Impossible trident

An impossible trident with backgrounds, to enhance the illusion

Hayward's "undecidable monument"

An impossible trident, also known as an impossible fork, a blivet, poiuyt, or devil's tuning fork is a drawing of an impossible object (undecipherable figure), a kind of an optical illusion. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

The graphic artist M. C. Escher used these types of figures as the basis for impossible three-dimensional compositions in many of his woodcut prints.

The word "poiuyt" appeared on the March 1965 cover of Mad magazine bearing the four-eyed Alfred E. Neuman balancing the impossible fork on his finger with caption "Introducing 'The Mad Poiuyt' " (the last six letters on the top row of many Latin-script typewriter keyboards, right to left). An anonymously-contributed version described as a "hole location gauge" was printed in the June 1964 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, with the comment that "this outrageous piece of draftsmanship evidently escaped from the Finagle & Diddle Engineering Works" (although something else called a "hole location gauge" had already been patented in 1961).

The term "blivet" for the impossible fork was popularized by The Worm Runner's Digest magazine. In 1967 H. Baldwin published there an article, "Building better blivets", in which he described the rules for the construction of drawings based on the impossible fork. In December 1968 American optical designer and artist Roger Hayward wrote a humorous submission "Blivets: Research and Development" for The Worm Runner's Digest in which he presented various drawings based on the blivet. He "explained" the term as follows: "The blivet was first discovered in 1892 in Pfulingen, Germany, by a cross-eyed dwarf named Erasmus Wolfgang Blivet." He also published there a sequel, Blivets — the Makings.