Here's a little puzzle from 1936, a real-life locked-room mysterywith a difference: it led to a significant development in military technology.
In this case, the body of a young woman was found in her hom
e, having evidently been shot in the chest and rapidly bleeding to death. There was no weapon , no indication of an intruder, and no motive. Two clues stood out. The bullet was very small and unlike anything the investigators had seen before. And the woman was lying in front of the open door of the coal furnace.
The celebrated physicist Robert Williams Woodof John Hopkins University was called in to investigate. Wood is perhaps best known as "father of both infrared and ultraviolet photography", inventing Wood's glasswhich blocks visible light but allows UV and IR. He also wrote The Man Who Rocked The Earth, a 1916 science fiction novel which anticipated the invention of the atomic bomb. He also had a detailed knowledge of explosives (and was apparently fond of using them for practical jokes), which allowed him to provide expert forensic assistance in a number of murder cases.
Wood immediately formed a theory about how the woman had been killed. This theory involved an entirely new type of weapon, which Wood set out to replicate. I'll leave you with the mystery for now, tomorrow we'll look at what Wood found and why it's still relevant today.
