Sources page biographical material

5.H.4. OTHER AND GENERAL
These all have coloured edges unless specified. See S&B, p. 36, for examples.
Edwin L[ajette] Thurston. US Patent 487,797 -- Puzzle. Applied: 30 Sep 1890; patented: 13 Dec 1892. 3pp + 3pp diagrams. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. 4 x 4 puzzles with 6-coloured corners or edges, but assuming no colour is repeated on a piece -- indeed he uses the 15 = BC(6,2) ways of choosing 4 out of 6 colours once only and then has a sixteenth with the same colours as another, but in different order. Also a star-shaped puzzle of six parallelograms.

Edwin L. Thurston. US Patent 487,798 -- Puzzle. Applied: 30 Sep 1890; patented: 13 Dec 1892. 2pp + 1p diagrams. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. As far as I can see, this is the same as the 4 x 4 puzzle with 6 coloured edges given above, but he seems to be emphasising the 15 pieces.

Edwin L. Thurston. US Patent 490,689 -- Puzzle. Applied: 30 Sep 1890; patented: 31 Jun 1893. 2pp + 1p diagrams. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. The patent is for 3 x 3 puzzles with 4 coloured corners or edges, but with pieces having no repeated colours and in a fixed orientation. He selects some 8 of these pieces for reasons not made clear and mentions moving them "after the manner of the old 13, 14, 15 puzzle." S&B, p. 36, describes the Calumet Puzzle, Calumet Baking Powder Co., Chicago, which is a 3 x 3 head to tail puzzle, claimed to be covered by this patent.

Le Berger Malin. France, c1900. 3 x 3 head to tail puzzle, but the edges are numbered and the matching edges must add to 10. ??NYS -- described by K. Takizawa, N. Takashima & N. Yoshigahara; Vess Puzzle and Its Family -- A Compendium of 3 by 3 Card Puzzles; published by the authors, Tokyo, 1983. Slocum has this in two different boxes and dates it to c1900 -- I had c1915 previously. Haubrich has one version, Produced by GB&O N.K. Atlas.

Angus K. Rankin. US Patent 1,006,878 -- Puzzle. Applied: 3 Feb 1911; patented: 24 Oct 1911. 2pp + 1p diagrams. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. Described in S&B, p. 36. Grandpa's Wonder Puzzle. 3 x 3 square puzzle. Each piece has corners coloured, using four colours, and the colours meeting at a corner must differ. The patent doesn't show the advertiser's name -- Grandpa's Wonder Soap -- but is otherwise identical to S&B's photo.

Daily Mail World Record Net Sale puzzle. 1920 1921. Instructions and picture of the pieces. Letter from Whitehouse to me describing its invention. 19 6-coloured hexagons without repeated colours. Daily Mail articles as follows. There may be others that I missed and sometimes the page number is a bit unclear. Note that 5 Dec was a Sunday.

9 Nov 1920, p. 5. "Daily Mail" puzzle. To be issued on 7 Dec.

13 Nov 1920, p. 4. Hexagon mystery.

17 Nov 1920, p. 5. New mystery puzzle. Asserts the inventor does not know the solution -- i.e. the solution has been locked up in a safe.

20 Nov 1920, p. 4. What is it?

23 Nov 1920, p. 5. Fascinating puzzle. The most fascinating puzzle since "Pigs in Clover".

25 Nov 1920, p. 5. Can you do it?

29 Nov 1920, p. 5. £250 puzzle.

1 Dec 1920, p. 4. Mystery puzzle clues.

2 Dec 1920, p. 5. £250 puzzle race.

3 Dec 1920, p. 5. The puzzle.

4 Dec 1920, p. 4. The puzzle. Amplifies on the inventor not knowing the solution -- after the idea was approved, a new pattern was created by someone else and locked up.

6 Dec 1920, unnumbered back page. Photo with caption: £250 for solving this.

7 Dec 1920, p. 7. "Daily Mail" Puzzle. Released today. £100 for getting the locked up solution. £100 for the first alternative solution and £50 for the next alternative solution. "It is believed that more than one solution is possible."

8 Dec 1920, p. 5. "Daily Mail" puzzle.

9 Dec 1920, p. 5. Can you do it?

10 Dec 1920, p. 4. It can be done.

13 Dec 1920, p. 9. Most popular pastime. "More than 500,000 Daily Mail Puzzles have been sold."

15 Dec 1920, p. 4. Puzzle king & the 19 hexagons. Dudeney says he does not think it can be solved "except by trial."

16 Dec 1920, p. 4. Tantalising 19 hexagons.

16 Dec 1920, unnumbered back page. Banner at top has: "The Daily Mail" puzzle. Middle of page has a cartoon of sailors trying to solve it.

17 Dec 1920, p. 5? The Xmas game.

18 Dec 1920, p. 7. Puzzle Xmas 'card'.

20 Dec 1920, p. 7. Hexagon fun.

22 Dec 1920, p. 3. 3,000,000 fascinated. It is assumed that about 5 people try each example and so this indicates that nearly 600,000 have been sold.

