A short history of daily puzzles
Daily puzzles feel modern, but every part of them is old. The ideas behind Words, Hive, Numbers and In Order were invented over more than two thousand years by a poet, a newspaper journalist, an architect, a postmaster, a medieval mathematician and an 18th-century scientist. Here is how they fit together.
Around 280 BC: anagrams
The Greek poet Lycophron, at the court of Ptolemy II in Alexandria, is remembered for rearranging the letters of names into new words. He turned the king's name, Ptolemaios, into apo melitos, “made of honey”. Playing with a fixed set of letters to find new words is the heart of the Hive.
1202: digits arrive in Europe
Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, published Liber Abaci in 1202. It taught Europe the Hindu-Arabic digits 0 to 9 and how to calculate with them, replacing Roman numerals for everyday arithmetic. Try multiplying XLVII by XIX and you'll see why it mattered.
1765: history becomes a picture
The English scientist Joseph Priestley published A Chart of Biography in 1765, drawing famous lives as lines along a timeline. Seeing that Shakespeare and Galileo were born the same year, or that Newton was born within a year of Galileo's death, is easier on a chart than in a list. Putting things in order on a line is what In Order asks you to do.
1913: the first crossword
On December 21, 1913, the New York World printed a “Word-Cross” puzzle by the journalist Arthur Wynne. It was diamond-shaped, with clues for each word, and it became a newspaper habit around the world: a new puzzle every day, the same for every reader.
1938: letters get points
The architect Alfred Butts designed a word game with letter tiles and gave each letter a value by counting how often letters appeared in the front page of a newspaper. Common letters were worth little, rare ones a lot. The idea that harder words deserve more points lives on in the Hive's scoring.
1955 and 1970: guessing a secret
In 1955 Morgan Worthy published Jotto, a pencil-and-paper game: guess a secret five-letter word and learn how many letters you got right, but not which. In 1970 the postmaster and telecommunications expert Mordecai Meirowitz invented a code-breaking board game with colored pegs that told you how many guesses were in the right place and how many were right but misplaced.
Combine the two and color each letter of a guess, and you have the clues of Words.
1982: numbers on TV
Countdown, the first program on Britain's Channel 4 in 1982 and based on a French show, included a numbers game: reach a three-digit target using six numbers and the four operations. It's the direct ancestor of Numbers.
Today: one puzzle, for everyone, every day
The last ingredient came from newspapers: the same puzzle for everyone, once a day. Online, it became a shared ritual, with results passed around as colored squares that show how you did without spoiling the answer. Daily Quests brings these ideas together in four free games, in English and Portuguese, new every day.