Before the jigsaw: the longer history of puzzles
The “history of puzzles” doesn’t begin with cardboard boxes or cozy winter tables. It begins with a much older human impulse: to take complexity, break it into manageable parts, and then put it back together in a way that proves understanding.
One of the most widely cited early examples is the Ishango Bone, often described as possibly the oldest mathematical artifact, unearthed in 1950 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, dated to roughly 20,000–25,000 years ago, and marked with organized notches that some interpret as structured counting or tallying (with ongoing debate about its original purpose).
A second thread, more directly connected to jigsaws, comes from classical geometry. Archimedes described a dissection puzzle (Stomachion) “more than two millennia ago,” involving a square divided into 14 pieces and prompting the question of how many distinct arrangements are possible; modern computation later identified 536 distinct square-forming solutions under rotation/reflection equivalences (among other counts depending on definition).
By the early medieval period, puzzle culture appears explicitly as a form of instruction and mental training. The MacTutor history entry on Alcuin of York summarizes a set of problems attributed to him, including the enduring river-crossing “wolf, goat, and cabbages” puzzle and notes that some of these crossing puzzles may indeed be original to Alcuin (with no earlier versions known).
This matters because it reframes jigsaws as part of a larger continuum: puzzles aren’t a modern novelty. They’re a stable cultural technology for thinking, made tactile, solvable, and satisfying.
Royal classrooms and the birth of the jigsaw idea
If the modern jigsaw has an origin scene you can almost feel, it looks like polished wood, engraved paper, and drawers that slide open with a soft, deliberate friction.
A late-18th-century mahogany cabinet with 14 drawers documented by Art Fund, contains some of the earliest surviving examples of dissected (jigsaw-puzzle) maps. These were used to teach geography to the children of King George III by their governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, and are described as among the first surviving educational children’s toys.
The cabinet isn’t just a charming artifact. It is a blueprint for what the jigsaw would become: education disguised as play, attention trained through touch, and a large concept (the world) made conquerable by dividing it into pieces.
The same record adds unusually vivid texture. Alongside printed maps from an instructional atlas published in Paris, the cabinet includes some of the earliest dissected maps produced by John Spilsbury in the mid-1760s. It also includes manuscript maps that were “probably added” by Lady Charlotte and the children, with “charming classroom mistakes”, a detail that instantly makes puzzle history feel less like museum glass and more like real education in motion.
A documented inventor: Spilsbury’s dissected maps
The jigsaw puzzle’s invention story is unusually well supported because both objects and printed descriptions survive.
The Strong National Museum of Play describes a 1766 puzzle titled Europe Divided into its Kingdoms, a map of Europe widely accepted as the world’s first jigsaw puzzle in surviving form. Spilsbury created it as an educational “dissected map” by pasting the map onto a thin mahogany board and cutting along geographical lines.
Christie’s catalog scholarship adds a crucial piece of documentary evidence: after leaving his employer, Spilsbury established a business in Covent Garden and appears in Mortimer’s Universal Director for 1763 described as an “Engraver and Map Dissector in Wood, in order to facilitate the Teaching of Geography.” The catalog notes this suggests he was making jigsaw maps by that time, even though no earlier dissected map appears to have survived.
The phrase “Map Dissector in Wood” reads like a mission statement. It also clarifies the medium’s original identity. The earliest jigsaws weren’t marketed as relaxation. They were marketed as learning, geography you could touch.
Craftsmanship, not just concept
One of the most “premium” surprises in early jigsaw history is how much material intelligence is embedded in the first surviving example.
The Strong’s conservator explains that wood is hygroscopic it expands and contracts with humidity and that tangential vs radial cutting affects warping risk. Spilsbury’s puzzle was created using a radial cut mahogany board, allowing more even movement over time; in addition, the paper grain on handmade “laid” paper was oriented so paper and wood would move in tandem, reducing stress that could warp or tear the paper.
In other words: the world’s earliest surviving jigsaw wasn’t just cut. It was engineered—quietly, thoughtfully and for longevity.
