From Benjamin Glover Laws, The Two-Move Chess Problem, 1890. White to mate in two moves.
Presumption Rewarded
Sinclair Lewis received this letter from a lawyer in a Midwestern city:
Dear Lewis:
Have read a few of your works and would like to ask a few favors. Please send me a list of your stories, your autograph, picture, and a letter describing your life. How many children have you and their names.
Thanking you, I am
Yours very truly,
J.J. Jones, Esq.
He responded:
My Dear Jim:
There was only one thing about your nice letter that I didn’t like. It was so sort of formal. True, we have never met, and somehow I feel we aren’t likely to, but, isn’t this a democratic country? So let me call you Jim, and you call me Fatty, or any other friendly name.
Now Jim, I haven’t got a photograph of me here, but I’ll go right down to the junction and have one taken. I’m preparing a letter about my life, but it’s been a pretty long one and a bad one, and that will take me several weeks.
But in the meantime, Jim, I’m awfully interested in lawyers. Kindly send me your picture, picture of your home and office, a list of your assets and liabilities, average income per month, list of the books you have read since 1914, if any. Kindly inform me whether you have ever defended a bootlegger and why. Should be glad to have any other interesting personal information for use in a story. How do you get along with your wife? Kindly explain this in detail.
Thanking you in advance, I remain,
Yours affectionately,
Sinclair Lewis
In a Word
filipendulous
adj. hanging by a thread
A cube suspended by a corner casts a hexagonal shadow.
A New Utility
Before the possibility of radio broadcast, inventors experimented with “piping” music into homes acoustically. From London’s Musical World, Jan. 6, 1855:
At the Polytechnic, a band playing in a distant apartment is unheard; but connect the different instruments, by means of thin rods of wood, each with the sounding board of a harp in the lecture theatre, and the music is audible to all as if it were present. The experiments prove, what we have often speculated on, that music might be laid on to the houses of a town from a central source, like gas or water.
“A well-known joker, at the private view, proposed the establishment of a ‘band-ditty’ company on the spot.”
A Versatile Palindrome
From Royal V. Heath in Scripta Mathematica, March 1955:
0264 + 4125 + 5610 = 0165 + 5214 + 4620
… remains valid if you split each term with a multiplication sign:
02 × 64 + 41 × 25 + 56 × 10 = 01 × 65 + 52 × 14 + 46 × 20
… or an addition sign:
02 + 64 + 41 + 25 + 56 + 10 = 01 + 65 + 52 + 14 + 46 + 20
Remarkably, everything above holds true if you square each term.
The Northanger Horrid Novels
In Northanger Abbey, Isabella Thorpe recommends seven Gothic novels to Catherine Morland:
‘Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.’
‘Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?’
‘I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.’
‘Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?’
‘Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.’
For a century it was assumed that Jane Austen had invented these titles, but then Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir discovered they were actual novels. Here’s an excerpt from Horrid Mysteries, which is certainly well named:
‘Thank God, Countess,’ one of them began, ‘that you have been rescued from the cruel hands of that barbarian, and are now in the company of more humane beings!’
‘From what cruel hands?’ I replied, with astonishment.
‘From those of your pretended lover, the Marquis Carlos of G******.’
‘Be silent, vile reptile,’ I exclaimed, ‘and dare not to asperse the name of a man whom I adore!’
Ironically, Austen’s parody may have rescued these titles from an oblivion they otherwise deserved. Announcing his discovery in a 1927 article, Sadleir wrote, “So long as Jane Austen is read — which will be for at least as long as there are readers at all — [these novels] will survive as tiny stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature.”
All Dressed Up
The shortest named speaking role in Shakespeare is that of Taurus in Antony and Cleopatra.
He says, “My lord?”
Foot Paths
I have just moved to an island on which every intersection is the meeting of three two-way streets. On a lark I decide to go running, turning right at the first intersection, left at the next, and alternating in this way to decide my route. Prove that eventually I’ll return home.
Changing Times
George Elgin’s “pistol sword,” patented in 1837, combines romance and efficiency:
The nature of my invention consists in combining the pistol and Bowie knife, or the pistol and cutlass, in such manner that it can be used with as much ease and facility as either the pistol, knife, or cutlass could be if separate, and in an engagement, when the pistol is discharged, the knife (or cutlass) can be brought into immediate use without changing or drawing, as the two instruments are in the hand at the same time.
This is one of the earliest U.S. patents — number 254.
Related: A gruesome piece of battlefield medicine from the Napoleonic campaigns of 1806 — a soldier’s face was transfixed by a bayonet that projected five inches from his right temple:
The man was knocked down, but did not lose his senses. He made several ineffectual efforts to pull the bayonet out, and two comrades, one holding the head, whilst the other dragged at the weapon, also failed. The poor wounded man came to me leaning on the arms of two fellow-soldiers. I endeavored, with the assistance of a soldier to pull out the bayonet, but it seemed to me as if fixed in a wall. The soldier who helped me desired the patient to lie down on his side, and putting his foot on the man’s head, with both hands he dragged out the bayonet, which was immediately followed by considerable hemorrhage, the blood pouring forth violently and abundantly. The patient then first felt ill, and, as I thought he would die, I left him to dress other wounded. After twenty minutes he revived, and said he was much better, and I then dressed him. We were in the snow, and as he was very cold the whole of his head was well wrapped up in charpie and bandages. He set off to Warsaw with another soldier; went partly on foot, partly on horseback, or in a cart, from barn to barn, and often from wood to wood, and reached Warsaw in six days. Three months after, I saw him in the hospital, perfectly recovered. He had lost his sight on the right side; the eye and lid had, however, preserved their form and mobility, but the iris remained much dilated and immovable.
From Paul Fitzsimmons Eve, A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery, 1857.
Can Can’t
“If anything is possible, then it is possible to prove that something is impossible. And if it is possible to prove that something is impossible, then necessarily, something is impossible.”
— Roy Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction, 2001