Development of The World Chess Championship - Early Uses of "World Champion"

Early Uses of "World Champion"

The idea of a world champion goes back at least to 1840, when a columnist in Fraser's Magazine wrote, "To whom is destined the marshal's baton when De la Bourdonnais throws it down, and what country will furnish his successor? ... At present de la Bourdonnais, like Alexander the Great, is without heir, and there is room to fear the empire may be divided eventually under a number of petty kings." A letter quoted in The Times on November 16, 1843, but probably written before that, described the second Staunton vs Saint-Amant match, played in Paris in November–December 1843, as being for "the golden sceptre of Philidor."

The earliest recorded use of the term "World Champion" was in 1845, when Howard Staunton was described as "the Chess Champion of England, or ... the Champion of the World".

The first known proposal that a contest should be defined in advance as being for recognition as the world's best player was by Ludwig Bledow in a letter to von der Lasa, written in 1846 and published in the Deutsche Schachzeitung in 1848: "... the winner of the battle in Paris should not be overly proud of his special position, since it is in Trier that the crown will first be awarded" (Bledow died in 1846 and the proposed tournament did not take place). In 1850 to 1851 the forthcoming 1851 London International Tournament was explicitly described as being for the world championship by three commentators: a letter from "a member of the Calcutta Chess Club" (dated 1 August 1850) and another from Captain Hugh Alexander Kennedy (dated October 1850) in the 1850 volume of the Chess Player's Chronicle; and the Liberty Weekly Tribune in Missouri (June 20, 1851). Although Kennedy was a member of the organizing committee for the tournament, there is no evidence that crowning a world champion was an official aim of the tournament.

The 1851 tournament was won convincingly by Adolf Anderssen. However, there is no evidence that this victory or his equally convincing win in the London 1862 International Tournament led to his being widely acclaimed at the time as the world champion, although Henry Bird retrospectively awarded the title to Anderssen for his victory in 1851. Between these tournaments Paul Morphy visited Europe in 1858 and crushed all opposition in a series of matches. Harper's Weekly (25 September 1858) and The American Union (9 October 1858) hailed him as the world champion, but another article in Harper's Weekly (9 October 1858; by C.H. Stanley) was uncertain about whether to describe the Morphy-Harrwitz match as being for the world championship.