There is a riddle that asks how a prisoner could escape over a high wall without leaving any evidence. How could he pull it off? The name of the riddle reveals how. It is called the Ice Block Wall Escape. The prisoner freezes water to form an ice block, stands on the ice to climb over the wall, and the evidence disappears when the ice melts.
Remember, a singular link is a combination that changes the scope or scale of its product. In the riddle, the prisoner creates a singular link by pooling the water in the shape of a block and allowing it to freeze. Changing the scope of the water, the prisoner uses it to literally scale the wall.
Let’s look at some other examples of changing scope or scale.
You could use canvas fabric to create a tent, and it might be effective in many environments. However, in heavy rainfall, the canvas would absorb the water, leaking rainwater into your otherwise cozy shelter. What’s the solution? Wax. You could melt the wax, brush it onto your canvas, and the waxed canvas would repel the water. Presto! Canvas on its own isn’t waterproof. Wax on its own has no form. The combination of canvas and wax creates waterproof material.
Teflon coating on pots and pans works the same way. When cooking with metal pots and pans, food tends to stick to their surfaces. Coating the metal with Teflon, which has an exceptionally low coefficient of friction, reduces the propensity of foods to stick. Metal cookware on its own is sticky. Teflon on its own has no form. The combination of cookware and Teflon creates a non-stick solution for cooking.
If you wash your car at the automated car wash, one of the final applications after the standard soaps and foams is “spot-free rinse.” This, I assume, is some chemically softened water whose properties reduce the likelihood that spots will form when the water dries. This is not just a regular rinse but rather an enhanced rinse. Its scope has changed.
When you begin looking for examples of combinations that change the scope or scale of their products, you will start to see them everywhere. Apply window tint to your car windows to block the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Add SPF sunblock to skin products. Galvanize metal pipes by covering them with a layer of zinc to prevent them from rusting. Soundproof the walls of a room to help absorb sound waves, deadening them and preventing them from bouncing to other surfaces. All these examples begin with surfaces that are in some way vulnerable — windows, walls, pipes, delicate skin — and after they are chemically altered, they become more resilient. The treatment changes their properties.
In these examples, each element provides a property that the other lacks, and together they create recipricity.
In the Ice Block Wall Escape riddle, water was manipulated to create an escape. In fact, water frequently serves as a catalyst for singular links. Think of concrete, Plaster of Paris, or ceramic clay. Each one begins as a powder. When you add water, you create a material that can be manipulated, pressed, injected, trammeled, or skimmed. Later, when the moisture is gone, the result is a hard surface. Mixing powder and water creates a pliable substance capable of new applications.
Controlling the ratio of powder and water generally controls the durability of the final product. This is most evident in the industrial applications of concrete, where the mixing ratios, their curing conditions, and other environmental factors could mean the difference between a skyscraper that stands for hundreds of years and another that crumbles under its own weight.
Humidity can be used for all manner of manipulation. Adding moisture to wood makes it more pliable, as in the case of furniture making. Moisture can be used to induce corrosion such as a uniform patina of rust on industrial signage. Moisture also conducts electricity, as you know all too well if you have ever accidentally spilled a glass of water onto your phone or computer keyboard.
The process of torrefaction, in which moisture is removed from lumber, changes the wood’s chemical and physical properties. It creates a chemically altered wood that is lighter, more stable, less vulnerable to decay and, in the case of musical-instrument manufacturing, is more resonant for sound vibrations.
Yeast turns flatbread into leavened bread, grape juice into wine, and tea into kombucha. A grain of sand in the soft tissue of an oyster induces pearl cultivation. The right combination of carbon, pressure, and high temperatures results in diamonds.
In each of these examples, a precise combination is required to achieve the desired outcome, with slight variations producing vastly different outcomes. A tiny change in the fermentation of wine could be the difference between a delicious Bordeaux and a glass of vinegar. In the case of diamonds, a slightly different geological environment could produce a wide spectrum of products from rubies or emeralds to plain old charcoal.
Encryption is another example of a singular link. The process of encryption converts a text message into an indecipherable blob of nonsense by applying an encryption algorithm. The recipient of the encrypted message applies the reverse algorithm to decrypt the text, thereby translating the nonsensical blob back into a legible message. There is a unique relationship between the plaintext and the ciphertext, and that relationship is uniquely explained in the algorithm. If anything in the algorithm were to change, the relationship would be corrupted.
Looking at it from this perspective, the creation of singular links is like cracking a safe or breaking an encryption. Approximate combinations are insufficient. Only exact combinations create the required change of scope or scale to satisfy the definition of a singular link.