SCRABBLE CREATOR
STUCK FOR WORDS
G'day folks,
The first British national Scrabble competition was staged in London in 1971 and won by Stephen Haskell, a young teacher. He notched up an aggregate score of 1,345 points from three games.
That would have impressed Alfred Mosher Butts, an American architect who
invented the game in the 1930s. The Great Depression had left him
without work but not without ideas and inspiration.
He liked crosswords, chess and other mind games and settled down in his
New York apartment to create a new game that would involve knowledge,
strategy and chance – and hopefully earn him some money. The world came
to know his creation as Scrabble, but that’s not what Mr Butts called
it.
He first tried naming it Lexico, then in 1940, with sparse interest from
game manufacturers and his dream starting to fade, he renamed it Criss
Cross Words. That didn’t work either so finally, in desperation, he
called the game simply . . . It.
Thankfully, a friend, James Brunot, offered to manufacture and market
the game when he retired from work in 1948. He was the one who came up
with the name Scrabble.
Sales in the early days were modest, amounting, it is said, to a few
dozen sets a week. The breakthrough came in 1952 when an executive of
Macy’s saw some people playing the game and was intrigued. Soon it was
stocked on the shelves of the famous New York department store.
From then on there was no looking back and the game became popular across the world, eventually selling about 100 million sets.
Mr Butts told the New York Times that for many years he earned
royalties, amounting to about three cents a set. "One-third went to
taxes," he said. "I gave one-third away, and the other third enabled me
to have an enjoyable life."
The New York Times also revealed that Mrs. Nina Butts was better at the
game than her inventor husband. Once she scored 234 for "quixotic." He
admitted that she "beat me at my own game," literally.
Mr Butts died in April, 1993, aged 93.
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