A jigsaw puzzle is a picture, which is adhered to a thin and stiff background, like wood or cardboard, and then cut into multiple pieces. People from all age groups puzzle for fun, to relax, or to relieve stress. Families puzzle together to connect with each other and disconnect from a hyper-digital lifestyle. Puzzling, however, has been around since time immemorial. According to highbrowmagazine.com, Greek mathematician Archimedes puzzled around 250 B.C. to solve geometry problems. He cut a square into 14 pieces, and then examined how many different configurations could be made from those 14 pieces. This puzzle was recently solved by Bill Cutler, a mathematician from Cornell University, who showed the puzzle has 536 truly distinct solutions. Engraver and mapmaker John Spilsbury, however, is credited with inventing the first jigsaw puzzle in 1767. He drew a map on top of a piece of wood, then used a jigsaw to cut it into small pieces. The name clearly stuck. Kids today still learn geography by using jigsaw puzzles of maps. In fact, the “Geographical Puzzle” was the first wooden puzzle produced in 1891 by Ravensburger, the world’s leading puzzle-maker. Puzzles for adults became popular around 1900, and by 1908, they were a staple of the upper class because of how expensive they were. During the Great Depression, puzzles offered people a quiet, inexpensive escape from the troubled economy. In 1977, Ravensburger introduced the world’s largest puzzle for its time, with 5,000 pieces. Today, the world’s largest Disney puzzle, dubbed “Memorable Disney Moments,” clocks in at 40,320 pieces. It took the puzzle creators 650 hours to trace each of the 10 scenes by hand to be digitally rendered on the computer, and another 400 hours to bend the steel sheets with a hammer to create the cutting tool. 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 labour 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 major manufacturer, began making puzzles based on high quality reproductions of fine works of art. Hundreds of thousands of Americans struggled to assemble Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence” when Springbok introduced it in 1965. 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 them correct, and in the last 25 years, a number of small custom wooden puzzle manufactures have helped re-popularize wooden puzzles. This is according to madehow.com.
