Some people leave massive footprints on the world, enacting bold, sweeping changes in their wake. Arthur Wynne was not one of those people. A British-born newspaper employee and violin enthusiast who emigrated to the United States at age 19, his life would be completely forgettable if not for one notable achievement. It was on this date 101 years ago that Wynne published what’s widely acknowledged as the first crossword puzzle in the New York World on December 21, 1913.

Wynne’s feature was called a “Word-Cross” and ran in the World’s “Fun” section. While earlier puzzles had used some variation on the phrase “crossword” to describe themselves, Wynne’s diamond-pattern game was the first to assemble most of the conventions of the modern crossword puzzle. It required readers to provide the answers to clues in an interlocking pattern that read horizontally and vertically. (The numbering scheme was admittedly strange, and needed some refining.) Wynne continued to produce the puzzles, and went on to introduce the use of black squares to separate words into neat rows and columns. It was supposedly a typesetting error that caused one edition of the “Word-Cross” to be printed as the “Cross-Word,” and there you have it.

Wynne’s puzzles were a popular World feature, and similar puzzles spread to other papers. (The Boston Globe was running its own crossword as early as 1917.) Crossword puzzles became the “Angry Birds” or “Candy Crush” of the 1920s, spreading everywhere, including to public places…and irritating a lot of people in their wake. The first issue of the New Yorker mused about "the number of solvers in the subway and "L" trains" in 1925.

Proving that old people have always been cranky, traditionalists complained that the crossword was a childish, dumbed-down fad that would hopefully fade away. The New York Public Library complained about crossword fans hogging the encyclopedias and dictionaries at the expense of “legitimate readers,” while The New York Times called the craze “a sinful waste,” “not a game at all,” and “a primitive form of mental exercise” in a 1924 editorial. In 1930, a New York Times correspondent bragged about how the paper had never succumbed to the crossword fad, which had apparently faded away.

In 1942, the Times finally printed its first crossword puzzle. Today the New York Times crossword is considered among the most challenging and prestigious in the world…proving that today’s flashy, annoying trend can become just another boring thing old people enjoy if you wait long enough. I look forward to the daily “Candy Crush” feature to be uploaded to my CyberNews neural implant, along with the weather and market reports, in 2060. Hopefully there’ll be some dumb new thing I can gripe about then too.

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