In Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece”, a New England deacon aspires to construct an indestructible “one-hoss shay” (i.e., one-horse chaise) with all its components logically designed and of equal strength. The poem’s central irony lies in the fact that despite the deacon’s meticulous efforts to create a logically perfect carriage, it ultimately meets an absurd and unexpected end. Exactly one century after its construction, the shay collapses “all at once, and nothing first, just as bubbles do when they burst.”