Hello, my name is Tyler, and I am your Puzzle Master insider.
Today, I'll begiving you an inside look at six individual paper puzzles and a
puzzle magazine from Sam Loyd.
For those of you who have never heard of Sam Loyd, here's a bit of history on Sam Loyd the Man.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1841.
At an early age, he developed a love for chess and by 1850 he was an accomplished chess prodigy.
His first big puzzle was the Trick Donkeys,
and in this puzzle you
have to cut with scissors down these two lines, separating the riders from the donkeys
and you have to position the pieces in such a way that it looks like the
riders are on the donkeys racing each other.
I'm not going to show you the solution today, but if you flip over each card, on the back there is a history of
the puzzle itself. This puzzle was famously used by a circus showman,
PT Barnum, who erased and renamed the puzzle Barnum's Trick Mules.
Sam Loyd's second big puzzle is called The Pony Puzzle.
The idea here is that you
cut out the pony shape, cut out each of the four legs and the tail, creating six pieces.
What you want to do with those six pieces is rearrange them into as
many different ponies as you can.
On the back of the card, there's a bit of a
history on the puzzle and from that it says "On the return voyage from a trip to
Europe, Loyd went past the famous White Horse Monument on Uffington Hill in
Berkshire, England. The then governor of Pennsylvania, Andrew G Curtin, who as a passenger,
suggested that a puzzle might be worked up about the colossal figure
of a horse engraved on the side of an old english hill.
Loyd wants to volunteer, and in a few minutes produced The Pony Puzzle."
Another popular puzzle
by Sam Loyd is called Get Off the Earth, or The Last Man.
In this puzzle, you can rotate it back and forth like this. You'll see on the back here that there
is a pin that allows you to rotate one way or the other and kind of stops it
from moving too far. So if you rotate it to the one direction and count the men,
there's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. Here's where you'll see the trick or the
mystery, I guess as it is. You rotate it completely the other direction and count
the men, there's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13. So the mystery is where does that 13th man come from?
Next from Sam Loyd, I have three puzzles that are postcard-sized puzzles.
First one's called Alice in Wonderland, second is the Japanese Leapfrog Puzzle,
and third is Comical Transformations.
So in the Alice in Wonderland, it's got "Was it a cat I saw?" here written out over and over.
You gotta find how many different combinations you can do to make "Was it a cat I saw".
Second is this Japanese Leapfrog Puzzle. It's got three frogs going different ways here,
and you got to jump the frogs and get the three frogs from one side to the
other and vice versa.
And this third one, Comical Transformations, it's got a face
here and you can see the guy's face a little more clearly this way.
There's a number of different faces and figures inside of this picture. On the back here,
it explains and finds, yep, explains which ones you have to find and what they are.
So it's three postcard-sized puzzles, there's a whole bunch more of these.
Sam Loyd also has the Our Puzzle Magazine here, and it's got a whole whack
of different puzzles inside. There's any number of word puzzles, picture puzzles,
things like that. So something to check out, and they've got this magazine which
is very interesting, you get a lot of stuff in there.
Again, just really great construction great pictures, and something interesting
from Sam Loyd that that you could take along on a trip or or something like that.
One interesting fact about Sam Loyd the Man is that he has been credited as the
inventor of some ten thousand different puzzles.
The company that to this day still bears his name, has taken up command
of creating some pretty awesome puzzles as you can see and puzzles
that are well made, but not expensive.
They're just awesome stuff and on their website they actually have a guarantee that goes as follows.
Each product created by the Sam Loyd company, carries the Sam Loyd signature label.
This is your guarantee that the product you have purchased is a genuine Sam Loyd
article that has been created using the very best techniques and
materials faithful to the standards set by Sam Loyd over a century ago.
Each puzzle goes through a stringent ten stage phase before it is worthy enough
to carry the Sam Loyd signature and made available to you throughout the world.
These six paper puzzles, and the magazine along with many other products
from Sam Loyd, are available on PuzzleMaster.ca. You will find a link to them down below in the description.
That wraps up today's video, make sure to subscribe
to the Puzzle Master YouTube channel
Like us on Facebook and Follow us on Instagram.
Thank you for watching and I hope that you have a very puzzling week.