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Toward the end of the 19th century, a newcomer of obscure and disputed origin appeared in England from beyond the Channel. Called Russian whist or biritch (soon anglicized into bridge), the new game differed from standard whist in two ways: the dealer named trumps, or passed the privilege across the table to his partner, and the dealer's partner became dummy, laying down his hand for all to see. London whist players who tried the new game soon noted that the exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British civil servants stationed at a remote outpost in India hit upon the idea of bidding for the privilege of naming the trump suit. Within a decade, auction bridge had captured the card tables of the U.S. and Europe.
French Ceiling. At the height of auction's popularity in the midigsos, the keen card mind of famed Yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt focused on the game's essential defect in comparison with present-day bridge: overtricks in excess of the bid counted toward game, just like bid tricks, so that a partnership could make a game without bidding it. Card Buff Vanderbilt found in the French variety of auction called plafond (ceiling) an innovation that he liked: only tricks bid and made were scored toward game, over tricks counting as above-the-line bonuses.
Seizing on the "ceiling" principle, Vanderbilt added an idea of his own: a partnership would have to bid a slam in order to get a slam bonus (in both plafond and U.S.-British auction, the bonus was awarded whether the slam was bid or not). The mechanics and scoring of the new game—with slam bonuses increased tenfold and more—were worked out by Vanderbilt and three card-playing friends on a cruise to Havana in November 1925. Contract was born.
Scramble of the Experts. The U.S. took up contract bridge with wild and alarming enthusiasm. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, newspapers reported bridge divorces, bridge assault-and-battery cases, even bridge deaths. Cartoonist H. T. Webster recorded bridge players' foibles in a long and memorable series. A North Carolina addict swore to shoot the next man who dealt him a bad hand, dealt himself a bust—and promptly shot himself to death. In Kansas City, Mo. in 1929, Housewife Myrtle Bennett committed one of the decade's most headlined homicides by shooting her husband after a bitter quarrel about a bridge deal in which he bid one spade, she jumped to four spades, and he, as declarer, bungled the play. Naturally, she was acquitted.
Along with divorces, homicides, quarrels and bad bids, contract brought the lasting war of the bridge experts. Contract made the expert indispensable for the run-of-living-room players: arriving at game and slam contracts with even reasonable safety required standardized communication between partners. In the scramble of the experts to cash in, the man who emerged on top was slender,
Russian-born Ely Culbertson, gifted with a real talent for cards and an absolute genius for personal publicity. His Contract Bridge Blue Book leaped to the bestseller lists in 1931, sold more than 1,000,000 copies within a few years.