Who Invented the Jigsaw Puzzle? A Short History of Puzzles

The woman who wrote the best-known version of Beauty and the Beast may also have invented the jigsaw puzzle. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont was a French writer who worked as a governess in London. In letters from 1759 and 1762, she mentions teaching children with wooden maps.

Most histories, though, give the credit to John Spilsbury, a London engraver who in the 1760s mounted maps on wood, cut out the countries and sold the pieces as “dissected maps.” Either way, the first jigsaw puzzle came out of a classroom. It was made to help children learn where the countries of the world are, and its pieces had no knobs at all. Each one was simply the shape of a country.

20 piecesSpilsbury’s Scotland, c. 1766

Spilsbury learned his trade as an apprentice to Thomas Jefferys, royal geographer to King George III. By 1763 he was advertising himself as an “engraver and map dissector in wood.” The Victoria and Albert Museum in London keeps one of his puzzles from around 1766: a map of Scotland mounted on thin mahogany and cut into 20 pieces. He made puzzles of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

Spilsbury didn’t live to see where his idea would go. He died in 1769, around the age of 30. His wife, Sarah, ran the business for a while and later married Harry Ashby, a former apprentice of Spilsbury’s, who kept selling the puzzles.

The new puzzles reached the royal nursery quickly. Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to George III’s children, kept a cabinet of dissected maps from the 1760s. A note inside says the maps were used to teach geography to the future King George IV and his brothers and sisters. Today the cabinet is on display at Kensington Palace.

A map is still one of the best first puzzles, because a child hunting for the right piece is also learning where things are. Wooden Puzzles for Kids: Maps, Space, named Puzzle of the Year by Creative Child magazine in 2024, has a world map in 38 big pieces and the 50 states and their capitals in 42, plus a third puzzle of outer space. Spilsbury used mahogany. These are birch. If you’re wondering how many pieces a preschooler can handle, here’s what actually builds focus in kids ages 4 to 6.

Puzzle of the Year 2024Wooden Puzzles for Kids: Maps, SpaceWorld map in 38 pieces · 50 states in 42 · ages 3+See the puzzle →

For more than a century, nobody called them jigsaw puzzles. Around 1880, puzzle makers took up the fretsaw, a thin saw that can follow a curved line, and the name “jigsaw puzzle” first appeared around 1906. Exactly which saw gave the puzzle its name is a little fuzzy, since historians describe the tools as jigsaws, fretsaws or scroll saws.

For their first century and more, puzzles were mostly for children. Puzzles for adults appeared around 1900, and by 1908 the United States was in the middle of a full-blown puzzle craze.

These were not easy puzzles. They came with no picture on the box, so you had no idea what you were building. The pieces were cut right along the color lines, so a red barn and a green field never shared a piece. And the pieces didn’t interlock, so one bump of the table could undo an evening’s work.

They weren’t cheap, either. A 500-piece wooden puzzle cost about $5, when the average worker earned about $50 a month. Puzzle sellers did their best business on Saturday mornings, when wealthy families bought puzzles to take to weekend house parties in Newport and other country retreats.

$5for 500 pieces in 1908, when workers earned about $50 a month

Game makers noticed. In 1908, Parker Brothers launched Pastime puzzles for adults, and in 1909 it stopped making games altogether and turned its whole factory over to puzzles.

No single person invented the shape, but the women who cut Pastime puzzles came close. They cut every piece by hand with scroll saws, were paid by the piece and cut around 1,400 pieces a day. The first Pastime puzzles, in 1908, didn’t interlock, just like everyone else’s. In 1909, the cutters started adding “whimsies,” pieces shaped like letters, animals and symbols. By 1911, Pastime had a style of its own, with pieces that locked together using curls, little heart-shaped “earlets” and other connectors. Each cutter had plenty of freedom, so the connectors changed from puzzle to puzzle.

1,400pieces a day, cut by hand at Pastime

Why lock the pieces together at all? Remember that bump of the table that could wipe out an evening’s work? Pieces that interlock hold each other in place, so you can pick up a finished section and move it without it falling apart.

