The following special catch puzzle appeared in the issue of The Weekly Dispatch for All Fools' Day, 1900. It caused considerable amusement; for out of a very large body of competitors, many quite expert, not a single person solved it, though it ran for nearly a month.

" A race between a man and a woman that I happened to witness one All Fools' Day has fixed itself indelibly on my memory. It happened at a country-house, where the gardener and the cook decided to run a race to a point 100 feet straight away and return. I found that the gardener ran 3 feet at every bound and the cook only 2 feet, but then she made three bounds to his two. Now, what was the result of the race?"

A fortnight after publication the editor added the following note: "It has been suggested that perhaps there is a catch in the 'return,' but there is not. The race is to a point 100 feet away and home again—that is, a distance of 200 feet. One correspondent asks whether they take exactly the same time in turning, to which I reply that they do. Another seems to suspect that it is really a conundrum, and that the answer is that 'the result of the race was a (matrimonial) tie.' But I had no such intention. The puzzle is an arithmetical one, as it purports to be."

According to an summary archive of the riddles run in the Weekly Standard that i managed to google...   'see below'

All this basically backs up what has already been said....  that the whole "riddle" was mixing up the pronouns.. the gardner was actually the female and she easily won the race.



Dudeny's columns in The Weekly Dispatch

P100 means puzzle number 100
S100 means solution number 100
* means a miscellaneous algebra problem "
.........

"  1900.04.01
P320 The gardner and the cook: *   "

"  1900.04.15
P320 is still not solved, is carried over"

" 1900.04.29
S320 trick of sexist prounouns fooled people"

Posted by Highway6 on 2006-03-06 15:02:04