NEW JERSEY: Experiment

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George Scherman got along well enough in the freshman class at high school, but he was big (6 ft., 160 lbs.) for his 14 years, and he didn't have many playmates. After school in Neptune, N.J. (pop. 3,068), he was apt to be found alone down in the basement of his home, fixing electrical appliances for the neighbors or making gadgets for himself.

One day last week, while his father and mother were away visiting a sick relative, George went down to the basement to work on a Rube Goldberg experiment he had thought up. His mother had arranged for a neighbor to give the boy his supper.

Working quietly and intently in the dimly lit cellar, he looped a strong, 20-ft. rope over a couple of beams, worked one end through a pulley and anchored it to a heavy beer case; he tied the other end to a wooden platform which he had nailed to a pair of roller skates. Midway in the rope's length, as a counterbalance, he hung a large pail filled with 40 lbs. of wet sand. Then he picked up a short length of clothesline, carefully fashioned a hangman's noose, and tied it to a hook in the ceiling above the dolly on skates.

The neighbor called him to supper.

George said O.K., since he was almost finished. He strapped a 4-in. jackknife, blade open, to his wrist. He lit a candle, and set it under the far end of rope. Then, pulling back the roller-skate platform until the tautened rope had lifted the sand-filled bucket off the floor, he stepped on to the platform, slipped the noose around his neck, and waited. The candle began burning through the rope. It snapped. The weighted bucket crashed down, whipping George's homemade roller platform out from under his feet with a sharp jerk.

Thirty minutes later, the neighbor sent her eight-year-old boy to see why George was so late for supper. "He's standing in the basement, but he isn't moving," the child reported. George's new toy had worked with terrible efficiency. They found him hanging, his toes touching the floor, strangled to death. The open knife that he had planned to use to cut himself down dangled unused from his wrist.