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Photograph of Sam Loyd
Frank Pearsall, New York · Cleveland Public Library · public domain · Wikimedia Commons

Games & puzzles

Sam Loyd

1841–1911

America's most famous puzzle-maker — and its most famous puzzle-hustler.

Born
30 January 1841 · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died
10 April 1911
Nationality
American
  • puzzles
  • chess problems
  • recreational mathematics
  • United States

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Sam Loyd, their publishers or their estate. Sam Loyd appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Samuel Loyd was born in Philadelphia and raised in New York City. He was a strong chess player and a prolific, witty composer of chess problems, and he turned the same cleverness to puzzles of every kind, which he sold to newspapers and magazines and to the public.

He was a showman. Loyd claimed to have invented the fifteen-piece sliding puzzle that swept the country in the 1880s; the actual inventor was Noyes Chapman, who applied for a patent in 1880. His son published his collected puzzles after his death, and the historians of the field still sort fact from Loyd's own publicity.

Works

Major works

  1. —"Excelsior" (chess problem)one of his best-known chess problems, named after Longfellow's poem; White mates in five
  2. 1896Get Off the Eartha rotary vanishing puzzle he patented that year
  3. 1914Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrumspublished after his death by his son

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1859

    Published a chess problem on a siege that had taken place in 1713, one of the many he wrote around a story.

  2. 1867

    Played in the Paris chess tournament, with little success.

  3. 1896

    Patented the rotary vanishing puzzles, including Get Off the Earth, Teddy and the Lion and The Disappearing Bicyclist.

  4. 1898

    The Strand Magazine called him "the prince of puzzlers".

  5. 1911

    Died on 10 April; his Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles appeared three years later.

  6. 1987

    Inducted into the US Chess Hall of Fame.

Why they are here

Sam Loyd and the shelf

Relevance

Loyd is widely named America's greatest puzzler and popularizer; Martin Gardner called him exactly that in 1957. He is also the textbook example of why puzzle history needs care, since Gardner went on to call him "obviously a hustler".

Influence

He made the puzzle a popular entertainment, and for a time collaborated with Henry Dudeney. His 5000 Puzzles is still reprinted and is in the public domain.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Sam Loyd, and they are not a recommendation on Sam Loyd’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Sam Loyd is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.