Futility Closet - 023-A Victorian Poisoning Mystery

Episode Date: August 25, 2014

On New Year's Day 1886, London grocer Edwin Bartlett was discovered dead in his bed with a lethal quantity of liquid chloroform in his stomach. Strangely, his throat showed none of the burns that chloroform should have caused. His wife, who admitted to having the poison, was tried for murder, but the jury acquitted her because "we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered." In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn about Edwin and Adelaide Bartlett's strange marriage and consider the various theories that have been advanced to explain Edwin's death. We'll also sample a 50,000-word novel written without the letter E and puzzle over a sure-footed American's visit to a Japanese office building. Sources for our segment on Adelaide Bartlett and the Pimlico poison mystery: "The Pimlico Poisoning Case," The Times, Feb. 16, 1886, 10. "The Pimlico Poisoning Case," The Times, March 8, 1886, 12. "The Pimlico Mystery," The Observer, March 21, 1886, 3. "Central Criminal Court, April 13," The Times, April 14, 1886, 6. "Central Criminal Court, April 16," The Times, April 17, 1886, 6. "The Pimlico Mystery," Manchester Guardian, April 19, 1886, 5. Michael Farrell, "Adelaide Bartlett and the Pimlico Mystery," British Medical Journal, December 1994, 1720-1723. Stephanie J. Snow, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How Anaesthetics Changed the World, 2009. A full record of the trial was published in 1886, with a preface by Edward Clarke, Adelaide's barrister. The full text of Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E", is available at Wikisource. Here's an excerpt from A Void, the English translation of George Perec's 1969 novel La Disparition, also written without the letter E. Two notable Futility Closet posts regarding lipograms: An 1866 poem written without the letter S An 1892 poem each of whose stanzas omits the letter E but includes every other letter of the alphabet (a "lipogram pangram") This week's lateral thinking puzzle comes from Mental Fitness Puzzles, by Kyle Hendrickson, Julie Hendrickson, Matt Kenneke, and Danny Hendrickson, 1998. You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 23. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll examine a baffling unsolved poisoning mystery from Victorian London, sample a 50,000-word novel that doesn't use the letter E, and puzzle over a sure-footed American's visit to a Japanese office building. Pimlico Mystery, which is a sensational British poisoning mystery that unfolded in 1855 and has never been solved. In a nutshell, what happened is this. A man and his wife went to sleep in their

bedroom in South London in 1855, and at 4 a.m. she awoke to discover that he was apparently dead, and an investigation showed that his stomach contained a lethal quantity of liquid chloroform, which is a poison. The chloroform should have burned his throat on the way down and his throat just wasn't burned. She admitted to having chloroform and she was tried for his murder but no one could explain how she could have gotten the chloroform into his stomach without passing it through his throat

and so they acquitted her of murder. The foreman of the jury said, We have considered the evidence, and although we think there is the gravest suspicion attaching to the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered. So they let her go. After the trial, the surgeon, Sir James Padgett, said, Now that she's been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it.

But she disappeared, and no one knows to this day how Edwin Bartlett was killed, and if she did it, how she managed to pull it off. Their background is fairly straightforward. He was English. She was French. He was about 11 years older than she was. They'd been married for about 10 years when all this happened. He was a moderately prosperous proprietor of grocery shops in South London. He had six of them. Their marriage was a bit strange because he seemed to enjoy seeing her start relationships with other men. At the trial, she said, the more attention and admiration I gained from male acquaintances, the more delighted did he appear. Their attention to me gave him

pleasure. And there was one in particular. after they'd moved in 1855 to the Pimlico district in London, they met a 27-year-old Wesleyan minister named George Dyson. And Edwin really pressed the two of them together. Adelaide said, my husband threw us together. He requested us to kiss in his presence and he seemed to enjoy it. Oh, that's not odd, huh? No, and it's odd because he, Edwin really went, I've got to say, overboard with that. He revised his will. The will had originally stipulated that she couldn't remarry after he died, which is a common provision at the time.

Really? But he went out of his way to remove that provision so that the two of them could marry after Edwin was gone. All of this is the weirder because Edwin was only 40 years old. He wasn't dying. His health wasn't that bad. So it's just kind of, I don't know what to make of that.

