"Why is a mouse when it spins?"

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"Because the higher the fewer!" *cue laughter* This was something my grandfather (who I never knew) would laugh about with his friends. Apparently, it was a very common joke (riddle, actually) in parts society of learned professions, like his, which was that of the law (he was a lawyer). Still, everyone thought that it was nonsensical, and is just to make people confused. Last year, I had the audacity to look it up. I scoured a lot of sources and found it at last. While many sites said that it was merely the ramblings of madman at madhouses, it has an origin. Old time steam locomotives had a boiler where the steam would increase the revolutions per minute (RPM) and make the train go faster. However, if it got too fast, and there were too many RPMs, it could shake apart and destroy itself. So included with these boilers was a governor on a shaft. This governor that spun around on the shaft would be driven by the centrifugal force of the steam production. This governor was called the 'mouse'. When the RPMs increased, and the governor (mouse) spun higher, it would weigh the arm, cutting off some of the steam using a regulator (sliding a stopper over the steam exhaust), and decreasing the power, leading to fewer RPMs. Thus, the higher the mouse, the fewer the RPMs.