by Tom Cutler
He never saw or heard another human being until, one day, a mysterious man who concealed his face taught him how to walk, and how to write his name. The stranger instructed him to repeat the sentence, ‘I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was,’ before releasing him onto the streets of Nuremberg.
This story sounded crazy, with a capital K, but it caused an international sensation.
Kaspar Hauser was put into the care of a teacher, Friedrich Daumer, who looked after him at his house, where he made huge strides in all subjects. But on 17 October 1829 he failed to come to lunch and was discovered in the cellar, bleeding from a cut to his forehead.
He said he had been attacked by a hooded man while on the toilet, and recognised the man’s voice as that of the stranger who had kept him in the darkened cell.
He was transferred into the care of Johann Biberbach and his wife.
On 3 April 1830 a pistol shot was heard from Hauser’s room and he was found bleeding from a minor wound to the right side of his head. He explained that he had got onto a chair to reach some books but had accidentally taken hold of a pistol that was hanging on the wall, causing it to go off.
Johann Meyer of Ansbach then took over his care, but this relationship was not a good one (nobody managed to spend much time in Hauser’s company). On 9 December 1833 the two had a row after Meyer objected to him telling lies. Five days later Kaspar Hauser came home with a deep wound to the left side of his chest. He said that a stranger had lured him into the Ansbach Court Garden and shown him a mysterious bag, before suddenly stabbing him.
The police searched the garden and found a purse containing a note written in mirror writing sprinkled with dashes. In translation it reads:
Hauser can tell you exactly what I look like and where I am from. To save Hauser the trouble, I want to tell you myself where I am from – – –. I come from – – – the Bavarian – – On the river – – – – – I even want to tell you the name: M. L. Ö.
What the point of this note was supposed to be was anyone’s guess, but it was academic. Kaspar Hauser died of his wound on 17 December 1833. His headstone was inscribed, in Latin, ‘Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth and death unknown secrets.’
The problem
Who was Kaspar Hauser? Who was the mysterious masked man who brought him up in a darkened cell? Who was the murderous man in the Ansbach Court Garden? The answers to these questions require lateral thinking as well as a good dollop of common sense.
Tap here for the solution.
The great Epping Jaundice mystery
The mystery
On Tuesday 9 February 1965, at St Margaret’s Hospital, Epping, in Essex, consultant physician Dr Harry Kopelman was asked for advice by a 23-year-old medical student. The young man said he was suffering from something strange that he didn’t recognise from his studies.
It had all begun on the Saturday before, at home in Harrow where he lived with his wife. He had started feeling ill, developing pains across the top of his abdomen, which became so severe that he was taken by ambulance to a local casualty department. After examination he was sent home with a vague diagnosis of acute gastritis – inflammation of the stomach – a common symptom, with a range of causes. Oddly, the man’s wife was reporting similar, though milder, symptoms, but he was ill enough to have missed work on Monday.
By the time of his consultation with Dr Kopelman the young doctor was over the worst but was still quite unwell, with a sore abdomen, just below the ribs, and a raised temperature. Most peculiarly, he had developed jaundice and was starting to turn an interesting shade of yellow.
Jaundice is a symptom of several disorders, and is caused by a build-up in the blood and body tissues of a liver product called bilirubin. Its yellowing effects are noticeable in the colour of bruises and also of urine. Jaundice itself is associated with ailments including hepatitis, chronic heavy drinking and gallstones. But Dr Kopelman was puzzled by the uncommon pattern of symptoms being presented in this young student doctor, so he had him admitted to the hospital and sent off blood samples for analysis.
In the meantime he went off to his regular outpatient clinic at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in nearby Harlow. No sooner had he unpacked his stethoscope than his assistant reported that his young wife, also a doctor, was feeling very unwell – she had just gone down with jaundice.
Was this a coincidence or the next case of some new and unusual ‘doctors’ jaundice’? To be on the safe side, Dr Kopelman contacted a local GP to see whether he had noticed any cases of jaundice in his patients. The doctor said it was odd he should ask, because he had recorded six new cases of ‘a funny sort of jaundice’.
Kopelman quickly arranged to visit all these patients, each of whom was, curiously, one half of a yellowing married couple. They were all well-to-do professional men and women: doctors, teachers, solicitors. Of the first sixty cases none was a young child, and just six were in their teens.
Harry Kopelman alerted the Medical Officer of Health for the area, Dr Isidore Ash. But Dr Ash was already aware that something peculiar was going on, with several cases of ‘Epping Jaundice’ having sprung up in Harlow, and a hotspot in the village of Chipping Ongar, not far away.
At St Margaret’s Hospital, the wife of the medical student had herself now gone yellow. After five days since her initial discomfort, the pain had subsided to be replaced by fever and jaundice, just like her husband. This was typical of the pattern. After acute onset of pain, which would last for two or three days, there would be a pause of a few days, during which the patient would feel generally unwell, before the jaundice worsened, bringing with it an intolerable itching of the skin.