It's strange that he'd be so interested in seeing her foster this increasingly close relationship with another man. But he did. That was all unfolding in 1855. That December, Edwin's health took a turn for the worse. And Adelaide asked George Dyson, this minister, if he could arrange to get her some liquid chloroform. And he asked why, and she said it was because she thought it would help her take care of Edwin. Later on, during the trial, it became known that that wasn't the real reason she wanted it. She wanted it because Edwin had been making sexual advances on her, and feeling at this point betrothed to the minister as much as anything. She

wanted to fend him off and thought she could do it by putting chloroform on a handkerchief and just holding him off that way. So he got the bottle of chloroform for her, gave it to her, and she was on the point of actually using it in that way to keep her husband off her. This was on New Year's Eve when she finally just broke down and confessed to him that that's what she had been planning to do. And I'm guessing they had an argument. Anyway, she showed him the bottle of chloroform. They put it on the mantelpiece and both went to bed. That's New Year's Eve, 1855. Cut to about six or seven hours later, four o'clock in the morning, she wakes up and finds that he's dead. She summons the maid

and tells the landlord come down i think mr bartlett is dead she said she'd woken to find him face down and had poured nearly half a pint of brandy down his throat trying to revive him uh they did an investigation they were not able to establish any natural cause of death but eventually they did a necropsy and found his stomach contained this liquid chloroform and uh dyson told them that he'd given liquid chloroform. And Dyson told them that he'd given the chloroform to her. And so she was charged with willful murder and brought to trial in April the next year. So that's the setup. The problem is there's no way to make the facts fit any explanation. That's why no one's gotten anywhere in explaining what happened. The analysis of the post-mortem basically said, quote, the administration of a fatal dose of

chloroform in the liquid form by the mouth is how he died. So it had gone into his mouth, down his throat, into his stomach. The question is, how do you do that without burning his throat? The Crown said there were only three possibilities. One was suicide. He deliberately drunk the poison in order to kill himself. Okay. Two is some sort of mistake. Perhaps he'd woken up in the middle of the night and confusedly drank it, thinking it was medicine or something, and wound up dying that way.

Okay. And the third is willful administration by someone else, which must have been Adelaide because she was the only other person in the room. Okay. Which amounts to basically saying it must have been murder. But in all those cases, it would go down his throat, right? Yes. I mean, and you're saying it must have been murder. But in all those cases, it would go down his throat, right? Yes. I mean, and you're saying it should have produced burning in the throat.

There was some testimony that if he was awake, sitting upright, cooperating, and drank it in one draft quickly, that it could maybe have gotten down there without burning. But even that is sort of equivocal, and there aren't many scenarios where that's even possible. Let me just run down this list. Suicide is the first possibility. Even the Crown thought this was highly improbable. During the testimony there, Dr. Alfred Leach said, quote, the deceased never exhibited any tendency to suicide.

In fact, Leach arrived at the scene of the death scene that morning and explicitly asked Adelaide, if Edwin might've taken this in order to kill himself. And she said, no, she, that would have been impossible without her knowing it. Um,

also Edwin had eaten a good supper the night before and had requested a good piece of haddock for the following morning saying it would encourage him to rise early, which is not something that a suicidal person is likely to say. So it's not impossible. He maybe did kill himself, but there's no evidence supporting that theory. Number two is an accident. Perhaps he had drunk it confusedly sometime in the middle of the night, somehow thinking it was something else. The problem with that is liquid chloroform burns.

And so as soon as he put it in his mouth, he would have felt strong burning pain and that would have told him that it wasn't brandy or whatever else he thought he was drinking, which sort of kills that theory. I'm getting a lot of this from an article in the British Medical Journal in 1994 written by Michael Farrell. And he says that accidental ingestion is the least likely. It's just hard to imagine any scenario where he could drink that without feeling pain and realizing what he was doing. But that leaves only murder. And when you hear the first bare facts of this case, you tend to think she must have done it. I mean, you've got two people in a bottle of poison on New Year's Eve.

And on New Year's Day, you've got one person and a corpse full of poison in a closed room. She had, you know, asked for the chloroform. She had, you know, the motive, the means, and the opportunity. Everything points to her. Yeah. But the problem is if you actually, the more you study the facts, the less certain that appears to be. Her actual behavior doesn't seem to match that of a murderess.

