Introducing “Stew’s Views,” an occasional column by longtime Lincoln resident Stewart Coffin, who writes about science, nature, economics, history, music, poetry, humor — and puzzles.
For the past 56 years, I have been in the business of crafting what some might call geometric recreations or puzzles but I prefer to call simply “AP-ART,” (the art that comes apart.) As I now near retirement age at 96, I have been spending less time at my workbench and more time organizing and documenting. I have even been setting up some display shelves as a sort of little museum in my apartment. In the three books on my work, it recently occurred to me that I have never given proper credit to the Lincoln Library and the one librarian there most responsible for my getting started. So that will be the purpose of this article.
After moving to Lincoln with my family in 1964, I continued for a few more years with my business of making canoes, kayaks, and paddles. But the noxious chemicals I used, such as benzene and acetone, were making me increasingly sick, and I began looking for some other form of work. With a background in art on both sides of my family, in 1968 I started tinkering with polyhedral sculptures, one of which was an interlocking set of twelve notched hexagonal rods.
Lacking the means to make a really accurate model, I consulted our next door neighbor Fred Wilfert, a skilled machinist, who was able to mill one from hexagonal steel rod using the machine tools where he worked at Reese Sewing Machine in Waltham. From that I was able to make a silicone mold and then cast a few in colorful epoxy to give to our three girls, ages 5, 6, and 8 to play with. They all took to their new toy readily.
Back in 1959, the town of Lincoln completed a new addition to our library, which included for the first time a children’s room, and Helen “Heddie” Kent was hired as the town’s first school librarian. When my kids took their new toys to the library to show to their friends, it caught the attention of Heddie, who immediately recognized its potential as a marketable puzzle and contacted me. She put me in touch with her friend and neighbor in Concord, Thomas Atwater, who by remarkable coincidence was one of the few business agents for inventors like myself in the entire country who specialized in puzzles. It was he who edited the Soma newsletter that helped bring attention to Piet Hein’s soon-to-become-famous Soma Cube.
A Hectix puzzle made in four different colorful woods.
There is much more to this story, such as the licensing of my Hectix puzzle to 3M, the molding of 100,000 of them by Nylon Products in Clinton, and assembly of 20,000 by our three girls on summer vacation on a picnic table in our backyard. But I won’t go into details here, as all of that together with much more is contained somewhere within my website, stewartcoffin.com.