Mattel announces Scrabble rule change.
In 1938 an architect by the name of Alfred Butts invented a word game he called "Criss-Crosswords". Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various lengths using examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times. From those tabulations he worked out how many letter tiles to use in his game and the points values to allocate to the letters. The game used a crossword style of placing the tiles on the board to form words.
Butts made a few sets but was unable to interest any games manufacturers. In 1948 he sold the rights to James Brunot in return for a royalty for each set sold. Brunot simplified the rules, rearranged the premium squares and renamed the game "Scrabble". Although Brunot made 2,400 sets in 1949, he ended up losing money.