To begin with, if you're going to try to kill someone, if you were going to try to kill me, you wouldn't wait to do it until we were alone together in a closed room with a bottle of poison. With no alibi, yeah. And just call in the landlord and say, oh my goodness, Greg's dead. Yeah, no alibi, no cover story, no attempt to exonerate yourself, not even a guess as to what might have happened. You're saying, oh, whatever kind of, you know, that's not what you would do,

even if you intended to kill me, because it leaves you no out. In particular, when the landlord arrived at the scene he saw a wine glass that smelled strongly of chloroform next to the body if she had killed him she would have had as much time as she wanted to clean or hide or destroy the glass you wouldn't leave it's like a smoking gun leaving it right next to the body like that. Also, as I said, or maybe didn't, when Alfred Leach, the doctor, proposed a necropsy to investigate and see if they could learn what the cause of death was, she endorsed that immediately,

when she could have opposed it. Tried to stop it, yeah. When he said, do you think he might have killed himself, she had an opportunity then to say, oh my goodness, that must be what happened. He drank this to kill himself. Right. He was committed suicide. She didn't do that. She said, no, actually, that have killed himself, she had an opportunity then to say, oh, my goodness, that must be what happened. He drank this to kill himself. He was committed suicide. She didn't do that.

She said, no, actually, that's impossible. I would have seen it. Right. Leach, the doctor, testified that during Edwin's illness in December that she had lavished tender care on him. She'd sat with him throughout his illness. He couldn't sleep unless she held his foot. Leach said, quote, a kinder, more patient, or more self-sacrificing nurse could not have been wished for. Which doesn't sound like, you know, I don't think their marriage was on the rocks, and she really did seem to care for him and was taking care of him, so it doesn't

sound like she would be likely to kill him then. An interesting quote from her from early in December, when Edwin was starting to get ill, they went to one doctor and weren't totally happy with what he told them, so they were going to get a second opinion. And she told someone, quote, if Mr. Bartlett does not get better soon, his friends and relations will accuse me of poisoning him, which is the very last thing you'd expect a poisoner to say. What the prosecution was trying to show in all of this was that she had killed him and they were proposing that the way she had done that was getting to inhale some chloroform on a handkerchief to sort of stupefy him to the point where he would be passive enough that she could just pour this down

his throat yeah but there are a lot of problems with that um a professor of medical jurisprudence said he knew of no case of murder by liquid chloroform it's hard to estimate first of all you have to estimate how much of the vapor to give to someone to sort of half knock them out, but still let them retain the swallowing reflex. Yeah. Then you have to pour it down their throat so that none of it goes into the windpipe,

and that was the case with him. Yes, you don't choke them. Right. And again, as you say, it's this whole burning question. Yeah. If she just poured it sort of relatively slowly down his throat, there would be burns on his throat, and there weren't any. Yeah. So all of that argues against the idea that this was a deliberate murder on Adelaide's part. But then that leaves you with just an open question.

How did the chloroform get into his stomach? Short answer is nobody knows. I'll give you some theories that people have offered down through the years and some stuff I've been thinking about just this week and reading old newspapers. Adelaide's barrister, Edward Clark, thinks that what may have happened is that on New Year's Eve, right before they'd come home, Edwin had had a dental procedure done and was in, I think, some pain afterward. And he thinks that Edwin at the dentist may have heard the dentist mention necrosis, thought that meant gangrene, confusedly thought that meant he was going to die, and drank the chloroform in order to kill himself. There are a lot of problems with that, one of which is that Adelaide had said explicitly that he couldn't have done that without her

knowledge. But also there's this odd detail that however he wound up drinking the chloroform, it had come to the men a bottle and it had been poured into a wine glass and he had drunk it from the wine glass, which seems like an oddly refined way to kill yourself. You'd think he would have just drunk it straight out of the bottle. Also, Leach had said that he wasn't suicidal or didn't seem to be at all. And if he was distressed after visiting the dentist, he didn't say anything to Adelaide or anyone else.

And he'd ordered what he wanted for breakfast. Right. So you could argue there that possibly, and I'm really reaching here, he ordered the haddock for breakfast and then discovered later, got into this fight with Adelaide about the chloroform and that she was going to use that to fend him off.

