Welcome to the first spotlight of the Lilly Library’s Mechanical Puzzle blog series, written by Andrew Rhoda, the Lilly Library’s Curator of Puzzles!
In the first post in this series, I explained what mechanical puzzles are, and I introduced the categorization system that Jerry Slocum developed for his collection. In this post, I want to present a few examples from the first category in that list: Put-Together Puzzles.
As with all the categories, the “put together” title is a reference to what needs to be done to solve the puzzle. The challenge here is to combine the pieces in some manner. The two main sub-categories are divided into two-dimensional and three-dimensional puzzles. For example, two-dimensional put-together puzzles may have you combine the pieces to make a particular image on a flat surface or place the pieces flat into a tray. A three-dimensional put-together puzzle will ask you to put the pieces into a box or will ask you to create a cube, pyramid, or other three-dimensional shape.
Examples of Put-Together Puzzles
The earliest documented example of what we consider a mechanical puzzle comes from this category. The Stomachion is a two-dimensional put-together puzzle that is also referred to as a “geometric dissection,” as it features a square divided into fourteen pieces (Slocum et al. 1986, 22). Sometimes also referred to as the Ostomachion and the Loculus Archimedes, and as that last name might suggest this puzzle is associated with the mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse.
In Puzzles Old and New, Slocum and his co-authors note that “[a] 10th century palimpsest discovered in the Saint Sabba [sic] cloister in Jerusalem in 1906 describes the Method of Archimedes,” when discussing the puzzle under the title “The Loculus of Archimedes” (Slocum et al. 1986, 22). The “palimpsest,” a manuscript that has been erased and reused for another text, that Slocum and his fellow authors are referring to in that quote is the Archimedes Palimpsest which has been dated to 975 CE and also contains part of a treatise on the Stomachion by Archimedes (Netz and Noel 2007, 110). Prior to the discovery of the palimpsest, the connection between the Stomachion and Archimedes was attested to by Roman writers and in Arabic manuscript translations from the Greek. As Netz and Noel note in The Archimedes Codex, several Roman writers used the Stomachion as a metaphor for creating poetry, but in these metaphors, we are also given an idea of the shapes that were made using the pieces (2007, 239-240). Arabic translation of the works of Archimedes also included references to the Stomachion. However, as Netz and Noel write, “the Arabic manuscript is very brief indeed – a couple of folios long – and, once again, furnishes us with very little information. But it does one crucial thing: it discusses the construction of the Stomachion as a square divided into fourteen pieces (2007, 237).”
Tangrams might be recognizable to many as this put-together has been popular since it started a puzzle craze in Europe and United States in the early 1800s. The earliest book of Tangram problems is a Chinese publication from 1813 (Slocum and Botermans 2004, 26). However, it was an 1815 Chinese Tangram book set including both problems and solutions that eventually made its way to London where it became the source of the puzzle craze (31). In 1817, London publisher John and Edward Wallis reprinted that set with an English introductory poem under the titles The Fashionable Chinese Puzzle and Key to The Fashionable Chinese Puzzle, for the book of problems and solutions respectively (31). Shortly after, the Wallis Tangram publications were translated into other European languages, increasing the Tangram’s popularity on the continent, especially in France, with the fad peaking in 1818 (31-33). It is also of note that publications of Tangram books in Germany during this craze led to Tangrams being incorporated into education through the early kindergarten movement (Slocum et al. 2012, 17).
The Soma Cube, designed by Piet Hein, is a well-known three-dimensional put-together puzzle, whose goal is to make a solid 3x3x3 cube using the pieces. Martin Gardner notes in his “Mathematical Games” column in the September 1958 issue of Scientific American that Hein designed the Soma Cube during a 1933 lecture on quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. In that article, Gardner writes, “While the noted German physicist was speaking of a space sliced into cubes, Hein’s supple imagination caught a fleeting glimpse of the following curious geometrical theorem. If you take all the irregular shapes that can be formed by combining no more than four cubes, all the same size and joined at their faces, these shapes can be put together to form a larger cube (1958, 182). In addition to being a “curious geometrical theorem,” the Soma Cube turned out to be a popular puzzle design and is still in production today.
Some puzzles in this category do not quite fit into these two subcategories. For this reason, Slocum left a “miscellaneous” subcategory open for these puzzles. One example has a variety of names but the same goal: arrange four or five cubes in a straight row, so that each of the sides do not repeat a color or symbol. It is commonly referred to by the name of Instant Insanity, the name that Parker Brothers gave the puzzle when they made their version in 1967 (Slocum et al. 1986, 38). However, the puzzle is older than that, with the first patented version of the puzzle appearing in 1900 when Frederick A. Schossow was awarded a patent for what he called the Katzenjammer puzzle (38). As Slocum and his co-authors write in Puzzle Old and New, this Katzenjammer puzzle featured playing card suits rather than colors, but the goal was the same: to arrange them in a line so only one suit showed on each side (38).
The examples above are well-known examples of put-together puzzles, but they are hardly the only forms that put-together puzzles can take. If you are interested in learning more about put-together puzzles in the Slocum Puzzle Collection you can find more information at https://libraries.indiana.edu/lilly-library/mechanical-puzzles, or by attending the Friday Puzzle Tour held from 1:00pm to 2:00pm in the Slocum Room.
About the author: Andrew Rhoda is the Curator of Puzzles at the Lilly Library, where he oversees the 35,000 mechanical puzzles in the Jerry Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection, in addition to the Slocum book and manuscript collections. He hosts classes from across disciplines who visit the collection, and he has presented on mechanical puzzles and the collection at puzzle events here in Bloomington and around the world.
References
Gardner, Martin. 1958. “Mathematical Games.” Scientific American September. https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/36F89C54-678F-468C-B88FF8E104254CA4.pdf.
Netz, Reviel., and William Noel. 2007. The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity’s Greatest Scientist. 1st Da Capo Press ed. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press.
Slocum, Jerry., Dieter Gebhardt, Jack Botermans, Harold Raizer, and Dic Sonneveld. 2012. The Anchor Puzzle Book: The Amazing Stories of More Than 50 New Puzzles Made of Stone. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Slocum Puzzle Foundation.
Slocum, Jerry, and Jack Botermans. 2004. The Tangram Book: The Story of the Chinese Puzzle with Over 2000 Puzzles to Solve. New York: Sterling Pub.
Slocum, Jerry and Jack Botermans, Carla von Splunteren, and Tony Burrett. 1986. Puzzles Old and New: How to Make and Solve Them. Plenary Publications International (Europe).
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