The See-Saw Puzzle

Necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. I was amused the other day in watching a boy who wanted to play see-saw and, in his failure to find another child to share the sport with him, had been driven back upon the ingenious resort of tying a number of bricks to one end of the plank to balance his weight at the other.

As a matter of fact, he just balanced against sixteen bricks, when these were fixed to the short end of plank, but if he fixed them to the long end of plank he only needed eleven as balance.

Now, what was that boy's weight, if a brick weighs equal to a three-quarter brick and three-quarters of a pound?

H. E. Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics (1917) · No. 122