In 1931, unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts sat at a kitchen table in Poughkeepsie, New York, counting individual letters on the front pages of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post. That manual frequency analysis set the tile counts and point values that Scrabble still uses today. This episode follows his first version, Lexico, the evolution into Criss-Crosswords with its 15 by 15 board, and years of rejection from Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Selchow and Righter and the US Patent Office.

The turning point came when James Brunot, a fan who owned a handmade set, bought the manufacturing rights in 1948, rearranged the premium squares to create spatial tension, and renamed the game Scrabble. We cover the money-losing 1949 assembly line in a converted Connecticut schoolhouse, the demand explosion of 195 ...