Standing to one side of the soap box, the clown sports a greasepaint smirk on his face. On the box is printed the label Washington Soap – Free From Lye. Could this be a satiric political cartoon from the closing years of the twentieth century? No, this is the illustration accompanying a Sam Loyd math puzzle from the opening years of that same century.

Did you watch your step, you puzzled masses of the modern age? For you needed the same good measure of skepticism to solve that puzzle that our fed-up-and-nottaking- it-anymore citizenry now need to cut through all the splattered mud and political hocus-pocus. For Loyd had set the seemingly impossible task of dissecting a three-dimensional box to a two-dimensional square. If he himself had been on the square, he should have admitted that he intended that the projected outline of the box be dissected. And not to give away anything to modern trickery, a row of crooked steps was needed to solve the puzzle in the required two pieces!