Sam Loyd has been dubbed America’s greatest puzzlist and an authentic American genius. For almost half a century, until his death in 1911 he was America’s undisputed puzzle king. Thousands of innovative puzzles appeared under his name, many of which are still popular today.
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Sam Loyd was born in Philadelphia on January 30, 1841. His father, a real estate operator, moved the family to New York in 1844, where Loyd attended public school until he was 17. He studied to be an engineer but became obsessed with the game of chess and as a youth frequented a chess club where his interest in making puzzles started. His first problem was published by a New York paper when he was 14, and during the next five years his output of chess puzzles was so prolific that he was known throughout the chess world. By 1858 he was hailed as the leading American writer of chess problems. In 1877 and 1878, Loyd wrote a weekly chess page for Scientific American Supplement and these columns comprised most of the book Chess Strategy, printed in 1978, and containing 500 chess problems.
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When Loyd was only 17, he invented his Trick Mules Puzzle which is deceptively difficult. The object is to cut apart the three pieces and then reassemble them so that the two jockeys are riding the mules. The puzzle was sold by Loyd to the American showman Phineas T. Barnum (of Barnum & Bailey Circus fame). Loyd earned some $10,000 from the puzzle. It is a typical Loyd puzzle. He was a master at making puzzles that appeared so simple to solve that people felt compelled to attempt them, only to find that they would spend hours unsuccessfully trying to figure them out.
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