23 Dec 1920, p. 3. Too many cooks.

23 Dec 1920, unnumbered back page. Cartoon: The hexagonal dawn!

28 Dec 1920, p. 3? Puzzled millions. "On Christmas Eve the sales exceeded 600,000 ...."

29 Dec 1920, p. 3? "I will do it."

30 Dec 1920, p. 8. Puzzle fun.

3 Jan 1921, p. 3. The Daily Mail Puzzle. C. Lewis, aged 21, a postal clerk solved it within two hours of purchase and submitted his solution on 7 Dec. Hundreds of identical solutions were submitted, but no alternative solutions have yet appeared. There are two pairs of identical pieces: 1 & 12, 4 & 10.

3 Jan 1921, p. 10 = unnumbered back page. Hexagon Puzzle Solved, with photo of C. Lewis and diagram of solution.

10 Jan 1921, p. 4. Hexagon puzzle. Since no alternative hexagonal solutions were received, the other £150 is awarded to those who submitted the most ingenious other solution -- this was judged to be a butterfly shape, submitted by 11 persons, who shared the £150.

Horace Hydes & Francis Reginald Beaman Whitehouse. UK Patent 173,588 -- Improvements in Dominoes. Applied: 29 Sep 1920; complete application: 29 Jun 1921; accepted: 29 Dec 1921. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. 3pp + 1p diagrams. This is the patent for the above puzzle, corresponding to provisional patent 27599/20 on the package. The illustration shows a solved puzzle based on 'A stitch in time saves nine'.

George Henry Haswell. US Patent 1,558,165 -- Puzzle. Applied: 3 Jul 1924; patented: 11 Sep 1925. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. below. 2pp + 1p diagrams. For edge-matching hexagons with further internal markings which have to be aligned. [E.g. one could draw a diagonal and require all diagonals to be vertical -- this greatly simplifies the puzzle!] If one numbers the vertices 1, 2, ..., 6, he gives an example formed by drawing the diagonals 13, 15, 42, 46 which produces six triangles along the edges and an internal rhombus.

C. Dudley Langford. Note 2829: Dominoes numbered in the corners. MG 43 (No. 344) (May 1959) 120 122. Considers triangles, squares and hexagons with numbers at the corners. There are the same number of pieces as with numbers on the edges, but corner numbering gives many more kinds of edges. E.g. with four numbers, there are 24 triangles, but these have 16 edge patterns instead of 4. The editor (R. L. Goodstein) tells Langford that he has made cubical dominoes "presumably with faces numbered". Langford suggests cubes with numbers at the corners. [I find 23 cubes with two corner numbers and 333 with three corner numbers. ??check]

Piet Hein. US Patent 4,005,868 -- Puzzle. Applied: 23 Jun 1975; patented: 1 Feb 1977. Front page + 8pp diagrams + 5pp text. Basically non-matching puzzles using marks at the corners of faces of the regular polyhedra. He devises boards so the problems can be treated as planar.

Kiyoshi Takizawa; Naoaki Takashima & Nob. Yoshigahara. Vess Puzzle and Its Family -- A Compendium of 3 by 3 Card Puzzles. Published by the authors, Tokyo, Japan, 1983. Studies 32 types (in 48 versions) of 3 x 3 'head to tail' matching puzzles and 4 related types (in 4 versions). All solutions are shown and most puzzles are illustrated with colour photographs of one solution. (Haubrich counts 51 versions -- check??)

Melford D. Clark. US Patent 4,410,180 -- Puzzle. Applied: 16 Nov 1981; patented: 18 Oct 1983. Reproduced in Haubrich, About ..., 1996, op. cit. in 5.H.4. 2pp + 2pp diagrams. Corner matching squares, but with the pieces marked 1, 2, ..., so that the pieces marked 1 form a 1 x 1 square, the pieces marked 2 allow this to be extended to a 2 x 2 square, etc. There are n² - (n-1)² pieces marked n.

Jacques Haubrich. Compendium of Card Matching Puzzles. Printed by the author, Aeneaslaan 21, NL-5631 LA Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1995. 2 vol., 325pp. describing over 1050 puzzles. He classifies them by the nine most common matching rules: Heads and Tails; Edge Matching (i.e. MacMahon); Path Matching; Corner Matching; Corner Dismatching; Jig-Saw-Like; Continuous Path; Edge Dismatching; Hybrid. He does not include Jig-Saw-Like puzzles here. Using the number of cards and their shape, then the matching rules, he has 136 types. 31 different numbers of cards occur: 4, 6-16, 18-21, 23-25, 28, 30, 36, 40, 45, 48, 56, 64, 70, 80, 85, 100. There is an index of 961 puzzle names. He says Hoffmann is the earliest published example. He notes that most path puzzles have a global criterion that the result have a single circuit which slightly removes them from his matching criterion and he does not treat them as thoroughly. He has developed computer programs to solve each type of puzzle and has checked them all.

Jacques Haubrich. About, Beyond and Behind Card Matching Puzzles. [= Vol. 3 of above]. Ibid, Apr 1996, 87pp. This is a general discussion of the different kinds of puzzles, how to solve them and their history, reproducing ten patents and two obituaries.