The first jigsaws were maps
In the 1760s a London engraver and mapmaker, John Spilsbury, glued maps onto thin boards of wood and cut them apart along the borders of countries. Children put the countries back together and learned where they were. These dissected maps were sold as teaching aids for wealthy families, and for decades most puzzles were maps or improving pictures from history and the Bible.
The pieces did not INTERLOCK; they simply sat side by side, and a knock to the TABLE could scatter them. Our map skills page carries on what Spilsbury was trying to teach.
Named after the saw
The name JIGSAW came later, from the fine-bladed saw used to cut the PIECES once puzzles were made from thin wood in curving, locking SHAPES. Wooden puzzles were expensive, and there was often no picture on the BOX, so solvers had no idea what they were building until it was nearly finished.
Die-cutting changed everything. A steel cutter pressed through CARDBOARD could stamp out every piece of a puzzle in one go, making puzzles cheap. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, puzzles became a craze in the United States: shops sold a new one every week, some came free with household products, and people rented them from libraries.
How experienced puzzlers work
Most people start the same way: turn every piece picture-side up, find the four CORNER pieces and the straight EDGES, and build the BORDER to make a FRAME. Then SORT the rest into piles by colour or PATTERN. Experienced puzzlers also sort by shape — the number of knobs and holes on each piece — which helps enormously in the hardest sections.
A large expanse of SKY or sea is the TRICKY part, because every piece looks nearly the same. Solvers there stop looking at the PICTURE altogether and go by shape alone, trying each piece until it will FIT. Some puzzles are made deliberately harder, with no straight edges, or the same image printed on both sides.
Whimsies, mash-ups and speed puzzlers
Wooden puzzles for adults in the early twentieth century often included whimsies, pieces cut in the shape of an animal, a letter or an object, and they are still a collector's favourite. Cardboard puzzles, by contrast, are often cut with the same few steel cutting patterns, so two different puzzles of the same brand and size can have identical piece shapes. Some artists swap pieces between them to make strange mash-up pictures.
Competitive puzzling exists too. The World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, held in Spain since 2019, has solo players racing to finish a 500-piece puzzle, and the fastest take well under an hour.
The missing piece
Almost every household has a puzzle with one MISSING piece, usually discovered at the very end. Some puzzle makers will send out a replacement if you write to them with the puzzle's details, because they keep a record of each cutting pattern.
As a HOBBY, jigsaws suit people who like to SOLVE something slowly, alone or in company around a table. Research on older adults has linked regular puzzling with better visual and spatial skills. The satisfaction of the last piece going in, and the PUZZLE finally COMPLETE, is much of the point.