Unboxing Tiles for Miles

Created by David Rubman of Chicago, Illinois, this monolith is made out of over 10,000 Scrabble tiles! Towering at 6 feet tall, the tiles are arranged to spell out the names of over 1,000 people (and two horses) who have made considerable contributions to our world. Everyone from Aristotle to Steve Jobs, even Jay-Z!

Rubman calls it Monolith 2012 as he was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is where it gets a little weird…

The meaning of the Monolith in the film has been widely debated. One theory is that it was created by an alien race to push lesser species forward. David’s Monolith 2012 argues that we haven’t needed aliens to build our civilization, rather the figures that are spelled out in Scrabble tiles have helped us advance.

SCRABBLE BIONS

• At least 30,000 Scrabble games begin somewhere in the world every hour!

• If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were placed in one long line, they would stretch 50,000 miles—that’s twice around the world!

• In a 1982 competition in Manchester, England, Dr. Karl Khoshnaw scored 392 points with the word “caziques”—the plural for a West Indian chief.

• Climbers Jon Ratcliffe and Steve Franklin played Scrabble while perched precariously 200 feet above the ground on a cliff ledge in Anglesey, North Wales.

• Using a specially reinforced wooden board and adhesive glue to make their moves, skydivers Nicole Angelides and Ramsey Kent play Scrabble at 13,000 feet after throwing themselves out of a plane above Florida.