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The History of Jigsaw Puzzles

The jigsaw puzzle was invented over 200 years ago. In 1767, English teacher, John Spilsbury, cut up a map into several pieces to be re-assembled again to help familiarize his students with the geography of their country. Spilsbury’s great idea was successful and soon became copied by many other teachers.

With time, this teaching aid turned into a popular spare time activity. Pictures of idyllic scenes, landscapes and picturesque buildings were glued on wooden boards, which were then sawn into several pieces in order to re-assemble them again. This explains the English name "jigsaw" puzzle! The first puzzles were made of cedar-wood or mahogany.

It was not until the mid-sixties that jigsaw puzzles were made of cardboard. Cardboard jigsaw puzzles are just as good a quality as the more expensive wooden jigsaw puzzles. This new production method suddenly made it possible to produce jigsaw puzzles that everyone could afford. Many different types of jigsaw puzzles began to appear and soon started what could be called a real puzzle boom. Nowadays millions of pictures are punched into small pieces every year in order to be reassembled again by patient puzzle players.


Recent History of Jigsaw Puzzles


Although puzzle sales were flagged somewhat in the early 1900s, by the late 1920s with the onset of the Great Depression, there was a resurgence in popularity. In 1933 jigsaw puzzle sales peaked at an astounding 10 million per week. With lack of steady employment, people turned to jigsaw puzzles and other forms of home entertainment instead of outside entertainment like restaurants and nightclubs. Many unemployed architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen made their own jigsaw puzzles for sale or rent. As the puzzle craze of the 1930s continued, drugstores and circulating libraries offered jigsaw puzzles for rent. They charged 3-10 cents per day depending on the size of the puzzle. For a brief time in 1932, retail stores offered free puzzles with the purchase of toothbrushes, flashlights, and hundreds of other products.


By the time World War II ended in the late 1940s, the sales of wooden jigsaw puzzles went into a sharp decline. This was because rising wages increased the labor costs of hand cutting the pieces. At the same time, improvements in the lithography and die cutting (processes which had been introduced decades earlier) made the cardboard puzzles more attractive. The Springbok Company, one of the major puzzle manufacturers, began making jigsaw puzzles based on high quality reproductions of fine works of art.


When Springbok puzzles introduced Jackson Pollock's "Convergence," in 1965, hundreds of thousands of Americans struggled to assemble it. By the late 1960s, wooden puzzles had practically vanished. However in the mid-1970s, Stave Puzzles was founded on the belief that there was still an audience for high quality wooden puzzles. Their success has proven correct, and in the last 25 years, a number of small custom wooden puzzle manufactures have helped re-popularize wooden puzzles.