I was going through patents from July 1926 (exhilarating you should try it!) when I found this one.

Take a look at it. A square grid board. Letter tiles. Numbers printed on the consonants. The word "NAME" is actually spelled out on the diagram, right there in the patent drawing.

It was filed in December 1925 by a man named Edward Richard McDonald — a lawyer, former mayor, and by all accounts a genuine renaissance man from Shediac, New Brunswick. He hired a Toronto patent agency, filed in three countries, and received US Patent 1,591,639 on July 6, 1926. The British patent followed in September. The Canadian patent in December.

He called it the Crossword Game. And it looks, unmistakably, like Scrabble.

The patent describes a game "played by two players to reach a predetermined total by compiling words on a chequer board or the like from letter-carrying pieces, each having a certain value marked thereon and adapted to be used in forming words." When John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association, read those words at a news conference in Shediac in 2016, he said they "sound remarkably like Scrabble."

McDonald's invention used a 13x13 grid board. Two players each received a full set of 26 letter tiles. Consonants carried point values — Z worth 10, Y worth 8, W worth 5 and so on. Vowels carried no value. Each player started with a full alphabet arranged in the two rows nearest them, then placed one letter per turn onto any unoccupied square to form words. Words could run crossways, diagonally, or in any direction where corners connected. Capturing an opponent's consonant by incorporating it into a word scored double its face value. Vowels, once played, stayed permanently and couldn't be captured.

It was a different game from Scrabble in meaningful ways. But the core architecture — letter tiles with numerical values, a grid board, words as the scoring mechanism — was the same idea that Alfred Butts would independently develop five years later in a New York apartment, working from scratch, with no knowledge that any of this existed.

McDonald was born around 1870 in Pointe-du-Chêne, New Brunswick, the son of a sea captain. Before settling into law he sailed extensively, worked in Florida real estate, prospected for gold in Colorado and northern Ontario. He served three terms as mayor of Shediac, was elected to the provincial legislature in 1935, and was appointed King's Counsel. He owned the first car in Shediac — licence plate number 111. He co-wrote a science fiction novel in 1908 under the pseudonym Raymond McDonald, with a code hidden in the text that paid a thousand dollars to anyone who solved it.

His daughter Betty recalled family acquaintances coming to the house to play on a wooden board with letter tiles at the kitchen table. That appears to be the full extent of the Crossword Game's commercial life. No original prototype is known to survive. No record of it being manufactured or sold.

Alfred Mosher Butts was a 32-year-old architect in New York when the Depression hit. "I had been doing country houses for rich people," he told the Associated Press in 1981, "but suddenly no one had any money and I had no work. So I thought I would make a game to make money."

He analyzed three categories of games — board games, number games, word games. Chess was solved. Dice and cards covered the numbers. "But in word games, anagrams was about it." He settled on a word game and began counting letters in New York Times articles, determining how frequently each letter appeared in English and what each should therefore be worth. The result was a letter distribution and point system that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly a century.

He called his first version Lexiko. A hundred tiles, no board, played by discarding and picking up until a word formed. Tiles worth one point each. He built the sets himself from tiny wooden blocks, using blueprints for the blue printed numbers and wood moldings for the racks — an idea he took from the Chinese game of mah-jong. He sold sets for $1.50, mostly to relatives, friends and neighbors.

He evolved the game over the next two years, added a board, renamed it Criss Cross Words, and tried to interest manufacturers. Every toy company passed. "They weren't interested at all," he said. "I suspect they were only interested in games for the kids at Christmas." He returned to architecture. The game sat.

Eventually a Connecticut bookseller began stocking it. James Brunot, a New York City businessman, saw it there and decided he wanted it for what Butts called "his little business in the country." Brunot tossed around names for the game. "The evolution of the word Scrabble," Butts said, "is a mystery to me." In 1949 Brunot and Butts sold the game to Selchow and Righter for what Butts called "a fair sum" — he used part of it to help establish a local library, bring a doctor to his rural village, and start a Lions Club. By the time Selchow and Righter took over, Scrabble was already a phenomenon. It would go on to outsell Monopoly by 23 percent and become, in the assessment of its own marketing department, the largest-selling board game in America.

Butts never created another game. "I had Scrabble and I knew I couldn't do anything better," he said. "So why bother?"

McDonald's US patent expired July 6, 1943. Scrabble was sold in 1949, six years after the patent had lapsed. Even if someone had connected the two games and wanted to pursue it, the legal window was already closed. McDonald died in February 1952, right as Scrabble's retail breakthrough was beginning. He almost certainly never heard the name.

The patent sat in a file for 88 years. Pierre Cormier, a Shediac businessman, spent years tracking down McDonald's history and had an Ottawa patent lawyer find it in Smithsonian records. In 2016, Shediac held a celebration of the 90th anniversary of McDonald's game. Hasbro — the current owner of Scrabble, which has now sold more than 150 million copies worldwide — supplied games to the town to demonstrate their support. The North American Scrabble Players Association co-president flew in. The town declared itself the Scrabble Capital of Canada.

Nobody stole anything. The evidence is clear on that. Two people, independently, looked at the word game possibilities of their era and arrived at the same basic architecture — letter tiles, point values, a grid board. One filed patents in three countries and played the game at his kitchen table in New Brunswick. The other built sets from lumberyard scraps in a New York apartment, sold them to neighbors for a dollar fifty, and eventually watched the thing become one of the best-selling games in human history. The difference between them wasn't the idea. It was everything that came after.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources
GB Patent 257,799 — Edward Richard McDonald, "Improvements in Appliances for use in Playing Board Games," accepted September 9, 1926 — public domain
US Patent 1,591,639 — Edward Richard McDonald, granted July 6, 1926 — public domain
Times Transcript, Moncton, New Brunswick, June 9, 2016
The Sun Times, October 17, 1981 (AP / Cynthia Benjamin)
The Macon Telegraph, September 13, 1981 (AP / Cynthia Benjamin)

Secondary sources:
Wikipedia — "Edward R. McDonald"
Wikipedia — "Scrabble"
Historical Marker Database — "Edward Richard McDonald," Shediac, New Brunswick