Controlled experiment using Hartley’s jelly, wire nails, and a wood plank confirms the proverb: set jelly cannot be nailed to a vertical surface and held for any significant time.
Key Takeaways
Concentrated dry jelly cubes stuck to the wall unaided, making that test a non-starter; only fully hydrated set jelly counts as a fair test.
Jelly mixed to standard dilution (1 pint water per pack) disintegrates when handled bare-handed, making vertical nailing nearly impossible before a nail is even driven.
12 nails through a bowl-shaped jelly on a tilted plank failed within 30 seconds; nails became fracture points, not anchors.
A nail crescent used as a catching receptacle also failed; gaps between nails let jelly escape.
Proposed workaround: embed nails into jelly while it is still liquid and let it set around them, bypassing the handling problem entirely.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged a UK/US language ambiguity: “jelly” in the proverb likely means jam to British ears, not gelatin dessert, which would make the task even harder and change the experiment’s validity entirely.
Discussion is thin and largely meta; no technical critique of methodology, materials, or the proposed nail-setting workaround appeared.
Notable Comments
@dhosek: raises the jelly-vs-jam distinction, suggesting jam would be “much less successful” than gelatin, undermining the experiment’s mapping to the original proverb.
