Puzzle Articles of Arthur L. Smith
Today I’d like to talk about Arthur L. Smith, a popularizer of mechanical puzzles in the first half of the 1900s. Smith wrote several articles for the Popular Science magazine about making and solving puzzles. His first article was published in March 1926, as part of The Home Workshop series of 15 articles spanning 1926 to 1931. They must have been popular, because he published several more after that all the way to 1942.
Information about Arthur L. Smith is fairly scarce. The artcles give some information:
To those who are not familiar with his reputation as an authority on puzzles it is sufficient to say that [Rev. Arthur L. Smith] was for some time the editor of the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League.
My note: the National Puzzlers’ League, NPL, was founded in 1883 and publishes a monthly magazine called Enigma. It is still around today.
I did some sleuthing and may have found some more information about him, but this is all speculative . . .
In the July 1925 issue of Popular Science, there was a list of contest winners for a crossword puzzle, and an honorable mention to Arthur L. Smith of Mildred, PA. It seems reasonable to suspect that this might be the same person, and there is indeed a Reverend Arthur L. Smith from Mildred. If this is the same person, then he was a minister at the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran church of Mildred, PA from 1913 to his retirement in 1946. His full name is Rev. Arthur Lewis Smith, and he “was known and loved by all the people in Mildred, regardless of their church connections” Source.
In any case, here is a list of articles that Arthur L. Smith published in Popular Science over the years. If I were a kid during this time, I believe these would be the type of articles I’d be drawn to. You probably couldn’t very easily go out and buy puzzles like these so you’d have to make your own. I highlighted what I believe to be the 15 articles that were part of the puzzle series, but he wrote more than that during that period, and many more after. When possible, I link out to the article in Google Books.