Three utilities problem
History

A review of the history of the three utilities problem is given by Kullman (1979). He states that most published references to the problem characterize it as "very ancient". In the earliest publication found by Kullman, Henry Dudeney (1917) names it "water, gas, and electricity". However, Dudeney states that the problem is "as old as the hills...much older than electric lighting, or even gas ". Dudeney also published the same puzzle previously, in The Strand Magazine in 1913. A competing claim of priority goes to Sam Loyd, who was quoted by his son in a posthumous biography as having published the problem in 1900.

Another early version of the problem involves connecting three houses to three wells. It is stated similarly to a different (and solvable) puzzle that also involves three houses and three fountains, with all three fountains and one house touching a rectangular wall; the puzzle again involves making non-crossing connections, but only between three designated pairs of houses and wells or fountains, as in modern numberlink puzzles. Loyd's puzzle "The Quarrelsome Neighbors" similarly involves connecting three houses to three gates by three non-crossing paths (rather than nine as in the utilities problem); one house and the three gates are on the wall of a rectangular yard, which contains the other two houses within it.

As well as in the three utilities problem, the graph K 3, 3 {\displaystyle K_{3,3}} appears in late 19th-century and early 20th-century publications both in early studies of structural rigidity and in chemical graph theory, where Julius Thomsen proposed it in 1886 for the then-uncertain structure of benzene. In honor of Thomsen's work, K 3, 3 {\displaystyle K_{3,3}} is sometimes called the Thomsen graph.
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