The Engineers Thumb

About The Engineers Thumb

The engineer's professional confidence gives him reasons to notice machinery while overlooking other warning signs. Watson's medical involvement creates an immediate physical fact around which the later narrative must fit. Holmes tests the account by connecting small observations about travel and equipment with questions the client did not initially ask.

Reading focus

Compare the engineer's technical observations with the practical warning signs he discounts while accepting the commission.

This reading edition contains 8,288 words in 1 original section. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice—that of Mr. Hatherley’s thumb, and that of Colonel Warburton’s madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of being placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results. The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but,…

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