The first newspaper crossword

Simon & Schuster is one of the largest English language publishers in the world and they started of with a crossword.  In 1924, Dick Simon and Lincoln Schuster set up business as publishers and looked for something to publish. They opted for a book of crosswords from the The New York World newspaper. It was a huge success, started a worldwide craze for crosswords and was the foundation for their very successful business. 
The New York World was just a moderately successful newspaper in the 1860s and ’70s but after that it really set the trends. It was bought in 1883 by Joseph Pulitzer who became a world-famous name in the newspaper business and in 1896 published the first colour newspaper supplement. One of its reporters was Nellie Bly, one of the first investigative journalists. She imitated Jules Verne’s famous novel when she travelled round the world in 72 days and later went undercover as a patient in a lunatic asylum to write an expose on how the patients were treated.
They also introduced a fun section that was put together by Arthur Wynne, an English-born journalist working in New York. It carried the games popular at the time but the editor asked Wynne if he could invent a new word game for the section.  He remembered the Magic Square, where a group of words had to be arranged so that they fitted together across and down. He designed a larger grid and provided a clue for each word. He used a diamond shape and experimented with other shapes before settling on the square or rectangle, which is common nowadays. 
Readers often submitted their own crosswords but these often had misprints and as a result the paper decided to drop the crossword in February, 1914. The outrage of the readers was such that the feature was restored after only one week. Within 10 years every paper in the United States carried a crossword. The last of the major papers to start crosswords was the New York Times and it became a daily feature in that paper by 1950.
One of the most controversial crossword clues in the New York Times appeared on the morning of the 1996 Presidential Election. The across clue read ‘Lead Story in tomorrow’s newspaper’. Both ‘Clinton Elected’ and ‘Bob Dole Elected’ fitted. Bob Dole supporters started ringing in the paper complaining that they were assuming Clinton would be re-elected while others complained that the Times was assuming Dole would win. The reason for both reactions was simple. The first letter of the answer also started a down answer. The down clue was ‘Black Halloween Animal’. If somebody put in BAT as that answer then ‘Bob Dole Elected’ fitted into the across answer. But CAT as the down answer led to ‘Clinton Elected’ across.
Crosswords have evolved through the years. Newsagents devote entire shelves to them. They have boosted the sales of newspapers, magazines, dictionaries and even pencils. They help start one of the great publishing companies and are available on the internet. They have indeed come a long way since the first crossword, compiled by Arthur Wynne, was published in the New York World newspaper on December 21, 1913 – 96 years ago this week.
n Michael Torpey