The Thinking Machine

Jacques Futrelle

4 ideas

1. Van Dusen's wager to escape Cell 13

   Professor Van Dusen bets two friends he can escape the death-row cell of Chisholm Prison within one week, entering with only a few seemingly trivial items, such as tooth powder, polished shoes and some banknotes. He notices rats in the cell and reasons they must reach the outside through a drain pipe, then ties thread unravelled from his stockings to a rat to reach an outside accomplice, the reporter Hutchinson Hatch. Through that line he gets acid to weaken the window bars, arranges for the prison's arc light to fail, and walks out among the repairmen, arriving at his friends' dinner on time.

2. Pure logic can overcome any obstacle

   Van Dusen asserts that the mind, applied with enough rigor, can overcome any physical constraint, because 'two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time.' Once the governing facts of a situation are known, the solution follows from them as inevitably as arithmetic.

3. Anomalies reveal hidden channels to exploit

   A small irregularity in the environment, such as a live rat in a sealed cell, is evidence of an unseen passage the system's designers overlooked. Instead of treating such details as noise, the reasoner asks what must be true for this thing to be here, and follows the answer to a route out. Every closed system leaks somewhere, and the leak shows itself through what does not belong.

4. Innocuous resources recombined into decisive tools

   Security that screens for dangerous objects misses dangerous combinations of ordinary ones. It also misses the institution's own predictable responses, which can be triggered and used.

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