The idea of placing dice into a matchbox of a size that allows them to rattle but not to turn appears in “The X-Ray Trick” by J. Whitehead, in Bagshawe's Magical Monthly, August 1925. The method in which the matchbox drawer is secretly divided, with a pair of loose dice on one end and a pair of fixed dice on the other was described by U. F. Grant in his “Dice and Match Box Mystery” in the October 1929 issue of The Sphinx. This is the earliest reference discovered to date.