Some possibilities were already ruled out. No patient had signs of gall-bladder problems, and none of the victims had liver fluke. In a cold February an insect-borne disease seemed highly unlikely. None of the blood samples revealed a case of ‘rat-catchers’ yellows’, a rare jaundice resulting from Weil’s disease, spread by rodents. Indeed, all the patients, so far, lived in the pleasant low-rat-index towns and villages around Epping. Infection of any kind seemed out of the question – no known infection or poison produced this singular pattern of effects.
A new virus seemed unlikely because none of the affected couples knew any of the others; and none of them had shared a meal outside their home or been to any social occasion with any of them, where they could have passed it on.
Nonetheless, Dr Kopelman wondered whether the cause of the Epping Jaundice could be something the patients had all eaten. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Their diet was what you would expect in 1965 in this prosperous, educated slice of society. They were eating a wide range of healthy foods, including wholemeal bread.
The Epping Jaundice was unique in its presentation, and in its appearance under the microscope, for every victim showed inflammation of the tiny bile ducts of the liver, in a pattern never before seen.
It was beginning to look as if the damage to the liver suffered by victims of the Epping Jaundice could only be the result of injury from some chemical or drug. Was there some new product that these well-off patients had all started using? Maybe it could be alcohol, or tobacco, or the still novel contraceptive pill?
But it seemed not – half the patients were men, and smokers and drinkers suffered no more than their abstinent fellow victims.
Dr Kopelman knew that whatever was causing the new jaundice was limited to the area around Epping. There were no reports of the disease from elsewhere in the country. But the Epping Jaundice was affecting only certain people in this area. They tended to be adults, they tended to be couples, and they tended to be professional.
Then Kopelman’s mind wandered back to the young student doctor and his wife. Unlike the other patients, they lived in Harrow, some 30 miles away, and only he regularly came into Epping. Harrow itself seemed to be unaffected, yet the young doctor’s wife had developed the characteristic symptoms of the Epping Jaundice without ever leaving her home town
. Had her husband somehow carried the virus, bacterium, drug, chemical or poison all the way from Epping, and brought it into their home?
Harry Kopelman questioned the patient closely but she could think of nothing. The only thing her husband had brought home from Epping the day of her illness was a loaf of wholemeal bread, a loaf they had eaten before without incident.
Then there was a development: another medical professional was brought into the hospital showing the distinctive symptoms of Epping Jaundice. Perhaps this was indeed a ‘white coat’ disease, favouring doctors and nurses.
The new patient was a nursing sister, and Dr Kopelman spoke to her closely, taking a detailed history. Who had she met? What had she done? Who had she nursed? Where had she been, and when? What had she eaten? What pills had she taken?
It was a long and painstaking conversation but, while going through her list of groceries, the patient mentioned in passing that she had bought some wholemeal bread a day or two before starting to feel unwell. Harry Kopelman pricked up his ears and, excusing himself, excitedly shot along to the bedside of another Epping Jaundice patient. He had an important question for her. Before becoming ill had she eaten any wholemeal bread? The answer was revealing – no, she had only eaten sliced white bread. Was she sure she hadn’t bought or eaten any brown bread? She was certain. White sliced bread only.
The problem
What was causing the Epping Jaundice? Was it some new disease that professional people, especially doctors and nurses, particularly came into contact with? Why did it seem to be singling out couples? Why were some people getting it and not others? Why was it confined to the areas around Epping, and why was there one solitary case in Harrow, 30 miles away? Was it the wholemeal bread that was somehow responsible?
Tap here for the solution.
The fastest submarine in the world
The mystery
Ever since Leonardo da Vinci sketched out an experimental design for a submarine, the possibility of a real underwater boat has been the dream of men in sheds at the bottom of their gardens.
A proposal for the first true underwater craft was written in 1578 by William Bourne, a British naval nut who suggested a completely enclosed vessel, looking rather like two rowing boats glued together, which could be rowed underwater.
Even by the time of the First World War, submarines were still not all that brilliant. They had no periscope and had to keep coming up to the top to see where they were. In 1921 an American sub ran out of fuel, and the crew had to put up sails made out of sailors’ blankets and curtain rods, before sailing 100 miles to port.
But modern submarines are much more sophisticated vessels, as quiet as the ocean itself, even though they are so huge. They can submerge in less than a minute and stay down for six months. The nuclear-powered ones (that’s most of them) can go 60,000 miles on just one lump of uranium the size of a walnut, and dive to a depth of more than 800 feet. This is equivalent to floating in the air at two and a half times the height of Big Ben. Even so, they still use a large pipe to suck clean air from the surface, rather like a snorkelling holidaymaker.
Although the submarines of today can go very fast, the speed performance of the USS Skate is astonishing. On 17 August 1958 this submarine really showed what she was made of when she did a circumnavigation of the globe in just fifty minutes.
The problem
How on earth did the USS Skate, one of the earliest nuclear-powered submarines, go around the world in less than an hour?
