MacTutor
Samuel Loyd
Times obituary
The death of Mr. Sam Loyd (writes a correspondent) at his house in Brooklyn will be regretted not only by those who are interested in the "poetry of chess," or problem composition, but also by all who have ever been amused by his ingenious puzzles. As a problem composer, he was in the front rank of acknowledged masters; Max Weiss, the famous Viennese chess player, styled him "the champion of the chess problem" in the introduction to a selection of his masterpieces published at Berlin, and Professor J. Berger of Graz, an even greater authority on the problem, endorsed that description, while at the same time deploring the American composer's contempt for the strict rules of the art Mr. Loyd, whose genius for inventing fresh and surprising themes and expressing them in a subtle and cryptic form has never been equalled, was content to work out his own ideas in his own way, caring little for considerations of economy and the avoidance of duals and other rather artificial canons of elegance accepted by English and German composers; and there can be no doubt that he was right to follow his peculiar bent, seeing that no other composer's problems so often give the solver impressions of wit and dry humor. On one occasion the writer described him as the "Sargent of problem composition" - a description that pleased him greatly, the more so as his wife was a relative of the famous painter.
The rapidity with which he invented his most complex stratagems, often working them out without board or men, was surprising. He once made a wager with Steinitz that he would compose an impromptu problem more quickly than the latter could solve; but, despite the fact that a charming composition, with several interesting and not too obvious variations, was evolved in five minutes, the Bohemian master won the contest with a few seconds to spare. Mr. Loyd must have produced close to 2,000 problems, not one of which lacked some point of originality. He was most popular with chess players, who were always cordially welcomed when they visited him.
No doubt he was better known as an inventor of puzzles than as a composer of chess problems. The tantalizing device of "Pigs in Clover" and many other familiar mechanical puzzles were invented by him, but unquestionably his greatest success in this line was the famous "Trotting Pony" puzzle Many millions of the "Trotting Pony" were sold, and until its secret was revealed, not more than half a dozen correct solutions were received out of the thousands sent to its author. The solver was asked to arrange certain black forms, eaten out of cardboard, in such a way as to make the picture of a trotter in a charismatic attitude of action. The idea of the solution was to group these forms in such a way that the white space in the middle was the silhouette of the trotter, and very few indeed of countless would-be solvers thought of that way out of their difficulties. Mr. Lloyd bad a real gift such as that shown in the Curiosa Mathematica of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll for the fantastio in mathematical science, and, had he devoted himself to making use of it, might have earned fame as an investigator in the vast and poetical region of pure mathematics, and a worthy follower of Cayley and Sylvester.
He was 70 years old and left a widow and three children
The death of Mr. Sam Loyd (writes a correspondent) at his house in Brooklyn will be regretted not only by those who are interested in the "poetry of chess," or problem composition, but also by all who have ever been amused by his ingenious puzzles. As a problem composer, he was in the front rank of acknowledged masters; Max Weiss, the famous Viennese chess player, styled him "the champion of the chess problem" in the introduction to a selection of his masterpieces published at Berlin, and Professor J. Berger of Graz, an even greater authority on the problem, endorsed that description, while at the same time deploring the American composer's contempt for the strict rules of the art Mr. Loyd, whose genius for inventing fresh and surprising themes and expressing them in a subtle and cryptic form has never been equalled, was content to work out his own ideas in his own way, caring little for considerations of economy and the avoidance of duals and other rather artificial canons of elegance accepted by English and German composers; and there can be no doubt that he was right to follow his peculiar bent, seeing that no other composer's problems so often give the solver impressions of wit and dry humor. On one occasion the writer described him as the "Sargent of problem composition" - a description that pleased him greatly, the more so as his wife was a relative of the famous painter.
The rapidity with which he invented his most complex stratagems, often working them out without board or men, was surprising. He once made a wager with Steinitz that he would compose an impromptu problem more quickly than the latter could solve; but, despite the fact that a charming composition, with several interesting and not too obvious variations, was evolved in five minutes, the Bohemian master won the contest with a few seconds to spare. Mr. Loyd must have produced close to 2,000 problems, not one of which lacked some point of originality. He was most popular with chess players, who were always cordially welcomed when they visited him.
No doubt he was better known as an inventor of puzzles than as a composer of chess problems. The tantalizing device of "Pigs in Clover" and many other familiar mechanical puzzles were invented by him, but unquestionably his greatest success in this line was the famous "Trotting Pony" puzzle Many millions of the "Trotting Pony" were sold, and until its secret was revealed, not more than half a dozen correct solutions were received out of the thousands sent to its author. The solver was asked to arrange certain black forms, eaten out of cardboard, in such a way as to make the picture of a trotter in a charismatic attitude of action. The idea of the solution was to group these forms in such a way that the white space in the middle was the silhouette of the trotter, and very few indeed of countless would-be solvers thought of that way out of their difficulties. Mr. Lloyd bad a real gift such as that shown in the Curiosa Mathematica of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll for the fantastio in mathematical science, and, had he devoted himself to making use of it, might have earned fame as an investigator in the vast and poetical region of pure mathematics, and a worthy follower of Cayley and Sylvester.
He was 70 years old and left a widow and three children
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