People Worth Remembering (one in a series): ALFRED BUTTS, Inventor of Scrabble

• Alfred Butts was born in Poughkeepsie, New York on April 13th, 1899. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a high school teacher. He graduated from Poughkeepsie High School in 1917, attended the Pratt Institute in New York City, and in 1924 went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in Architecture.

• In October of 1925, at the age of 26, he married his high school biology teacher who was 42. They remained happily together until her death in 1979 at the age of 96.

• He found employment as a designer with an architectural firm and worked there from 1925 until 1931. As many businesses closed during the Great Depression, he was laid off his job and unable to find work anywhere. During his days with a lot of free time to spend, he pondered the idea of inventing some new sort of challenging table game, one that would require competing players to search their minds while having fun socializing at the same time..

• After studying the most popular games, he grouped them into three types: Games based on numbers, such as dice and card games; board games such as chess and checkers; and games based on words and letters. Unsure of which category to choose, he decided to create a game that used both numbers and alphabet letters.

• Each day, he carefully analyized and dissected news articles on the pages of the New York Times, keeping statistical track of which letters were used most frequently. He then assigned a numerical point value to each letter of the alphabet. The most commonly used letters were the vowels A, E, I, O, and U, with A and E used most frequently. So he assigned only a single point to each of them, while rarely used letters like Q and Z were worth ten points. Wooden letter tiles were positioned in a crossword style on the table top. He later fashioned a playing board with spaces marked for the individual letters to be placed by the player. He decided to name his game Lexico.

• By the time he decided to try marketing the game, he had changed the name to Criss-Cross Words. Every single manufacturer that he approached with his new game turned it down.

• Then Butts teamed up with a game aficionado named James Brunot, who had some savvy about marketing. It was Brunot who renamed the game “Scrabble” meaning “to scratch frantically.” Brunot bought the rights to the game, agreeing to pay Butts a royalty for every set sold. In 1949, his first year, only 2,400 Scrabble sets were sold. Meanwhile, Alfred Butts had returned to his career as an architect.

• Sales continued at a sluggish pace until a breakthrough in 1952. Jack Straus, president of Macy’s department store, vacationed at a resort that had a Scrabble game set in the lobby for guest use. He decided to play a game with his wife -- and was immediately hooked.

• As soon as he returned to his New York office, he ordered his buyers to immediately order the games by the caseload and stock their shelves with them. Macy's, at the time the largest retail store in the country, was soon moving 6,000 Scrabble sets per week. By 1954 Brunot and his new company had sold over 3.8 million sets.

• By now Brunot was unable to keep up with demand, so the rights to the game hopscotched from one game manufacture to the next, with Brunot always staying true to his royalty agreement ensuring that Alfred Butts received the payments he was due. By the time the Hasbro corporation won the rights to the game, the number of sets being sold was into the millions.

• Butts estimated that his royalties came down to about three cents for each set sold. He later mused, “One-third went to taxes, I gave one third away, and the other third enabled me to have a happy and comfortable life.”

• He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an architect. In his later years he designed a card game played with letter cards which he dubbed “Alfred’s Other Game,” It never took off. In his spare time, he became a prolific artist, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art still owns six of his paintings.

• Butts died in 1993, just before his 94th birthday, having lived long enough to see his Scrabble creation proudly rank among the most popular table games on the planet. □