Tap here for the solution.
LATERAL THINKING BETCHAS AND GOTCHAS
‘Sometimes the situation is only a problem
because it is looked at in a certain way.’
Edward de Bono
The cocktail glass
The bet
This beautiful little demonstration is one of the finest and most brain-curdling lateral thinking problems I know.
What you do is arrange four matches in the shape of a cocktail glass, as illustrated in the picture below.
Next, break off the end of a match and drop it into the position shown, to represent an olive.
Bet your audience that they can’t move just two matches such that the olive ends up outside the glass. They are not allowed to touch the olive or end up with a damaged-looking glass.
If you are doing this for men you can tell them that the object is a spade with the broken piece of match representing a stone.
You can set up the betcha with this amusing story about a builder.
An Irishman goes for a job on a building site in London. The foreman says, ‘This is a high-class construction site. We don’t just accept anyone here; you’ll have to answer some hard questions before we can accept you.’
‘OK,’ says the Irishman.
‘Right,’ says the foreman. ‘What’s the difference between a joist and a girder?’
The Irishman sucks his teeth for a second.
‘Simple!’ he says. ‘Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust.’
This is a beautiful lateral thinking joke, because people are expecting an anti-Irish joke and they get an intellectual pro-Irish joke instead.
Anyway, you then bet them that they can’t move just two matches to leave the stone beside the spade. They mustn’t touch the stone, and the spade must be exactly the same shape when they’ve finished.
The chicanery
The solution is illustrated below. First you slide the horizontal match halfway, so its end meets the tip of the central match. Next you move the original left-hand match down to the bottom right-hand position indicated in the illustration.
Working this out takes quite a bit of thinking. It’s a lovely little puzzle.
Nailed it!
The bet
A fellow I know, who is a magician, was one day working at home with a mechanical saw, making a piece of magical apparatus. He was cutting away merrily when he absent-mindedly amputated one of his index fingers. They fixed him up at the hospital but they couldn’t reattach the finger.
Not only has the absence of this finger since impeded his nose-picking capacities, it has affected his ability to shuffle cards and produce rabbits from top hats, as you might imagine. You’d never normally know he was missing a finger, though, because they gave him a prosthetic one. The join is hidden by a ring, and it can be disconcerting to see him suddenly pull the thing off to show it to someone, or wiggle it vigorously in a very unnatural-looking way.
He could say something like, ‘I bet you ten quid I can scratch my left elbow with my left index finger.’ People would sneer and pour opprobrious scoffs upon him. Then he would simply pop the thing off with his right hand and scratch his elbow.
While I was thinking about this it occurred to me how similar the effect would be to an old fraud described by the puzzle-loving mathematician Martin Gardner in one of his many superb books.
What happens is that you bet your audience that you can remove your own thumbnail. Then, taking out your pocket-knife you do just that, causing screams and groans among your most nervous admirers as the nail is lifted away with horrible verisimilitude.
The chicanery
This gruesome trick needs a bit of preparation. The beauty of it, though, is that you can prepare long in advance of your demonstration.
What you do is apply a coating of melted candle wax to your thumbnail, using a small brush. It dries quickly and sticks fast, looking just like an actual nail.
When the time comes for your betcha, make the bet, then remove the pocket-knife and slide it slowly under the wax, lifting it away in a revoltingly realistic manner. If you are a gifted actor, you will be able to make pained grimaces like Laurence Olivier while you do this, which will add to the theatrical charm of the performance.
I’ve added to the realism of this when doing it myself by first surreptitiously jabbing a sharp needle into the skin close to the nail. This part of the thumb is poorly supplied with nerve endings, so it doesn’t hurt much. The wound should not produce blood u
ntil the finger is squeezed, so if you time it right you can squeeze gently at the appropriate moment and it will ooze quite an impressive amount of blood just as the fake nail is coming away, and will run around the cuticle and under the wax in a delightfully disgusting manner.
Paraffin wax is edible, so if you wish to add a touch of the truly macabre to the already grisly effect, you can drop the fake nail into your mouth, blood and all, and swallow it, though this is not recommended on a first date.
If you’re betting for money, or a drink or something, insist on receiving your payment before you start, because once you’ve done the trick and got the screams, some bright spark will spot that you still have a nail on the end of your thumb.
Five into four will go
The bet
Did you hear about the man in the hot air balloon? He was floating over the countryside when he realised he was completely lost, so he dropped down a bit and shouted to a fellow he could see walking along a lane.
‘You, there,’ he called. ‘Can you tell me where I am?’
The man shouted back up, ‘You are in a hot air balloon, sir, 40 feet above the ground, 53 degrees 24 minutes north and 2 degrees 58 minutes west.’
‘My God, that’s accurate,’ said the balloonist. ‘Are you an engineer?’
‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘How did you know?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘everything you just told me may be technically accurate but I still have absolutely no idea where the bloody hell I am. To be honest, you’re about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.’