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    This Simple Puzzle Test Sealed The Fate Of Immigrants At Ellis Island

    What did it take to get through Ellis Island? For a few years, it took passing a a puzzle test. NPR's Audie Cornish talks with Adam Cohen, who wrote about it in Smithsonian Magazine.
    by Audie Cornish May 17, 2017 1 minute
    A wooden puzzle in the silhouette of a human head might look fun if the stakes weren't so high. A doctor named Howard Knox invented The Feature Profile Test — the formal name for this puzzle —after officials struggled to administer IQ tests to immigrants because of issues with language and literacy.

    A wooden puzzle in the silhouette of a human head might look fun if the stakes weren't so high.

    Historians at say this simple puzzle containing facial features broken at Ellis Island in the early 1900s. The goal was to weed out the "feeble-minded" and ensure that a "better class" of foreign-born people was ushered into U.S. citizenship. The puzzle is currently housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

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