And perhaps he was so distraught and insulted at that, that he wound up killing himself. But that's a pretty long way to go for that explanation. Alfred Leach wrote in The Lancet that he thought what might have happened is that Edwin had taken the chloroform maliciously to distress Adelaide after she'd confessed her, her plan to fend off his advances with it. So he,

he didn't mean to, to take enough of it to kill him. He just wanted enough to make himself ill in order to, I guess, make her feel distraught or upset. Yeah, yeah. Which, speaking of a husband, seems kind of a weird way to, like, if you and I had a fight, it wouldn't occur to me to drink a little poison to get back at you. Yeah, but you don't encourage me to have affairs with other men either. That's true.

Also, and this is entirely me just speculating. No one anywhere has entertained this, but it occurred to me that there are psychiatric disorders, you know more about this than I do, where he could have taken a small amount of it, not in order to upset her, but in order to make himself ill because he enjoyed that role. Right. Or you were saying that when he had been ill, she had been so attentive. Yes. So it is possible that he was thinking, you know, if he made himself ill again, she would be all attentive and he'd have all her attentions. Which is possible too. Yeah. And that he just misjudged the amount. As I say, I don't know anyone out in the world who's actually entertaining that,

but it just ran through my head. One last thing here, Michael Farrellrell who had written about this In the British Medical Journal This is just for the record Said if she had wanted to kill him Here's how she might have gone about it She could have used the chloroform As a vapor to sort of stupefy him a bit Which he might have cooperated with

Because he may have been in some discomfort After the dental procedure When she got him into that state She could pour him a glass of brandy Give that to him and he would drink that off. That has a fiery taste. She tells him she's going to get another glass of brandy,

but instead fills the glass with chloroform and tells him to drink it off. And conceivably, if he already had the taste of brandy in his mouth, he could have drunk that off in one draft and maybe he was in enough pain from the dental procedure that he didn't sort of register the pain

that the burning of the chloroform would have caused. But he'd have to drink it very quickly to not get the burning in his throat. And then she could have poured the rest of the brandy down his throat to disguise the smell and sit by the body for a few hours before waking the maid and the doggots, the landlord. But even that leaves open the question of why didn't she get rid of the glass, which was just sitting there. And there's a lot of ifs involved there that we don't have support for. And Farrell writes, In each of these possible scenarios, the puzzle remains

concerning the fact that no traces of burning were noticed in the mouth and throat of the deceased. Perhaps the state of Edwin's mouth made it more difficult than otherwise to detect the signs. The evidence is closely balanced to suggest either murder or suicide, with the suicide theory appearing marginally more convincing. Adelaide did not marry Dyson, but returned to Orléans, the place of her birth, leaving behind her one of the most intriguing poisoning cases of the 19th

century. Two last points there. As he mentioned, she didn't actually get together with Dyson after all that. Really? The minister, because she had asked Dyson to get the chloroform under the pretext that she needed it to help Edwin with his illness. And when Dyson found out during the trial that she actually wanted it to fend off his sexual advances, he assumed immediately that she would just hoodwink him in order to get poison to kill her husband. Oh. And that killed any relationship between them. So he thought she was guilty.

Yes, he did, for whatever that's worth. So he thought she was guilty. Yes, he did, for whatever that's worth. And finally, we don't have much of Adelaide's voice in any of this, because at the time, it wasn't customary for a defendant to testify on her own behalf. That didn't happen until later in the 19th century. So when you read through all these records, that's what I came away wishing I could hear, is to get her to finally tell her side of the story and what she thought happened and to describe it and it's the one thing we don't have unfortunately so at this late date probably no one will ever know uh what happened to Edwin Bartlett

that night but it's a fascinating question we'll have a link to the full record of the case edited by Adelaide Bartlett's barrister Edwin Clark in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. If you've been enjoying the esoteric trivia that we talk about in these podcasts, you should be sure to check out our book, Futility Closet, An Idler's Miscellany of Compendious Amusements, which contains hundreds of bite-sized oddities, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes and learn about a doctor who took out his own appendix,

