The publisher of the New York Herald offered a $5 gold piece to the reader who could form the most words using the letters from the shortest verse in the Bible.
More than 400 readers submitted identical solutions listing 2505 words, and the publisher was obliged to pay $5 to each of them, since no provision had been made for ties.
[1] By the 1940s and 1950s millions of players tried to solve puzzles published in a wide range of newspapers and magazines.
The first puzzle contests in that era were designed primarily to boost the circulation of the magazine or newspaper.
[2] Shortly after the New York Herald Tribune started publishing Tangle Towns in September 1954, the number of readers went up 72,000 to over 400,000.
The puzzle was designed by William Sunners, a Brooklyn schoolteacher for a fee of $15,000 (roughly 4 years salary in that era).
The final tiebreaker would require the player to draw a path through a grid of several hundred numbers to obtain the highest possible total.