RAY: Here's the answer to last week's puzzler. Do you remember last week's puzzler?

TOM: It had something to do with Germany.

RAY: There you go. OK. Now, I gave a lot of answers.

TOM: Or was it Russia?

RAY: And you didn't. That was War and Peace. And you didn't participate. I remember when I stated the puzzler, you were quite quiet.

TOM: I was.

RAY: Yeah. You didn't... Usually you interject; you interrupt; you interfere; disrupt.

TOM: Well, remind me what it was.

RAY: OK.

TOM: And I'll tell you why I was like that.

RAY: Here it is. Sometime in the late 1930's in Germany and perhaps other countries as well, aeronautical engineers... Now this thing is ripe with hints, this puzzler is. Aeronautical engineers were working on a device. The device. Get this.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: The device took water vapor which is one of the by-products of gasoline engine combustion and would condense it into water and save it and it would save it in such a way so that the amount of water saved would be exactly equivalent in weight --

TOM: To the amount of fuel burned.

RAY: There you go.

TOM: Right. And I said --

RAY: So --

TOM: I remember saying something like that way the weight of the plane would remain constant.

RAY: You did say that.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: Why would you want it to remain constant you might ask yourself?

TOM: The only thing I could think of was that it must have been a weapon of some kind and you wanted the weight to remain constant because there was some kind of a guidance system which wouldn't work properly if the weight kept changing.

RAY: Buzz bombs you're thinking of? Right?

TOM: Something like that.

RAY: No. That's not it either.

TOM: Nothing like that, huh?

RAY: So, as you might guess, as the engine burned a pound of fuel, a pound of water would be saved. Right?

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: You've come to that conclusion.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: And the rest would be discarded, of course. The question is why would you want to do this. That was the question and obviously you've come upon weaponry which is not it. Airplanes was not it. Our engineer Jonathan Marston came up with submarines. Ooh. That's good. Huh?

TOM: Oh, that would be good.

RAY: Except why would you want to save water? You're what? You're immersed in water.

TOM: Wait a minute. You said aeronautical.

RAY: There you go.

TOM: And submarines aren't aeronautical, John.

RAY: Well, he wasn't paying attention. He's engineering the show. Damn it. He's got a lot of other important things to do, but he got the jist of it.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: But he was close, I said.

TOM: Oh, dirigibles.

RAY: Exactly.

TOM: Of course.

RAY: At that time they had switched over from hydrogen as the levitating medium.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: Which was a little dangerous.

TOM: Little dangerous.

RAY: To helium which was much safer, but very expensive.

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: And needless to say as you consume fuel and the craft becomes lighter and lighter --

TOM: You got to spew the stuff out.

RAY: You got to spew the stuff out, but you can't do that because it's expensive. So, you what you want to do is save some of the by-products so you keep the weight of the vehicle the same.

TOM: Oh, I love it.

RAY: Isn't it great? Dale Margie or Margy sent that in.

TOM: Actually, he's answered for me a question I've been struggling with for a lo these many minutes which was the stoichiometry involved. That assumes the whole question and answer assumes that you produce far more water.

RAY: It's 18 to 1.

TOM: Really?

RAY: Eighteen pounds of water.

TOM: No.

RAY: To every pound of... And that is the source of a greenhouse effect.

TOM: Of the greenhouse effect.

RAY: That is. We're adding water to the planet and in doing so, we're slowing down. Pretty soon the days are going to be 25 hours. We're slowing down the angular velocity of the planet.

TOM: Well, we knew that because of the billboard effect too.

RAY: Well, that too.

TOM: That's 26 hours.

RAY: Right.

TOM: Add that to it.

RAY: Yeah.

TOM: So, there's the billboard effect and the roof snow theory and --

RAY: All that. OK?

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]