Origins
In a 1964 Associated Press profile released right before the original Jeopardy! series premiered, Griffin explained the show's origins as follows:
My wife Julann just came up with the idea one day when we were in a plane bringing us back to New York from Duluth. I was mulling over game show ideas, when she noted that there had not been a successful "question and answer" game on the air since the quiz show scandals. Why not do a switch, and give the answers to the contestant and let them come up with the question? She fired a couple of answers to me: "5,280" – and the question of course was "How many feet in a mile?". Another was "79 Wistful Vista"; that was Fibber and Mollie McGee's address. I loved the idea, went straight to NBC with the idea, and they bought it without even looking at a pilot show.
Griffin's first conception of the game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not be shown on camera easily, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories. Taking inspiration from horse racing, he also decided to add three "Daily Doubles", clues in which a contestant could wager any amount of his or her money. Griffin originally titled the show What's the Question?, but ended up discarding that initial title when skeptical network executive Ed Vane rejected his original concept of the game, claiming, "It doesn't have enough jeopardies."
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