Puzzling Times

 by Patti Sherry-Crews

Among my favorite childhood memories were the evenings I spent with my grandmother who lived next door to us, putting together jigsaw puzzles. We ate Ritz crackers with pimento cheese from a jar while watching westerns on TV together: Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Bonanza, Bat Masterson, and The High Chaparral among others. I credit the reason I wrote my first historical western to those evenings and the spark to my imagination it lit.

This last year I returned to jigsaw puzzles with a vengeance. These past months we always had a puzzle going in my house. And we weren’t alone in this. There were puzzle exchanges between friends, neighbors who set out used puzzles on porches free for the taking, and our local bookstore occasionally put out a cart with free puzzles. Stores along the main shopping street near me had jigsaw puzzle displays in their windows—including clothing stores who didn’t normally stock jigsaw puzzles. It seemed jigsaw puzzles were suddenly everywhere. There are even companies now who will even make jigsaw puzzles out of images you send them, so there was that going on (fun gifts!).

I got to wondering how long we’ve been piecing together fragments to make a picture.

First Jigsaw Puzzles:

English cartographer and engraver, John Spilsburg is credited with making the first jigsaw puzzle 1767. Called “dissected maps,” he pasted maps unto wood and cut them into pieces. The first puzzles of this kind were used to educate children about geography. And thus, it went for about a century and a half.

The First Jigsaw Puzzle

The Early 20th Century:

Around 1900, puzzle mania hit adults. Early jigsaw puzzles were a challenge. There was no image on the box to guide the user, so the completed image was a surprise. The pieces didn’t interlock, and if you’ve ever worked a cheap puzzle where the pieces don’t fit together well, you know how frustrating this can be. Also the pieces were cut along color lines so without clues like a piece that is part roof and part sky, for instance, it makes it much harder to fit all together.

The early puzzles were hand-cut wooden puzzles, which were expensive and out of reach for middle and working classes. Now, if you were wealthy, it was a common practice to buy a jigsaw puzzle to entertain your weekend house guests.

Then the Parker Brothers of game making fame got into the act with their Pastime brand. The Pastime puzzles featured interlocking pieces, some in whimsical shapes such as birds, shoes, cats, initials, and numbers, etc.

The author's own wooden puzzle in progress, note inclusion of recognizable shapes. (maybe aParker Bros. Pastime puzzle?)

The Great Depression:

During this troubled time, the jigsaw puzzle saw an upsurge in popularity as people sought emotional escape. With money tight, people stayed home more often, rather than go to restaurants or shows, and working together on a puzzle was an alternative entertainment. And at a time when morale was low, being able to start and complete a task successfully was a morale booster. I puzzling people of 2020 can relate.

Wooden puzzles were still expensive, so libraries and some stores offered rentals.

 Many out of work carpenters turned to puzzle-making in their basements and garages. Then a man named Charles Russel attached a saw blade to his wife’s sewing machine, and the rest is "jigsaw" history.

Mass Production:

The innovation of die-cut cardboard puzzles made jigsaw puzzles affordable to a larger number of people with costs of ten to twenty five cents. Families looked forward to the “weeklies,” new puzzles put out each week. Companies started to give away free puzzles to promote their products.

Some companies, such as Par Puzzles, continued to make wooden puzzles, but the die-cut cardboard variety took over the market. 

I'm grateful to Grandma Sherry for introducing me to jigsaw puzzles, which has always been an activity that allows me to daydream and make up my own tales. And I'm forever thankful for all the evenings I spent together with my grandma when I was little and for all the subsequent evenings spent with my own family over puzzles.

Are you a fan of jigsaw puzzles? There are ways to put together puzzles. Obviously, finding the edges and the corners is the universal way to start. But then I'm more of a big picture, work by colors person, while my husband is a sort by shape puzzlers who has pieces laid out in trays and cookie sheets. He likes to spend hours sorting pieces, while I like to find a few recognizable images like animals or buildings and work out from those. Together we've ploughed through dozens of puzzles this year alone!

How about you? What's your jigsaw methods?

(Thanks to Anne D. Williams who wrote Origins of Jigsaw Puzzles, and the article used to write this post)

HISTORY OF JIGSAW PUZZLES

While working on my WIP, set in 1878, I wondered if my character could do jigsaw puzzles, so I googled the history of jigsaw puzzles and was surprised by what I found. I thought others might find it as interesting as I did.

Anand cartographer, John Spilsbury, of London, is believed to have produced the first jigsaw puzzle around 1760, using a marquetry saw. Early jigsaws, known as dissections, were produced by mounting maps on sheets of hardwood and cutting along national boundaries, creating a puzzle useful for the teaching of geography. Such "dissected maps", were used to teach the children of King George III and Queen Charlotte by royal governess Lady Charlotte Finch^.
engraver

The name "jigsaw" came to be associated with the puzzle around 1880 when fretsaws became the tool of choice for cutting the shapes. Since fretsaws are distinct from jigsaws, the name appears to be a misnomer. Cardboard jigsaw puzzles appeared during the late 1800s, but were slow to replace the wooden jigsaw due to the manufacturer's belief that cardboard puzzles would be perceived as being of low quality, and the fact that profit margins on wooden jigsaws were larger.

Jigsaw puzzles soared in popularity during the Great Depression, as they provided a cheap, long-lasting, recyclable form of entertainment. It was around this time that jigsaws evolved to become more complex and more appealing to adults. They were also given away in product promotions, and used in advertising, with customers completing an image of the product being promoted.


Sales of wooden jigsaw puzzles fell after World War II as improved wages led to price increases, while at the same time improvements in manufacturing processes made cardboard jigsaws more attractive^.
According to the Alzheimer Society of Canada, doing jigsaw puzzles is one of many activities that can help keep the brain active and may contribute to reducing the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

Modern construction

Most modern jigsaw puzzles are made out of cardboard since they are easier and cheaper to mass-produce than the original wooden models. An enlarged photograph or printed reproduction of a painting or other two-dimensional artwork is glued onto the cardboard before cutting. This board is then fed into a press. The press forces a set of hardened steel blades of the desired shape through the board until it is fully cut. This procedure is similar to making shaped cookies with a cookie cutter. The forces involved, however, are tremendously greater and a typical 1000-piece puzzle requires a press that can generate upwards of 700 tons of force to push the knives of the puzzle die through the board. A puzzle die is a flat board, often made from plywood, which has slots cut or burned in the same shape as the knives that are used. These knives are set into the slots and covered in a compressible material, typically foam rubber, which serves to eject the cut puzzle pieces.

Beginning in the 1930s, jigsaw puzzles were cut using large hydraulic presses which now cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cuts gave a very snug fit, but the cost limited jigsaw puzzle manufacture only to large corporations. Recent roller press design achieves the same effect, at a lower cost^..By the early 1960s, Tower Press was the world's largest maker of jigsaw puzzles, acquired by in 1969.

New technology has enabled laser-cutting of wooden or acrylic jigsaw puzzles. The advantage of cutting with a laser is that the puzzle can be custom cut into any size, any shape, with any size (or any number) of pieces. Many museums have laser cut acrylic puzzles made of some of their more important pieces of art so that children visiting the museum can see the original piece and then assemble a jigsaw puzzle of the image that is also in the same shape as the piece of art. Acrylic is used because the pieces are very durable, waterproof, and can withstand continued use without the image fading, or the pieces wearing out, or becoming frayed. Also, because the print and cut patterns are computer based, lost pieces can be manufactured without remaking the entire puzzle.