From craft to craze: naming, manufacturers, and the Great Depression wave
A key moment in the history of jigsaw puzzles isn’t technological. It’s linguistic.
According to Etymonline, the term “jigsaw puzzle” is recorded by 1906; the tool name “jigsaw” appears earlier (1855). The entry also notes earlier terminology “dissected map (or picture)” recorded by 1807 describing an image mounted on board and divided into irregular parts to be joined together as a puzzle.
That progression is a cultural signal: once a hobby has a stable name, it has likely reached a broader public.
Early 20th-century leisure makers
The Strong’s jigsaw history overview notes that after the U.S. Civil War, well-known game producers including Parker Brothers, sold puzzles blending educational value and entertainment. In 1908, Parker Brothers introduced Pastime puzzles featuring pieces cut as animals, letters, and geometric shapes, and other manufacturers introduced interlocking pieces about the same time.
Even in that brief description, you can see the modern puzzle experience taking shape: interlocking stability, playful cutting, and a shift from “teaching tool” to “serious leisure.”
The Great Depression: the decade that industrialized puzzling
If you want to understand why “puzzling” is still culturally associated with hard winters and hard times, you have to read the 1930s as a case study in attention economics.
A 2024 scholarly article by Anne D. Williams in the American Journal of Play (“Therapeutic Play: Adult Puzzling and Hard Times”) documents how, as the economy declined, interest in jigsaw puzzles rose and major companies increased production. The paper notes that early-1930s adult wooden puzzles were still relatively expensive around $1.50 to $4.50 for a three-hundred-piece puzzle when the prevailing wage could be roughly $0.25/hour, and that many puzzlers used puzzle-rental libraries to keep costs down.
Then came the promotional breakthrough that feels startlingly modern, like a precursor to “free with purchase.”
In July 1932, the Lambert Pharmacal Company offered a free cardboard jigsaw puzzle with purchases of its Pro-Phy-Lac-Tic toothbrushes and simultaneously raised the toothbrush price from 25 to 29 cents (a 16% increase). The paper reports that sales quadrupled; because the puzzles cost about a penny to produce, profits surged and competitors rapidly copied the promotional model.
Within months, once-a-week commercial cardboard puzzles for adults appeared, sold at newsstands for 10–25 cents. Then comes the headline statistic: a February 1933 article estimated the industry was producing ten million puzzles each week, with about 30% sold and 70% distributed free as promotions. The same paper notes the U.S. had about 30 million households at the time—meaning puzzles were reaching an enormous share of the public.
The end of the craze is equally well documented. The paper reports that the puzzle boom ended abruptly in March 1933 due to multiple converging factors, including an IRS ruling that puzzles were subject to a 10% excise tax, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration and bank holiday, renewed optimism from the New Deal, warmer weather, and the end of prohibition encouraging people to spend less time at home.
This is the key pattern to carry forward in your narrative: jigsaws surge when people are homebound and seeking control, then recede as the outside world reopens.
War rooms, art rooms, and the modern renaissance
The mid-20th century reshaped puzzles in two ways at once: it revealed how “game boards” could be repurposed for survival, and it set the stage for puzzles to behave like collectible art.
WWII ingenuity: the board game as a covert container
One of the most cinematic chapters in puzzle-adjacent history is documented by Imperial War Museums.
IWM records that in December 1939, a new branch of British military intelligence called MI9 was set up to teach servicemen who became POWs how to escape and evade recapture, and that MI9 secretly sent escape tools to POW camps.
Among the examples: IWM describes how manufacturers Waddingtons made board games such as Monopoly that could be sent to POWs with maps concealed inside. Crucially, the maps were signaled by subtle printing marks: a full stop on “Free Parking” indicated a map of Northern France and Germany; a full stop after “Marylebone Station” meant Italy; and a full stop after “Mayfair” denoted Norway, Sweden, and Germany.
In a puzzle-history essay, this belongs not as trivia, but as thematic amplification: puzzles and puzzle-like objects have always been about information, how it’s stored, hidden, revealed, and reassembled.
