Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This 1917 silent film is a great example to use to introduce to students or anyone, how Word Ladder puzzles work. Loyd, who later went on to King Kong film fame, produced this silent film with the help of Thomas Edison.
The film is ingeniously arranged so as to give the onlooker a chance to use his wits in guessing the next word on the billboard. Each worker changes the word with one letter change to get from Pants to Nails, just like Lewis Caroll's original puzzle word game - Doublets or Word Ladders. Watch, can you guess the changes in words each time?
The first word advertises the product of a clothing man. But he has made his reckoning without the host, or rather a number of hosts. For a florist, a furrier, a jeweler, a plumber, a dry-goods man, a carpenter, a physician, a lawyer, a mason, a ship's chandler and a hardware man happen along one after the other, and by merely pasting over one letter of the word on the billboard with a different letter, each alters the word into an advertisement of his own product.
Minstrel by Anders Baldwin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This 1917 silent film is a great example to use to introduce to students or anyone, how Word Ladder puzzles work. Loyd, who later went on to King Kong film fame, produced this silent film with the help of Thomas Edison.
The film is ingeniously arranged so as to give the onlooker a chance to use his wits in guessing the next word on the billboard. Each worker changes the word with one letter change to get from Pants to Nails, just like Lewis Caroll's original puzzle word game - Doublets or Word Ladders. Watch, can you guess the changes in words each time?
The first word advertises the product of a clothing man. But he has made his reckoning without the host, or rather a number of hosts. For a florist, a furrier, a jeweler, a plumber, a dry-goods man, a carpenter, a physician, a lawyer, a mason, a ship's chandler and a hardware man happen along one after the other, and by merely pasting over one letter of the word on the billboard with a different letter, each alters the word into an advertisement of his own product.
Minstrel by Anders Baldwin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