Ben Franklin's method for multiplying good deeds, and the difference between a rhododendron and a cold apple dumpling. rhododendron, and a cold apple dumpling. This week I've also been reading Gadsby, which is a novel written in 1939 by Ernest Vincent Wright. The remarkable thing about this novel is it's 50,000 words long and it does not contain the letter E anywhere. That was the whole point of this. Wright said he got tired of people saying

that you couldn't basically use the English language very well without using the letter E that it was essentially indispensable so he set out to write a novel to prove them wrong this sort of writing, this constrained writing in this way of deliberately omitting one or more letters is called a lipogram

and it happens sometimes inadvertently Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven doesn't happen to contain the letter Z but that's not that surprising The Raven, doesn't happen to contain the letter Z. But that's not that surprising. The Raven is only about a thousand words long, and Z is the least commonly used letter of the English language. So that's just going to happen by accident sometimes. But E is very different. E is by far the most frequently used letter of the English language, and it's very hard to write, certainly, a 50,000-word novel without it. The way Wright

did it was to literally tie down with a piece of string, tie down the E key on his typewriter. He said the story required five and a half months of concentrated endeavor with so many erasures and retrenchments that I tremble as I think of them. The problem with omitting E is that you can't use most verbs in the past tense, past tense like remarked or anything else. He had to use the word said to attribute all his dialogue. You can't use any numeral between six and 30, so you can't use dates. He says, when introducing young ladies into the story, there is a real barrier

for what young woman wants to have it known that she is over 30. And you can't use pronouns, a whole horde of pronouns. He, she, they, them, theirs, almost all of them contain the letter E, so you have to contrive ways to tell the story without usingorde of pronouns. He, she, they, them, theirs. Almost all of them contain the letter E, so you have to contrive ways to tell the story without using any of those. And I've got to say, Wright was very punctilious about this. He wouldn't use the word Mr., which looks safe enough on the page, but if you say it or write it out, it contains an E, and he thought that wasn't fair.

You could use doctor, though, for instance. Very strict. And even for chapter headings, he wouldn't write out chapter two because chapter contains an E. He would use Roman numerals instead. He says, a particularly annoying obstacle comes when, almost through a long paragraph, you can find no words with which to continue that line of thought. Hence, as in solitary, you're stuck and must go way back and start another, which, of course, must perfectly fit the preceding context. In the introduction, which he figured it was safe to use letter E,

since that's not part of the story, he says, people as a rule will not stop to realize what a task such an attempt actually is. As I wrote along and long-handed first, a whole army of little E's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon. But gradually, as they saw me writing on and on without even noticing them, they grew uneasy, and with exciting whisperings amongst themselves, began hopping up and writing on my pen, looking down constantly for a chance to drop off into some word. For all the world, like seabirds,

perched watching for a passing fish. But when they saw I'd covered 138 pages of typewriter-sized paper, they slid off onto the floor, walking sadly away arm in arm, but shouting back, You certainly must have a hodgepodge of a yarn-sized paper. They slid off onto the floor, walking sadly away arm in arm, but shouting back, You certainly must have a hodgepodge of a yarn there without us. Why, man, we are in every story ever written, hundreds of thousands of times. This is the first time we ever were shut out.

The story is about a town called Branton Hills, in which a man named John Gadsby, who's about 50 years old, Branton Hills has fallen on hard times, and he enlists a group of young people to help him sort of restore its fortunes and succeeds. So it's set, starts in 1906 and runs through the first part of the 20th century. So I just want to read an example just to show you what it reads like. In chapter six, a young girl named Lucy proposes establishing a zoo in the town and a rich woman named Lady Standish donates $4,000 that they need to build it. So here's a passage from Gadsby.

