Ralph G. Beaman author page

Ralph G. Beaman constructed the first-ever Schrödinger crossword in the Times, which appeared on February 7, 1988. Beaman's puzzle is the only Schrödinger in the Pre-Shortz Era. It was published over 8 years before David Kahn's first-of-the-Shortz-Era Schrödinger and Jeremiah Farrell's Dole/Clinton masterpiece, both of which appeared in 1996.

In the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project blog, David Steinberg discussed Beaman's puzzle at length, noting such unique features as its inclusion of three 21-letter spans employing the Schrödinger device and the use of Schrödinger elements in the clues.

Ralph Gardner Beaman was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1923. His father was a funeral director, and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1944. He then served in the Navy at its foreign language school. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois in the late 1940s. By the 1950s, he joined DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, where he would spend the rest of his career as a chemist.

He had a profound interest in words and their patterns. Throughout the 1970s, he wrote articles for the journal Word Ways. (This journal was later edited by fellow Schrödinger constructor Jeremiah Farrell).

In one of his Word Ways articles, Beaman analyzed the interplay between a word's length and its number of syllables, identifying words that have the same number of syllables as letters, including a four-letter word with four syllables (IEIE, a Hawaiian pine).

In another Word Ways article, he attempted to show the maximum possible score in Scrabble, demonstrating a game in which the total score is 4,153 (featuring two board-spanning words: JACKPUDDINGHOOD and BENZOXYCAMPHORS).

In other articles, he identified words that form new words if the last letter is dropped (e.g., RABBIT to RABBI), the first letter is dropped, both the first and last letters are dropped, and other more complex sequences. Notably, his various Word Ways analyses do not reference the use of a computer and instead suggest he formulated them by hand.

He passed away in 1997 at age 73.