This is awesome! I just discovered that you can read Thinking Machine stories online! I had a book of them as a kid. The “Thinking Machine” was a super-smart detective, sort of an American Sherlock Holmes. The author Jacques Futrelle hadn’t written very many when he went to Europe to promote the books… and arranged passage back to America on the Titanic. Yeah. So there aren’t any more. Anyway, I think these versions online may have been slightly edited in my book. There are details that I distinctly remember from the stories that don’t appear here. (I’ll list one in particular after the jump so as not to spoil anybody. Go read the stories. They’re really good.)Okay, so the really glaring change to me is in “The Silver Box”. I distinctly remember that one of the clues was that the boss had originally given the secretary a gold box, which she’d asked to exchange for a silver one (because the silver one was high enough to lift the phone receiver). That little bit doesn’t appear in the online story at all! And hey, now that I think about it, calling the story “The Silver Box” is a really huge tip-off that the secretary had something to do with it, right?