Everything I read from now on was written without the letter E. Now that a zoo was actually on its way, Gadsby had to call in various groups to talk about what a zoo should contain. Now you know that all animals can't find room in this orthographically odd story. So if you visit Lucy Zoo, you'll miss a customary inhabitant or two,

but you'll find an array worthy of your trip. And here he lists all the animals you'll find in the zoo. Hippopotamus, yak, caribou, walrus, bison, long list, all of which are safely without ease. In following months, many a school class was shown through our zoo's fascinating paths as instructors told of this or that animal's habits and natural haunts, and showing that it was as worthy of sympathy, if ill, as any human. And not only did such pupils obtain kindly thoughts for zoo animals, but cats, dogs, and all kinds of farmstocks soon found that things had an uncommon look through a dropping off in scoldings and whippings and rapidly improving living conditions. But most important of all was word from an ugly, hard-looking woman who, watching, with an apologizing sniff, a flock of happy birds, said,

I'm sorry that I always slap and ball out my kids so much, for I know now that kids or animals won't do as you wish if you snap and growl too much. And I trust that Mayor Gadsby knows what a lot of good all his public works do for us. That's very much the flavor of the novel. They try these public works and they succeed and and in doing so, teach the populace some worthy moral lesson. Oh, I see. Which is pretty good without an E, that you can write a coherent story at all, much less point of moral. So here's the moral he draws from that. Again, this is without the letter E. Now this is the most satisfactory and important thing to think about, for brutality will not, cannot, accomplish what a kindly disposition will. And if folks could only know how quickly

a balky child will, through loving and cuddling, grow into a charming happy youth, much childish gloom and sorrow would vanish, for a man or woman who is ugly to a child is too low to rank as highly as a wild animal, for no animal will stand, for an instant, anything approaching an attack or any form of harm to its young. But what a lot of tots find slaps, yanks, and hard words for conditions which do not call for such harsh tactics. No child is naturally ugly or cranky, and big gulping sobs or sad, unhappy young minds in a tiny body should not occur in any community of civilization. Adulthood holds many an opportunity for such conditions. Childhood should not. So that's all somewhat stiff.

I mean, it all holds together pretty well and tells a story. It's probably better than I could do. Yeah, it's certainly better than I could. But he actually manages to pull off what I think is kind of a nice style here and there. This is the final paragraph of the whole novel. A glorious full moon sails across a sky without a cloud. A crisp night air has folks turning up coat collars and kids hopping up and down for warmth. And he finishes it with finney instead of Vienne. That is actually pretty poetic there. Yeah, considering.

He published this. He had to self-publish it because he couldn't find a publisher for it in 1939, and then he died in the same year, so he didn't get to see what kind of reception it got. But it's become kind of famous among wordplay buffs for obvious reasons, and it's inspired some followers. Georges Perrec, the French writer, I've written about him also on Futility Closet,

in 1969 wrote a 300-page French novel without the letter E that's been translated. In English, it's translated as Avoid, and it's also been translated into eight other languages, all with these similar lipogramic constraints. They drop some letter depending on what the particular languages they're working in. And then in 2001, Mark Dunn published a novel called L-M-N-O-P, which if you can believe it, starts with the whole alphabet and gradually drops out successive letters until toward the end he's working with only L-M-N-O-N-P,

which is something to see. So that's Gadsby. I think he deserves a tribute from us, Ernest Vincent Wright, for trying this and pulling it off so well. I guess we should say something appropriately lipochromatic. Good job, Wright. That's the best I can do. I think I'm sure I've noticed. We'll have a link to the full text of Gadsby, which is now in the public domain, in our show notes. This is our lateral thinking puzzle segment.

Greg is going to give me a situation or scenario, and I'm going to have to try to reason it out using only yes or no questions. I like these off weeks. All I have to do is only yes or no questions. I like these off weeks. All I have to do is say yes or no. I know. There's no pressure at all. The person trying to solve always feels a little bit like taking an exam in front of a whole audience. You ready?

Okay. Oh, I should say, this one is from Kyle Hendrickson's book Mental Fitness Puzzles from 1998. Okay. Is that a hint? Maybe. On the first day of a business trip to Japan, BJ arrives at a large office building. She's never been there before and can't read any of the signs. Without seeing or talking to anyone, she quickly makes her way through a labyrinth of hallways to arrive at her destination.

How? This is 1998, so I'm assuming she doesn't have some clever smartphone app. Right, no. Okay, so she's in Japan. Yes. She can't read Japanese. That's right. Are there signs with something other than Japanese on them that she can use?

