patient’s stomach, presumably with a magician’s flourish.
“In constructing the trap, care should be taken that the spring g, is only strong enough to hold the worm, and not strong enough to cause his head to be cut off.”
In a Word
scoteography
n. the art of writing in the dark
Husbands and Wives
This problem dates from at least 1774; this version appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly of December 1902:
Three Dutchmen and their wives went to market to buy hogs. The names of the men were Hans, Klaus, and Hendricks, and of the women, Gertrude, Anna, and Katrine; but it was not known which was the wife of each man. They each bought as many hogs as each man or woman paid shillings for each hog, and each man spent three guineas more than his wife. Hendricks bought 23 hogs more than Gertrude, and Klaus bought 11 more than Katrine. What was the name of each man’s wife?
(There are 21 shillings in a guinea.)
represents the number of hogs. The equation y2 – x2 = 63 or (y + x) (y – x) = 63 admits of three solutions, viz., 63 × 1, 21 × 3, and 9 × 7: