We like to celebrate longevity, so we’re marking the 100th anniversary this month of a brain-challenging pastime that so many people enjoy: the crossword puzzle. From the Washington Post:
On a snowy evening in the early 1900s, a newspaper editor at the New York World was hunched over his desk trying to think of something special for the Christmas issue.
Remembering the small word squares he’d solved as a young Brit in Liverpool, he drew a diamond-shaped grid with numbered squares and numbered clues. It contained 32 words, and his simple instruction read: “Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”
The puzzle appeared Dec. 21, 1913, and what 42-year-old Arthur Wynne had created was the first crossword puzzle.
Read more here in a fascinating article by Merle Reagle, who makes the Sunday Crossword puzzles for the Post. He tells the history of how the puzzle developed and how he tracked down the 80-year-old daughter of Arthur Wynne for an interview. Fun!
