Alfred Butts

Alfred Mosher Butts (born 13 April 1899 in Poughkeepsie, April 4, 1993 in New York City) is an American architect, inventor of the board game Scrabble. Invention of Scrabble

In the early 1930s, struggling with unemployment, Alfred Butts decided to create a new board game. By analyzing existing games, he divided them into three categories: bingo or bones, motion games like chess or drafts and word games like anagrams. In addition, it was inspired by the playful words of Edgar Allan Poe's book "Golden Beetle", in which the hero of the novel, to obtain the treasure, had to break the password with the letters of the alphabet.

Using this knowledge, Butts tried to create a game that would include elements of these three categories. By analyzing the title pages of the New York Times, he calculated the incidence of individual letters in English words, to determine the appropriate proportion in the selection of letters in the game (example can be limited to four letters 'S', which in English added to the noun changes its grammatical form singular in plural). The rules of the game were simple, with a properly prepared pool of letters, the players drew 7 letters and tried to place as high a score as possible. Initially named his game as "Lexiko", he later changed it to "Criss Cross Words" and began searching for a patent for this game. As it turned out, game makers were not interested in the idea, but the determined Butts eventually sold the rights to the entrepreneur and lawyer, game devotee James Brunot. Brunot introduced some modifications to the game and called it "Scrabble." In 1948, the game was patented, and Butts and his wife converted the abandoned school building in Dodgington, Connecticut, into a scrabble factory. 1949 produced 2400 sets.

Currently, only 2 million sets of this game are sold in America alone each year. Authoritative control (person):

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