Crossword puzzles - from pastime to murder solving
News News blog
Did you know that the crossword puzzle was not invented until the 20th century?
The world's first crossword puzzle appeared on December 21, 1913, in the Christmas supplement of the New York World newspaper and contained 31 search terms. It is said to have been invented by Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool, based on a game his grandfather used to play called The Magic Squares. However, Wynne's crossword puzzle did not yet contain black squares and was diamond-shaped.
The crossword then received its commercial breakthrough from publishers Dick Simon and Max Schuster. Simon presented an idea for the Cross Word Puzzle Book, which immediately sold 400,000 copies. In the early 1920s, the first crossword puzzles appeared in European newspapers and magazines. The first crossword puzzle in a German newspaper was printed by the Berliner Illustrirte in 1925.
Incidentally, a solved crossword puzzle led in 1981, after the world's largest comparison of type specimens, to the solving of the so-called crossword murder, one of the best-known criminal cases in the GDR.
