The History of Jigsaw Puzzles

The first jigsaws did not have knobs, repeated piece shapes or a picture on a box. They were wooden maps designed to teach geography.

John Spilsbury and the dissected map

London mapmaker John Spilsbury is closely associated with the earliest surviving jigsaw puzzles. Around the 1760s he pasted maps onto thin wooden boards and cut around kingdoms and countries. The Strong National Museum of Play holds a 1766 example, Europe Divided into its Kingdoms, which is widely accepted as the earliest known jigsaw puzzle.

Why they were called dissections

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these puzzles were called dissected maps or dissected pictures. They were expensive, hand-cut objects used mainly by wealthier families and schools. Subjects expanded from geography to history, religion, animals and scenes from daily life.

From hand cutting to mass production

Industrial advances allowed puzzles to be produced in larger quantities. Cardboard examples appeared during the nineteenth century, although wood initially retained a reputation for quality. Around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the word “jigsaw” became attached to the puzzle, even though many makers used fretsaws or scroll saws rather than the exact tool now called a jigsaw.

The twentieth-century puzzle craze

Improved printing and die cutting made cardboard jigsaws affordable. They became popular family entertainment and were also used as advertising premiums. During the economic difficulties of the 1930s, a reusable puzzle offered many hours of relatively inexpensive entertainment.

Wooden, shaped and three-dimensional jigsaws

Modern wooden jigsaws often include specially shaped “whimsy” pieces. Other designers moved the idea into three dimensions, creating architectural models, vehicles and metal construction kits. Crafty Puzzles sold many such models, which remain in the 3D wooden jigsaw archive and construction-model archive.