The English version goes back to 1915, in the Oxfordshire: one night, Victor Orille (but may be Orville, or Erwill), driving home with his wife from a party where he got drunk, met with an accident. Due to this, his wife died.
Judged guilty of culpable homicide, he was condemned to five years' imprisonment. But, as he found the sentence too small, Victor asked to be transferred as far as possible from England. His prays were accepted, an so Mr. Orille was set to Cape Town, South Africa: from a rich person he was, he became like a prisoner serving a life sentence.
During one of his long days, Orille began to draw horizontal and vertical lines, and then filling some of the squares. After a while, he found the way to insert words, readable from left to right and from top to bottom.
Orille was first believed crazy, but soon the new mania spread in all the prison, arriving to the ears of its director who sent some of the prisoner's crosswords to a local newspaper. The new game was published, obtaining a raising success and making Orille, when he left the jail, a rich man. He died in 1927, at the age of 75.

The American version is much more ordinary: on December 1913, the journalist Arthur Wynn was examining some magical squares for the christmas edition of hiw newspaper, the New York World.
Suddendly, an idea flashed through his mind: why not tring to build more complicated magical squares, inserting longer words? But that was not so easy, so Arthur tried to blacken some squares in orther to have more than a word in a single row, inserting different words (not the same as in magical squares) in horizontal and vertical rows.
At first, the Wynn's boss tried to suppress the new born crosswords. But the public didn't agree and since then the new game gained a world wide fame and success.

It is now the turn of the Italian version.
When in 1925 crosswords arrived in Italy, published by La Domenica del Corriere spreading everywhere with high success, nobody noticed that the same game appeared at leaste 35 years before, at that time obtaining no success.
Crosswords, in fact, were created on September 14, 1890 by the journalist Giuseppe Airoldi, appearing for the first time in the Secolo Illustrato della Domenica.
Here is the first crosswords (definitions in Italian):

1R 2I 3P 4A 2O D E R 3S E R A 4A M E N

Orizzontali: 1. Guai se l'onda mi varca o mi spezza 2. In Germania son acqua corrente 3. Ogni dí quando il sole � morente 4. Cosí soglion le preci finir. Verticali: 1. Sono un fiore di rara bellezza 2. Il medesimo in lingua latina 3. Quali frutti noi siamo, indovina! 4. Per la messe di là da venir.

The English and American merits derive from the introduction of black squares.

At the outbreack of World War II, in many countries crosswords were banned, as their schemes could be easily uesed by spies. For example, even if this was only a coincidence, few days before the D-Day, some crosswords were published with the words Overlord and Neptune (coded names for the militar operation) as two of the solutions.

The following are two crosswords appeared in Italy in 1944 (translated definitions):

Horizontals: 1. Milan by night 6. Turin during curfew 7. Genova three hours before dawn 8. Taranto at night 9. Florence without light Verticals: 1. Naples at midnight 2. Nocturnal view of Venice 3. Livorno at 23h52 4. Brescia three hours after sunset 5. Bologna in the darkness (The white square shining within all this darkness is due to somebody who didn't respect the curfew).

1S 2S 3S S S 4S S S     S   5S 6S 7S 8S S S S S S   9S S S

Horizontals: 1. The wind when it's strong 4. The wind, instead, when it's weak 5. Silence, please! 8. Can be a call 9. We have been sounded Verticals: 1. Theatrical whistle during a yound actor's debut 2. S, they are two (Esse sono due) 3. Spring wind 6. We are out of money (Siamo Senza Soldi) 7. Wind very light, very light..

Crosswords have been used also as educative tools in schools: in 1924, the Latin teacher Colby proposed to his pupils at Milton Academy the following crossword to awake their interest in Latin language:

A R M A V I R U M Q U E C A N O       R       L       V       M   R E M   K   U   C   A   A   N       A       L   U   N       I N E   T   Q U A   M   D     I S       U   U L T       E   I     C O N S U E T U D O   R A T I S

There are two kinds of schemes: one fixed, in which the crossword is built following simmetric rules, and the other free, where crossings are built with no particular rules.

Geographically, crosswords differ in both style and content. The British style accepts many unkeyd words with no cross clues, eliminates most short words, and favors difficult or punning definitions. In the USA, however, more conservatibe rules apply. The puzzles must be what is called an overall interlock, allowing no unkeyd letters at all. Black squares must be kewpt down to about one-sixth of the total number of squares, two-letter words are not allowed, and a low word count is attempted, since the longer the words, the harder the puzzle. The real quality of a crossword puzzle is based on the cleverness of its word combinations and its creator's ability to compose challenging and diverse clues.