Puzzles, Geometricks an Album of Puzzles
date: label: date made
content: 1950
label: date made
content: 1939
label: date made
content: 1939-1950
name: label: maker
content: Grumetter, Murray
notes: label: Description
content: Puzzles involving the arrangement of flat polygons into various shapes have been known since antiquity. This small spiral-bound booklet contains five paper envelopes, each with the cardboard pieces for one or more rearrangement puzzles. The puzzles were copyrighted by the Brooklyn, New York, inventor, mathematician and businessman Murray Grumetter (1900-1970), and published in 1939 by Playcraft house in Brooklyn. They were designed to entertain adults, to help children acquire a sense of proportion, order, design, and to foster originality, concentration and perception.
label: Description
content: Envelope A contains “Versa-Tiles,” a set of four identical quadrilaterals that may be arranged to form a square or a diamond-shape rhombus. Also included is a square which can be arranged with the for quadrilaterals to form a larger square and a rectangle which can be arranged with the quadrilaterals to form a larger rectangle.
label: Description
content: Envelope B, “‘Teen Squares,” contains four pieces marked in red with portions of small squares. These pieces can be arranged to give the appearance that there are 15, 16 or 17 squares.
label: Description
content: Envelope C, “Biform Square,” contains eight polygonal pieces. Seven of them can be arranged to form a square. A second set of seven can also be arranged in a square.
label: Description
content: Envelope D, “The Tormenter,” includes four rectangular pieces, four small tiles of differing polygonal shapes, and a shaded L-shaped piece. Two sets of eight of these pieces can be arranged in a square.
label: Description
content: Envelope E contains “Foo-lin,” described as “A Fascinating Chinese Puzzle.” There are seven polygonal pieces (two equal triangles, four quadrilaterals and an irregular pentagon). Three sheets included in the envelope show silhouettes of twelve of the figures that can be formed with the pieces. There also is a sheet for ordering solutions and more problems. The pieces are not those of a tangram. In addition to puzzles, the book contains a photograph of Jane Pickens and two of her Escourtiers playing Geometricks before curtain time. Endorsements from various New York newspapers alo are included..
label: Description
content: Murray Grumette would move to California in the 1950s, where he worked at Lockheed Aircraft on the IBM 704 computer. In 1958, he published a set of “code-undrums,” coding problems for that computer. His wife, Lina Grumette (1908-1988), was a noted chess player.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
topic: label: Subject
content: Mathematics
label: Subject
content: Mathematical Recreations
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Mathematics
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Rhoda S. Ratner
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2008.0047.01
label: catalog number
content: 2008.0047.01
label: accession number
content: 2008.0047
objectType: label: Object Name
content: puzzles
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 1.5 cm x 12 cm x 15.1 cm; 19/32 in x 4 23/32 in x 5 15/16 in