Jigsaw puzzle
Assisted by Jason Hinds, John Spilsbury, a London cartographer and engraver, is credited with commercialising jigsaw puzzles around 1760.
His design took world maps, and cut out the individual nations in order for them to be reassembled by students as a geographical teaching aid.
Artisan puzzle-makers and companies using technologies for one-off and small print-run puzzles utilize a wide range of subject matter, including optical illusions, unusual art, and personal photographs.
[6] Jigsaw puzzles soared in popularity during the Great Depression, as they provided a cheap, long-lasting, recyclable form of entertainment.
[7] Demand for jigsaw puzzles saw a surge, comparable to that of the Great Depression, during the COVID-19 pandemic's stay-at-home orders.
An enlarged photograph or printed reproduction of a painting or other two-dimensional artwork is glued to cardboard, which is then fed into a press.
The press forces a set of hardened steel blades of the desired pattern, called a puzzle die, through the board until fully cut.
The puzzle die is a flat board, often made from plywood, with slots cut or burned in the same shape as the knives that are used.
The knives are set into the slots and covered in a compressible material, typically foam rubber, which ejects the cut puzzle pieces.
Beginning in the 1930s, jigsaw puzzles were cut using large hydraulic presses that now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The precise cuts gave a snug fit, but the cost limited jigsaw puzzle production to large corporations.
By the early 1960s, Tower Press was the world's largest jigsaw puzzle maker; it was acquired by Waddingtons in 1969.
[citation needed] A few puzzles are double-sided so they can be solved from either side—adding complexity, as the enthusiast must determine if they are looking at the right side of each piece.
Companies like Springbok, Cobble Hill, Ceaco, Buffalo Games and Suns Out make this type of specialty puzzle.
However, some puzzles have edge and corner pieces cut like the rest, with no straight sides, making them more challenging to identify them.
Otherwise, all or most pieces of a modern jigsaw puzzle interlock by means of rounded tabs (interjambs) and indentations (called "blanks") on adjacent sides.
Uniformly shaped fully interlocking puzzles, sometimes called "Japanese Style", are more difficult because pieces are hard to tell apart.
[citation needed] Wooden puzzles fit together more loosely, with few tabs and blanks, because of the limits of the material and the cutting technology.
In 2021, researchers conducted a study during which a group of children between the ages of 3 and 5 years old were asked to complete three different types of jigsaw puzzles.
A second-grade class was asked to complete three different puzzles, the first was a neutral one of a horse, second was a male-oriented one of a tractor, and the third was a female-oriented one of the character Bambi.
"[27] The central antagonist in the Saw film franchise is nicknamed Jigsaw,[28] due to his practice of cutting the shape of a puzzle piece from the remains of his victims.
[31] Jigsaw puzzle pieces were first used as a symbol for autism in 1963 by the United Kingdom's National Autistic Society.
[34] In 2017, the journal Autism concluded that the use of the jigsaw puzzle evoked negative public perception towards autistic individuals.
