The False Claims of Puzzle Writer Sam Loyd

Posted on by M.E. Bond Posted in OriginsTagged , ,

I’ve been reading A.J. Jacob’s latest book, The Puzzler, aloud to Andrew. The subtitle is “One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life” and each chapter looks at a different type of puzzle. We just read the chapter on rebuses, which mentioned Sam Loyd’s 15 Puzzle scam. Of course, I thought this was the perfect jumping off point for a blog post. Before we get into Sam Loyd’s false claims let’s see what made him famous.

Sam Loyd

Sam Loyd was born in 1841 in Philadelphia and grew up in New York City. At age 14 he published his first chess problem. Only two years later he was called America’s leading writer of chess problems. He studied engineering but quit to make a living writing puzzles. He was an editor for a chess magazine and later wrote a puzzle column that was widely syndicated. One of his most well-known puzzles is the Famous Trick Donkeys, used to promote P.T. Barnum’s circus. After his death Sam Loyd’s son published his Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles. He is still known as one of the greatest puzzle writers of all time. He is also known for being a huckster and there’s evidence that many of his self-promoting claims were false.

Parcheesi

Sam Loyd claimed that he invented Parcheesi, the American version of Pachisi, an ancient Indian board game. Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld did some research into Loyd’s claims, including this one. They say that according to the Chicago Tribune (May 1893) reporting on an exhibit at The World Columbian Exposition, Parcheesi came “from India where it had been played since the 4th century. The game company Selchow & Righter bought the rights to Parcheesi in 1870 and obtained a trademark for it in 1874. There was no evidence of any involvement by Sam Loyd.”

Tangram

In 1903 Sam Loyd published The 8th Book of Tan, which included an extensive history of the tangram, claiming the puzzle is 4,000 years old when in reality it was only 200 years old. The false history was exposed by Sir James Murray, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, just seven years later.

Pigs-in-Clover

From February to May 1889 a puzzle craze for the game Pigs-in-Clover swept the United States. The game, consisting of concentric rings of cardboard on a wooden base with marbles that must be coaxed through the holes, was invented by Charles Crandall, who applied for a patent in February, 1889. Numerous newspaper articles reported him as the inventor and he even signed an oath to that effect. Yet in an interview with Sam Loyd in the Lima (Ohio) Daily Times on January 13, 1891 he claimed to be the inventor!

15 Puzzle

Before the Pigs-in-Clover craze came a similar craze for the 15 Puzzle, a game where you have to slide numbered tiles into the correct numerical sequence. The first commercial 15 Puzzle was made by Matthias J. Rice and sold in December 1879. By March its popularity had skyrocketed, even generating songs, theatre productions, and political cartoons! In the same article where he claimed to be the inventor of Pigs-in-Clover, Sam Loyd said he invented the 15 Puzzle. This was ten years after the craze ended. Until his death in 1911 he made the same claim at least 23 times. Nine of 11 obituaries found by Slocum and Sonneveld credited Loyd as the inventor, even though he was never mentioned in connection with the puzzle during the 1870s or 1880s.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly Sam Loyd was one of the greatest creators of chess and other puzzles, but clearly he was not above twisting the facts to promote himself. The biggest puzzle may be how he convinced so may people with his brazen claims so that even today he is often falsely credited as the inventor of other people’s puzzles.

Sources

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