The large Scrabble board seen in this famous 1953 photo with creator, Alfred Mosher Butts and promoter, James Brunot was an oversized custom-made promotional version of the game created to showcase it during a surge in popularity.  The photo was taken in November by photographer, Arthur Rothstein for a Look magazine assignment and was frequently credited as a 1953 snapshot of the pair celebrating the success of the game. 

By 1953, the game was in the grip of a craze after the president of Macy's discovered it on vacation and placed a large order. 

Alfred Mosher Butts (1899-1993), an American architect from Poughkeepsie, New York who designed including the Stanford Free Library in New York and was also an amateur artist.  Six of his drawings were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

He invented the board game called Scrabble in 1931.  Seeking to create a word game combining chance and skill during the Great Depression, he originally named it "Lexico" and later "Criss-Cross Words" before it was eventually trademarked as Scrabble in 1948 by entrepreneur James Brunot.

Butts designed the game without a board!   He focused on letter frequency analysis to determine the distribution.  Butts studied existing games and found that games fell into three categories:  number games, such as dice and bingo, word games and move/strategy games such as chess or checkers.  

Butts was a resident of Jackson Heights, New York in Queens 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.

Alfred Mosher Butts

Alfred Butts cleverly spelled out his name with the Scrabble tiles.

James Brunot

(1902-1984)

Brunot was a friend of Butt's who loved the game.  Brunot "believed that all the game needed was some slick marketing and a few refinements".  That was when Burnot and Butts teamed up, simplified the rules and board design renaming the game Scrabble.  Brunot is credited with the name change and creating both the premium squares on the board and premium points for some letters.  Butts retained patent rights on the game and earned royalties on the sales.  Brunot received the copyright for Scrabble on December 1, 1948 and trademarked Scrabble Brand Crossword Game on December 16, 1948.  Game sets were first put together in the basement of the Brunot home.  Up to 18 games were initially manufactured there each day.  

 Approximately 1.5 million to 2 million Scrabble games are sold globally each year with over 165 million sets being sold worldwide since 1948.  In North America alone, between 1 and 2 million sets are sold annually.  The game is a staple in households with one in three American homes owning a set. Scrabble is now manufactured by Hasbro in the United States and Canada.  By Mattel in other international markets.  It is produced in 30 plus different languages.

If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were lined up, they would stretch for more than 50,000 miles! Scrabble is ranked as the second-best board game in U.S. history, second only to Monopoly. 

April 13 is National Scrabble Day celebrated annually for it is the date chosen to honor the birthday of the game's inventor.  Scrabble was created during the Great Depression.  Butts decided to develop a word game that incorporated elements of chance and skill.

Whether you're a word wizard, a tile tactician or just in it for fun, today's the perfect day to break out the board and let the letters fly.  May your words be long, your points be high and may your Q's always find their U's.  If that doesn't happen, QI can be played in Scrabble.