Then machines took over the cutting. Beginning in the 1930s, puzzles were cut with large hydraulic presses that push a pattern of hardened steel blades through printed cardboard, and the precise cuts gave a snug fit. Today most puzzle pieces have four sides, with rounded tabs on some and matching hollows, called blanks, on the others. Edge pieces have one straight side, and corners have two.

Whimsies were the first surprise hidden in a puzzle, and that idea never went out of style. The 1,000-piece Roman Empire puzzle hides 163 objects to spot while you build, plus two secret envelopes with bonus tasks.

163 secretsRoman Empire1,000 pieces · 163 hidden objects · 2 secret envelopesSee the puzzle →

The second craze came in the worst of times. During the Great Depression, with unemployment climbing above 25 percent, a jigsaw puzzle was cheap entertainment that lasted for days. The new machine-cut cardboard puzzles reached adult buyers just in time.

25¢the “Jig of the Week,” every Wednesday

By mid-1932, companies were giving puzzles away as advertising with things like toothbrushes and flashlights. That fall, a new weekly showed up on newsstands: the “Jig of the Week,” a 25-cent puzzle that came out every Wednesday. Dozens of other weekly puzzles followed. People who couldn’t afford to buy one could rent one, because drugstores and lending libraries rented puzzles out for three to ten cents a day, depending on the size. At the peak, in early 1933, Americans were buying about 10 million puzzles a week.

10,000,000puzzles a week, early 1933

Some puzzles were made hard on purpose. In 1964, the puzzle company Springbok turned Jackson Pollock’s drip painting Convergence into a 340-piece jigsaw and called it “the most difficult puzzle in the world.” Every piece looks like a tangle of paint, which was the whole point. In 1965, hundreds of thousands of Americans bought one.

Then puzzles started hiding things. In 1987, the English illustrator Martin Handford published Where’s Wally?, a book of crowded scenes with one small man in a striped shirt hidden in each. His American publisher renamed him Waldo because an executive didn’t like the name Wally. By 2007, the books had sold more than 73 million copies, and searching had become a game of its own.

Search-and-find puzzles put the two ideas together, so the game starts when the last piece goes in. The Giant Search & Find Floor Puzzle: Urban City builds a 2-by-3-foot scene of city streets and outer space from 48 large pieces, with more than 40 hidden objects to find. For more on why searching a finished picture is good for kids, read what observational puzzles teach that regular puzzles don’t.

For kidsGiant Search & Find: Urban City48 large pieces · 2 × 3 ft · 40+ hidden objectsSee the puzzle →

Some puzzle makers went a step further and turned the finished picture into a crime scene. Mystery jigsaws come with a case to solve, and the clues are hidden in the image you build. The Detective Puzzle: New York has 1,000 pieces of a busy city full of landmarks, characters and hidden clues. Once it’s finished, 21 detective cases are waiting. In the Grand Museum puzzle, the crime is art theft: once the last piece is in, you hunt through the galleries for 301 hidden tasks and use the detective case folder to work out which paintings were stolen and swapped for fakes.

21 casesDetective Puzzle: New York1,000 pieces · Roaring TwentiesSee the puzzle →301 hidden tasksGrand Museum1,000 pieces · an art-theft caseSee the puzzle →

In the spring of 2020, with people stuck at home, puzzles sold out. Ravensburger’s U.S. sales were reportedly up 370 percent over the year before, and the puzzle maker Ceaco said that on one day that spring it sold more puzzles than in all of the previous December.

Puzzling is a competitive sport now, too. The first World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship was held in Valladolid, Spain, in 2019, with players from 39 countries. In 2025, it drew 1,154 competitors from 65 countries. The fastest individual time there for a 500-piece puzzle is 22 minutes and 2 seconds.

The pieces have changed, and so have the maps, but the idea is the same as it was in a London print shop in the 1760s. Take a picture of the world apart, and someone will want to put it back together. If your class enjoyed this one, the history of board games goes back even further, about 5,000 years. And for ways to use puzzles in lessons, see integrating puzzles into the classroom.