Highlights | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1934 | 1935 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939 | References
Highlights
- 1930: The Times (UK) -- the "Thunderer" mentioned in letter to NYT editor [on right]
- "Together with The Times of London, yours [NYT] is...
- 1931: Dell Crossword Puzzle Magazine
- 1934: Acrostics
- 1938: Scrabble; Bletchley Park
- 1939: Frank Lewis
- "By the late 1930s, the crossword puzzle boom...
1930
- the term "crossword" first appeared in a dictionary
- The Times Crossword at 90 -- cracking fun for the clued-up The Times; 2/1/2020
- A brief history of The Times crossword see our very first crossword, explore the history of the cryptic
and get to know our longest-serving crossword compiler; The Times; 3/9/2014 - First Times Crossword UK; 1/20/2011
1931
- Dell (Crossword Puzzle) Magazine; longest running crossword magazine
1932
- Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers
"classic whodunnit with a crosswordy code" [Guardian] - Dictionary Wrecked Word Contests and Cross-word Puzzles Blamed at Library;
Evening Star (Wash. DC), A-3; 12/19/1932
1934
- "Acrostic puzzles, also known as 'Double-Crostics', were the invention of...
- A 1934 murder mystery’s pages were printed out of order. Now the world is obsessed.
only four people have ever solved the puzzle contained in the pages of 'Cain’s Jawbone.'
TikTok helped turn the obscure, 100-page British novel into a craze; WaPo; 12/26/2022
1935
- Competition judges have to decide whether skill is involved or whether, as a lawyer for the police argues at Bow Street,
"the words are ridiculously easy, and a child of 12 should have no difficulty in solving them"; 1935 - Word-Nerd Nation: The surprising history of The Stanford Daily's crossword 2/23/2023
1937
1938
- Criss-Crosswords => Lexiko => "Scrabble"
created by architect named Alfred Mosher Butts - "Bletchley Park asked its cryptologists to...
- Wikipedia: Bletchley Park; cryptanalysis
- Bletchley Park: Home of the CodeBreakers Google Cultural Institute; slideshow
- Cryptography: U.S. Cyber Command Valentines Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles; .pdf
- Can You Solve a UK Intelligence Agency's Christmas Puzzle? GCHQ ; Giz; 12/10/2015
- Turing's Spirit Hovers at a Restored Estate
Bletchley Park, where the Real 'Imitation Game' Happened; NYT; 11/28/2014 - At Bletchley Park, a Reminder About the History of Cracking Codes NYT; 8/9/2014
- Happy birthday, Crossword: a very efficient aptitude test 12/6/2013
1939
- World War II: 1939-1945; Frank Lewis US Army code breaking; later NSA
- Code Girls: The Untold Story of the Women Cryptographers Who Fought WWII
at the Intersection of Language and Mathematics interviewer had only two questions to ask her:
"Did she like crossword puzzles, and was she engaged to be married?"; 12/11/2017 - The Women Who Helped America Crack Axis Codes review of Code Girls;NYT; 11/6/2017
- NSA Uses Twitter Puzzle To Recruit Computer Hackers 5/16/2014
- Can You Crack the NSA's Top-Secret Crossword Puzzles?
the National Security Agency Just Released Archive Editions of its In-House Magazine, Cryptolog; PopSci; 3/28/2013 - Frank Lewis, US Codecracker, Ingenious Puzzle Designer Wired; 12/2/2010
- NSA's Puzzle Periodical: 2015-; NSA Cryptochallenge: Puzzle of the Week
- The CryptoKids Arrive at NSA.GOV! Codes & Ciphers; Games & Activities
- The Winter Murder Case. A Philo Vance Story Van Dine, S. S.; "A detective story is a grim business,
and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection
of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity -- just as he goes to a ball game or to
a cross-word puzzle? Dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a
cross-word puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly."
References
- Wikipedia: 1930s
- The Decades That Invented the Future: Part 4: 1930s
Radar; Works Progress Administration; Schrödinger's Cat; Pop Culture Characters; Ballpoint Pen;
Nylon; Z1 computer by Zuse; Kodachrome; Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias; War of the Worlds;
Electric Pinball; Volkswagen Beetle; Wired; 11/9/2012 - Paleofuture: 1930s
- A Look at the 13 Most Influential and Interesting Inventions from the 1930s 7/13/2019