The art puzzle pivot: premium positioning goes mainstream
A distinct “modern art” chapter becomes especially clear in the official history of Springbok Editions.
Springbok’s history page states that in 1963 it was founded by Robert and Katie Lewin, inspired by circular puzzles Robert bought in London; it emphasizes high-quality interlocking pieces and state-of-the-art lithography, and notes the founders used museum-sourced imagery and commissioned artists, positioning puzzles as collector items.
The page also provides a decisive “premium market” fact: Springbok puzzles retailed for $3.50 in 1963 when the industry average retail price for a jigsaw puzzle was less than $1.00.
It documents a corporate timeline as well: Springbok was acquired by Hallmark Cards in 1967, sold exclusively in Hallmark stores through 2001, discontinued by Hallmark in 2002, and then continued under a long-term relationship with Allied Products (which acquired the rights and invested in machinery and expertise to maintain quality standards).
A single product page captures the cultural logic of this era: Springbok’s description of Jackson Pollock’s Convergence puzzle notes it was billed as “the hardest jigsaw puzzle in the world,” claims hundreds of thousands were purchased, and states the original was 340 pieces, later re-released as a 1000-piece version (including a 2003 anniversary reprint).
You don’t need to argue that every modern “art puzzle” descends from Springbok. But you can credibly argue that by the 1960s, puzzles were being marketed not just as pastime, but as aesthetic challenge, art you didn’t merely look at, but labored over.
Why puzzles resurfaced in 2020—again, at scale
The COVID-era puzzle boom wasn’t just nostalgia. It repeated the same deep pattern documented in the 1930s: people stayed home; anxiety rose; screen fatigue increased; and puzzles provided a controlled challenge with a finish line.
In the American Journal of Play article, Williams reports that jigsaw puzzle sales began soaring days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic (March 11, 2020), and that on March 24 “puzzles for adults” reached Amazon’s top ten list of searches alongside hygiene and cleaning products.
The same paper cites industry anecdotes that define “surge” in concrete terms: Ceaco sold more puzzles on a single March day than during the entire prior December holiday peak; Ravensburger’s late-March sales were 370% higher than the same period in 2019; and an online retailer saw a tenfold increase in sales.
A separate business report from Forbes similarly states that Ravensburger’s U.S. puzzle sales were up 370% year over year during the last two weeks in March 2020.
And the shortage itself became part of the cultural memory. The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2020 that there was a shortage of jigsaw puzzles “just when we need them most,” reflecting both demand and supply constraints.
By mid-2021, the Wall Street Journal also reported that Ravensburger North America’s sales jumped 70% in 2020 compared with 2019, a useful “after the spike” data point for your readers who wonder whether the boom was real or just social-media noise.
The takeaway for Artistic Puzzles’ brand voice is not “puzzles saved us.” It’s more precise: in periods of uncertainty, people return to experiences where effort becomes visible progress and where the finished surface can feel like a small, orderly victory.
Conclusion: puzzles as art objects, attention practice, and modern ritual
Artistic Puzzles is built for people who don’t treat puzzles as disposable entertainment. We’re here for the collector’s eye and the maker’s patience, for imagery chosen as carefully as a print, and for builds that feel satisfying at both scales: the piece in your hand, and the finished picture in your space.
The history supports that position. Jigsaws begin as tactile geography lessons, dissected maps stored in a mahogany cabinet, complete with manuscript “classroom mistakes.” They become a mass habit when manufacturing and promotion make them cheap and ubiquitous, peaking with an early-1933 estimate of ten million puzzles per week. They absorb new meaning in wartime (even adjacent to covert escape aids), and reemerge as premium aesthetic challenges in the postwar era. And in 2020, they surge again—so strongly that “puzzles for adults” reaches Amazon’s top searches and major manufacturers report extraordinary sales jumps.
A jigsaw puzzle, at its best, is still what it was at the beginning: a way to make the world piece-sized, solvable, and—eventually—beautiful.