Sep 19, 2023
Puzzler today.
I was flossing the other day, so I had some time to think, and I was musing about the origin of the name, The Brooklyn Dodgers. I was watching a documentary about baseball, and it got me thinking.
So I looked it up, just for fun. It turns out that the people of Brooklyn were called 'dodgers' before the team was there. The people that lived in Brooklyn then were called 'Trolley Dodgers.'
The baseball team was originally the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, but they shortened it to just the Brooklyn Dodgers.
There were these electric trolley cars that ran through Brooklyn, and they ran right by the Ebbets Field where they used to play, and the fans had to dodge the trolley in order to get to the field. So they were called Trolley Dodgers.
And the question is very simple. Why were these people dodging trolleys? What was it about the behavior of the trolleys that made it necessary to dodge them?
And here is the hint. The hint is, Thomas Edison.
Good luck.
And here is the answer.
The trolleys ran on DC current. But the generators of this current year were very unreliable.
That's the answer.
They didn't often produce the right flow of current and the trollers would behave erratically because they were always getting different volts in different amounts and sometimes they would surge forward and people had to scatter or dodge them to avoid bodily harm.
So the people of Brooklyn were dodging these trolleys because of unreliable generators of the DC current.
