Who Invented the Game Scrabble and How Were the Values For the Letters Determined?

In 1931, an unemployed American architect named Alfred Butts invented the game we now call Scrabble.

Turned down by every manufacturer he approached, he sold homemade sets out of his garage until 1946, when a company bought the rights and began mass production.

Butts determined the scoring value and quantity of each letter by counting the number of times it was used on a single page of the New York Times.