Alfred Mosher Butts (April 13, 1899 – April 4, 1993) was an American architect, famous for
inventing the
board game
Board games are tabletop games that typically use . These pieces are moved or placed on a pre-marked board (playing surface) and often include elements of table, card, role-playing, and miniatures games as well.
Many board games feature a co ...
''
Scrabble
''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left t ...
'' in 1938.
Personal life
Alfred Mosher Butts was born in
Poughkeepsie, New York
Poughkeepsie ( ), officially the City of Poughkeepsie, separate from the Town of Poughkeepsie around it) is a city in the U.S. state of New York. It is the county seat of Dutchess County, with a 2020 census population of 31,577. Poughkeepsi ...
, on April 13, 1899, to Allison Butts and Arrie Elizabeth Mosher. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a high school teacher. Alfred attended
Poughkeepsie High School and graduated in 1917. He then graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
with a degree in
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
in 1924.
He was also an amateur artist, and six of his drawings were acquired by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
.
He died on April 4, 1993, nine days before his 94th birthday.
''Scrabble''
In the early 1930s, after working as an architect but now unemployed, Butts set out to design a board game. He studied existing games and found that games fell into three categories: number games, such as
dice and
bingo
Bingo or B-I-N-G-O may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Gaming
* Bingo, a game using a printed card of numbers
** Bingo (British version), a game using a printed card of 15 numbers on three lines; most commonly played in the UK and Ireland
** Bi ...
; move games, such as
chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...
and
checkers
Checkers (American English), also known as draughts (; British English), is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers ...
; and word games, such as
anagrams. Butts was a resident of
Jackson Heights, New York, and the game of ''Scrabble'' was invented there. To memorialize his importance to the invention of the game, a street sign at 35th Avenue and 81st Street in Jackson Heights is stylized using letters with their values in Scrabble as a
subscript.
Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of
anagrams and
crossword puzzle
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answ ...
s, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their letters. A key to the game was Butts's analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of
''The New York Times'' to calculate how frequently each letter of the
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
was used. He then used each letter's frequency to determine how many of each letter he would include in the game. He included only four "S" tiles so that the ability to make words plural would not make the game too easy.
Butts initially called the game ''
Lexiko
''Lexiko'' was a word game invented by Alfred Mosher Butts. It was a precursor of ''Scrabble''. The name comes from the Greek , meaning "of or for words".
''Lexiko'' was played with a set of 100 square cardboard tiles, with the same letter dist ...
'', but later changed the name to ''Criss Cross Words'' after considering ''It'', and began to seek a buyer. The game makers he originally contacted rejected the idea, but Butts was tenacious. Eventually, he sold the rights to
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...
and game lover James Brunot, who made a few minor adjustments to the design and renamed the game ''Scrabble''.
In 1948, the game was trademarked, and Brunot and his wife converted an abandoned schoolhouse in
Dodgingtown, Connecticut, into a ''Scrabble'' factory. In 1949, the Brunots made 2,400 sets and lost $450 ($5,612 in 2022 terms). But the game was steadily gaining popularity, helped by orders from
Macy's
Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American chain of high-end department stores founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It became a division of the Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, through which it is affiliated wi ...
department store. By 1952, the Brunots could no longer keep up with demand and asked licensed game maker
Selchow and Righter to market and distribute the game. One hundred and fifty million sets have been sold worldwide and between one and two million sets are sold each year in North America alone.
''Alfreds Other Game''
Butts later invented another game titled simply '' Other Game''. Published in 1985
by Selchow and Righter, it never achieved the commercial success of ''Scrabble''.
References
External links
Picture of Alfred Mosher Butts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Butts, Alfred Mosher
1899 births
1993 deaths
Board game designers
People from Jackson Heights, Queens
20th-century American architects
Architects from New York City
People from Poughkeepsie, New York
Scrabble