(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] Behold, the crossword puzzle,
but where did it come from?
Meet Arthur Wynne, born
in England in 1871.
Although Arthur was born
across the Atlantic,
he moved to the United
States by the time he was 19
and eventually settled in New York City
where he worked for the New York World.
In 1913, Arthur's editor asked
him to make a new feature
for the newspaper's Sunday Fun Section.
As he brainstormed for
new games and puzzles,
Arthur remembered a
game from his childhood.
In this earlier game called Magic Squares,
players arranged groups of words
so that they could be read
the same way across and down.
This puzzle would
probably have been enough
to please the editor,
but Arthur took it one step further,
adding more complicated
squares and giving readers
clues to the correct words
rather than the words themselves.
Today, we call these puzzles crosswords,
but the New York World originally
called them mental exercises.
Arthur published his
first crossword in 1913,
it was shaped like a diamond
and the clues were pretty easy.
It was a huge success and other
papers quickly followed suit
with similar puzzles.
By 1930, the London Times produced
their first crossword puzzle
and they went on to create
the standards that
define crosswords today.
