Alfred Mosher Butts

Alfred Mosher Butts was born on April 13th 1899 in Poughkeepsie. He went to school for architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. As an architect he worked on the Charles W. Berry housing project and the Stanford free Library in his home town of Stanfordville. Besides being the architect he was also the co-founder of the public library. He became unemployed during the depression and began to work on board games. He invented the game scrabble in 1920 although at first it was not called scrabble. It was first called Lexico and then changed to Criss Cross Words but when he found a buyer for the game the name was changed to Scrabble. He sold the game to James Brunot who himself made a few changes to the game before putting it into production. Alfred Mosher Butts died on April 4th 1993.