“An Electric Man”

In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.”

Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey as to its inner workings, saying only that its aluminum skin concealed a steel framework.

When a large block of wood was placed in its path, “it stopped, rolled its eyes in the direction of the obstacle, as if calculating how it could surmount it. It then deliberately raised the right foot, placed it upon the object, and stepped down on the other side. The motion seemed uncannily realistic. You almost feel like shrinking from before those rolling eyes. The visionless orbs are operated by means of clock-work situated within the head.”

When the robot announced, “I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco,” Perew acknowledged that the team planned to send it across the continent drawing a light wagon bearing two men. He claimed it could cover 20 miles in an hour.

I don’t know any more about it. This isn’t the first mechanical man we’ve encountered — a steam-powered robot had been proposed as early as 1868. But neither seems to have gone anywhere.

03/23/2025 UPDATE: Readers Kendra Colman, Justin Hilyard, and Hans Havermann point out that Cybernetic Zoo has a whole summary on the “Electric Man” and its history, including Perew’s original 1894 patent and various news articles (with additional photos) from 1895 up to 1914. Apparently the effect is deceiving — the man doesn’t actually pull the wagon, the wagon pushes the man. Many thanks to everyone who’s written in about this.

March 23, 2025March 23, 2025 | Oddities · Technology

Alienated Majesty

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.

The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)

Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (highlights above).

The Hollywood Reporter called it a “masterpiece.”

March 22, 2025March 21, 2025 | Entertainment · Language

The Polish Acquaintanceship Problem

A Polish problem longlisted for the 19th International Mathematical Olympiad in Yugoslavia, July 1977:

A room contains nine men. Among every three of them there are two who are mutually acquainted. Prove that four of them are mutually acquainted.

	Select Click for Answer
If one of the men is unacquainted with four of the others, then those four know one another and we’re done. If not, then this means that each man is mutually acquainted with at least five of the others. It can’t be exactly five in every case, because the total number of acquaintances in the room must be an even number. Hence someone is acquainted with at least six men. Among those six, three know one another, and they together with the man himself make four.

Click for Answer

March 21, 2025March 20, 2025 | Puzzles

Speeding Indeed

We have a strong intuition that it’s wrong to punish someone for a crime he hasn’t committed, but is this always the case? Algy, an Alaskan motorist, and Ben, a traffic policeman, both know reliably that Algy intends to speed on a remote, unpatrolled, but radar-surveyed highway at 10:31 tomorrow morning. They also know that, if this happens, police won’t be able to reach the scene of the offense until several hours after it’s been committed.

Algy radios Ben with an offer: If Ben issues a ticket for this crime before it occurs, Algy will pay the fine. If Ben doesn’t issue the ticket until after the offense has occurred, then Algy will flee the country to avoid paying the fine. Ben thinks about this, then issues the ticket now, writing in tomorrow’s date. He delivers the ticket to Algy’s address, where Algy’s wife gives him Algy’s check for the fine, which Ben cashes immediately. At 10:31 tomorrow, Algy exceeds the speed limit as described.

University of Hong Kong philosopher Christopher New writes, “If this example is valid, it suggests that there may be room in our moral thought for the notion of prepunishment [punishment before an offense is committed], and that it may be only epistemic, rather than moral, constraints that prevent us from practising it.”

(Christopher New, “Time and Punishment,” Analysis 52:1 [January 1992], 35-40.)

March 21, 2025March 20, 2025 | Oddities

“A True Maid”

No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?

— Matthew Prior

Time magazine called this perhaps the only naughty verse that can’t be bowdlerized.

(While we’re at it: In 1680 John Wilmot published a poem about premature ejaculation.)

March 20, 2025March 19, 2025 | Poems

Double Duty

This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only the captions beneath the first panels are discarded in the second half.

March 20, 2025March 19, 2025 | Entertainment · Oddities

“A Mill”

Two leaps the water from its race
Made to the brook below,
The first leap it was curving glass,
The second bounding snow.

— William Allingham

March 19, 2025March 18, 2025 | Poems

Warning

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ambigram_Cognac_Danger_on_a_set_of_two_shot_glasses_(empty_and_full).jpg — Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ambigram shot glasses by Basile Morin. The design is here.

March 19, 2025March 18, 2025 | Art

The Lunatic

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make a wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cats’ meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

— Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932

March 18, 2025March 17, 2025 | Society

The Liars

A problem by British puzzlist Hubert Phillips:

In writing home about an examination, five schoolgirls each made one true statement and one untrue one. The relevant passages:

Betty: Kitty was second in the examination. I was only third.
Ethel: You’ll be glad to hear that I was top. Joan was second.
Joan: I was third, and poor old Ethel was bottom.
Kitty: I came out second. Mary was only fourth.
Mary: I was fourth. Top place was taken by Betty.

In what order did they place?

	Select Click for Answer
Kitty Joan Betty Mary Ethel It’s possible to begin with any of the girls’ statements, but here’s one solution: Two girls say that Mary placed fourth. If this is not true then Kitty was second (per Kitty’s statement) and Betty first (per Mary’s statement). But if Betty is first then Joan is second (per Ethel’s statement), which is a contradiction. That means it’s true that Mary placed fourth, and it follows that Kitty is not second (per Kitty’s statement). Hence Betty placed third (per Betty’s statement), Ethel placed fifth (per Joan’s statement), and Joan placed second (per Ethel’s statement). That leaves Kitty, who by process of elimination must have placed first. From Problem Omnibus, 1960.

Click for Answer

March 18, 2025March 17, 2025 | Puzzles