2026-09-08 · history
Pigs in Clover (1889) — A Tilting Wooden Box That Stalled the U.S. Senate for a Season
In 1889, a single wooden box brought the United States to a standstill. Under a sheet of glass, four tiny marble "pigs" sat in a spiral maze; the only tool was gravity, tilting the board to herd all four into the center pen. Senators and newspapermen alike stopped mid-sentence for it. The inventor was Charles Martin Crandall, who patented it on September 10, 1889. Two years later, puzzle writer Sam Loyd claimed he'd invented it himself, and for decades the record blurred. A craze that got itself mocked in a White House political cartoon deserves, I think, to be read again as one of the first mobile games.
