RAY: The events in this puzzler took place long, long ago before the advent of cars and planes. Let's say sometime roughly between the stone age and my brother's Bar Mitzvah. OK. Some engineers were contemplating --

TOM: Only a year and a half?

RAY: Building a suspension bridge across a gorge.

TOM: Oh.

RAY: The gorge at Niagara Falls. You know a gorge is, right?

TOM: I do. I do. It's what I do at Thanksgiving.

RAY: So, you got the river raging below and you've got to get cables for the suspension bridge from one side to the other, but there's no way to get the cables to cross because there was no boat that could fight that current. I mean a boat trying to go from... Shoo. I mean, it was --

TOM: No. Maid of the Mist.

RAY: And then they couldn't skate over the vertical walls.

TOM: And the Maid of the Mist hadn't been invented yet.

RAY: They hadn't invented the Maid of the Mist.

TOM: No.

RAY: So, they had to get the cables across somehow and after the engineers and builders figured out how to do it, they staged a contest on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Open to the public and the purpose of the contest was to help get these massive cables across the gorge. The contest was won by a young boy. And shortly after the contest was completed, they were able to run the cables from one side of the gorge to the other. The question very simply was what was the kid's name? What was the contest?

TOM: Yeah. I didn't get this one.

RAY: You didn't get it?

TOM: I didn't. No.

RAY: The contest --

TOM: I didn't understand.

RAY: Berman even got this one!

TOM: I didn't understand the question actually.

RAY: You didn't?

TOM: No.

RAY: You gonna understand the answer?

TOM: I mean, I understand it now that you gave me the answer, yesterday.

RAY: You don't like it?

TOM: No. I like it. I thought it was great.

RAY: The contest was a kite flying contest. The first kid to be able to get a kite, his kite to land on the other side of the gorge --

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: Won. And what they did, they took that kite string and attached to it a rope. Slightly heavier than the thing and they pulled that across and they attached successively stronger ropes until they finally had one strong enough to pull, what?

TOM: A chain.

RAY: A cable across.

TOM: Exactly.

RAY: And then once they had one, they had another and there you go.

TOM: I think that's good. That's good.

RAY: I mean, like I said, it may be completely bogus as far as --

TOM: Oh.

RAY: It being historically accurate and it probably is.

TOM: Judging from most of the puzzlers that you've used, it would be an amazing feat if it were not.

RAY: It would be. And who is going to win our fabulous prize?

TOM: Well, our prize is won by a young boy. It's not a young boy. It's someone named Jane Oaks from Long Boat Key, Florida. Long Boat Key.

RAY: Cool name.

TOM: There's someone who is not working for a living.

[ Car Talk Puzzler ]