No. Is there something about color coding on the walls or the floor or something? Is BJ a human being? She's a dog and she sniffs her way to the right trail. I mean, she's a human being. Okay. She's a human being. Does she have any special skills or abilities or talents that I need to know about? Uh, no, no. Um, she's an adult female in Japanapan she does it matter what nationality she is no no um does it matter specifically that it's japan no okay it's just she's in a country where she can't read the language that's the point yeah that's all okay so she somehow without

seeing or talking to anyone heads to anyone, heads to the correct office? Yes. Through a labyrinth of hallways. Does she smell something? No. Well, I don't know. She's heading for a kitchen. No, you're really good.

I wouldn't have thought of any of these questions. And she smells the kitchen smells. Does she hear something that helps guide her? No. Does she see something that helps guide her in any way? In any way, yes way yes is this something she saw before she got into the building uh i can't quite answer that something she sees while she's in the building that helps her well i mean she has to see where she's going right right right

right well well the trick here is i have to figure out how she knows which hallways to go down. Right, that's right. Does she see something that helps guide her? Not in the sense that I think you're asking, no. Was she given directions before she got there or a map before she got there? Yes. So somebody gave her directions

before she got into the building? No. Somebody gave her a map before she got into the building, like a map of the building. Somebody gave her directions in the building. Once she got into the building, she was given directions somehow? Why are you laughing at me? Because I can't. Perfectly reasonable questions.

No, they are. I don't want to mislead you by saying the wrong thing, but no, none of those is true. But you said at some point she was given directions. Oh, playing like some kind of no because you said she didn't hear anything that no technology no no okay um um but if you had to say that one of her senses is guiding her it would be sight yeah without making too much of that without making too much of that is any of her other senses helping to guide her here no No, I guess I would say she couldn't do this with her eyes closed. Well, yeah, because you'd walk into walls, right? I just want to be playing fair.

Yeah, okay, but you seem to think that somebody gave her directions or a map at some point. That's not exactly right. That's not exactly right. Did she see directions or a map at some point? Can she see from where she is her final destination no um do i need to know anything specific about the characteristics of her final destination no okay i had a whole good line of reasoning for that we can do that anyway okay um uh so i have to figure out how, like, there's a bunch of choices that she could pick. Right.

And that is the case. It's not like all the hallways are closed off except one or something. It's a maze. She could pick a bunch of directions, but she unerringly chooses the right one. Exactly. And that's the trick, is how did she choose this correct pathway? Right. Um, has she this correct pathway? Right. Has she been there before?

No. Does she know anybody who's traversed this path before? No. Are all the buildings set up the same? So it's a corporate office and her office is the same in North America? No, that's a great answer, though. Oh, man, coming up with so many good answers. You really are.

Did somebody leave a trail for her somehow? Does it matter what time of day it is? No. So whether lights are on or lights are off. No, that's another good, you're good at this. Doesn't matter what time of day it is. Does it matter what time of year it is? No.

You want a hint? I guess. You need to know more about her. Well, I asked if she had any special abilities or skills or talents, and you said she did not. Is she walking? Yes. On her own feet? Yes.

I need to know more about her. Does her age matter? No. Does she have any disabilities no that matter does she have a previous any previous experience with something that matters yes in another hand um previous experience with office buildings yes previous experience with office buildings? Yes. Previous experience with similar office buildings to the one she's in? Uh, no, not necessarily. She, she, and you said her final destination doesn't matter, so it's not like she's going

someplace that she knows is usually in the basement or usually on the top floor. Right, that's right. Um, does her occupation matter? Yes. Yes, she's an architect. Does her occupation matter? Yes. Yes, she's an architect. Yes. She designed the building. She designed the building.

Okay. Oh, my. That took me a while. All right. Well, if you have a puzzle you think we'd like to use on our show, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you send in a puzzle but don't hear it used, there could be a couple reasons for that.

For one, sometimes we already know a puzzle that people send in, and it's just one that we happen to know from the past. Also, sometimes multiple people have sent us in the same puzzle. We're discovering, yeah. Yeah, which has been a problem because, like, I read it and planned to use it on Greg, and Greg read it and planned to use it on me, and then we discovered that we both knew the puzzle and the answer because we'd seen it for multiple

letters. But keep sending them. Yes. Yes. We're enjoying getting them in from the listeners. So please feel free to send one in if you have one for us. That's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com,

where you can post comments or questions, listen to past shows, and see the links mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for the book on amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 intriguing distractions perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50. If you want to support Futility Closet,

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