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Cutting a Fine Figure: The Art of the Jigsaw Puzzle, a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, surveyed the history of the jigsaw puzzle beginning with the first known “dissected map” from the 1760s and ending with a three-dimensional magnetic globe puzzle from 1995.

The map puzzle, a staple of childhood play, exemplifies the initial educational mission of jigsaw puzzles. Virtually every American child has tried at one time or another to assemble the puzzle map of the United States. It is relatively easy to put Florida and Texas and California into place on the edges, but making sense out of the jumble of states in the middle involves some real concentration and knowledge of the country’s geography. The idea of combining learning with play achieved general acceptance after the publication of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. The development of the jigsaw puzzle “to facilitate the teaching of geography” was a natural outgrowth of those ideas in the eighteenth century.

John Spilsbury, a London mapmaker and the best documented of the early puzzle makers, is recognized by most scholars as having invented the jigsaw puzzle around 1762. Competing claims for possible earlier inventors (Coven & Mortier of Amsterdam around 1740 and Dumas of France around 1760) are still being debated, but there is no doubt the first jigsaw puzzles were made from engraved maps pasted onto wood and cut into pieces along political boundaries.

Spilsbury’s trade card advertised many dissected maps, including the world, five different continents, England, Scotland, Ireland, and more than a dozen other individual countries. His puzzles were so successful that competition sprang up quickly. William Darton, a prominent London publisher of children’s books, adapted the jigsaw to teaching history by issuing the “Engravings for Teaching the Elements of English History and Chronology” in 1787. Each piece depicted a king or queen with a brief description of his or her reign. The solution required putting the monarchs in their proper order.

Religious and moral teachings in puzzle form soon followed. The books of the Bible, lives of the saints, and stories like Pilgrim’s Progress all made their way onto jigsaw puzzles by the end of the eighteenth century. These were especially suitable for use on Sundays, when many children were not allowed to engage in active or secular play. Other puzzle lessons included the alphabet, arithmetic, and science.

Only the educated upper classes purchased the early puzzles, which cost more than a laborer’s weekly wage. The carefully engraved and hand-colored prints were mounted on thin mahogany or cedar boards, then cut into pieces with a fret saw. The dovetailed boxes with sliding lids were also made of relatively expensive hardwoods.

Affluent citizens of the newly established United States undoubtedly bought some of the early puzzles. The Smithsonian Institution’s collection includes “Riley’s Biographical & Chronological Dissected Tablets of English History Composed for the Amusement of her Royal Highness, the Princess Amelia,” which was imported to Anne Arondel County, Maryland, around 1800.

Puzzles for amusement, with no explicit didactic purpose, appeared as early as 1785 in England. Publisher John Wallis was the first of many who adapted William Cowper’s popular poem “John Gilpin” to the jigsaw puzzle. The lighter subjects, though relatively rare in the eighteenth century, grew steadily in importance and today represent the majority of children’s puzzles. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales as well as stories like Robinson Crusoe intrigued children more than the overtly educational subjects. The nineteenth century also brought puzzles that celebrated memorable events, such as the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838, the great fire at the Tower of London in 1841, and the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851.

The shift to more appealing topics coincided with reduced production costs, making puzzles more accessible to a broader market. Advances in printing during the nineteenth century made puzzles less expensive: Engravings and woodcuts gave way to lithographs that were printed in black and white, then hand-painted with watercolors. Publishers began to employ young children to color the prints with stencils; their wages were very low, and the work was often crude. Woodworking also progressed, with power scroll saws replacing the more laborious cutting with handheld fret saws. The substitution of cheap softwoods for mahogany during the nineteenth century helped reduce the cost of manufacturing puzzles and their boxes still further.

Developments in European puzzle production paralleled those in Britain with a few exceptions. One major difference was in the packaging. British puzzles came jumbled in the box, which was too small to hold the puzzle assembled. An uncut picture was included in the box to serve as a guide to assembly. In contrast, European puzzles were usually sold assembled, often in sets of three or more. They lay flat in a wide box, with one guide picture pasted to the lid of the box. Another difference was the cutting style. British puzzles had interlocking pieces only on the edges of the picture, in contrast with European puzzles that had interlocking pieces throughout the picture.

The United States depended on England and Europe as sources for puzzles for several decades, since the young republic lagged behind the continent in manufacturing. The earliest American producer appears to be Thomas T. Ash of Philadelphia, who issued a “Dissected Map of Palestine” in the mid-1830s. (F.&R. Lockwood of New York was selling puzzles a decade earlier, but it has not yet been established whether Lockwood manufactured the puzzles or just imported them.)

By mid-century a number of American companies were making puzzles, with dissected maps predominating. Samuel McCleary and John Pierce of New York patented a novel method for die-cutting map puzzles in 1849. (Their cumbersome technique, requiting a separate die for each piece, was not very successful, however, and soon disappeared.) They marketed their “Geographical Analysis of the State of New York” as an educational game. The box was covered with testimonials from Governor Hamilton Fish and prominent educators of the day, such as the president of Union College and Emma Willard, founder of the Troy (New York) Female Academy. Other puzzle manufacturers included the important mapmaking firms of S. Augustus Mitchell in Philadelphia and J.H. Colton in New York.

Diversification from map to picture puzzles started in the United States at this time. W.&S.B. Ives, the well-known Salem, Massachusetts, game publisher, began to produce picture puzzles in the early 1850s. In Philadelphia several firms were engaged in the puzzle business in the 1850s and 1860s, including Thomas S. Wagner, Jacob Shaffer, M.H. Traubel, and Davis, Porter, & Co. These four may well have had some business connections since the same pictures show up on more than one company’s puzzles. Charles Magnus of New York and Mark Salom of Boston were two other puzzle makers active in the 1860s. Among their wares were puzzles depicting scenes from the Civil War. Like the map puzzles, these early picture puzzles were hand-colored.

Burgeoning transportation networks after the Civil War enabled puzzle makers to distribute their wares far more widely than in earlier decades. The puzzle business was soon transformed by the rise of two giants of children’s publishing, McLoughlin Brothers of New York and Milton Bradley of Springfield, Massachusetts. By 1870 both companies were competing very successfully with imports from Europe, turning out puzzles and games by the thousands. Together with Parker Brothers, founded in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1883, Bradley and McLoughlin came to dominate the domestic production of children’s puzzles and games over the ensuing decades.

Smaller companies also emerged as puzzle producers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Selchow & Righter of New York and Peter G. Thomson of Cincinnati were particularly prolific producers of simple strip puzzles for young children, such as “Sliced Birds” and “Sliced Nations.” Other game companies like E.I. Horsman and J.H. Singer, both of New York, and Rufus Bliss of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, added puzzles to their lines.

All these companies used new technology that contributed to large-scale manufacturing, notably the chromolithography that had supplanted hand-coloring for children’s puzzles by about 1875. McLoughlin Brothers in particular made the most of the new techniques. The allure of the rich, brilliant lithography of their puzzles is as strong for today’s collectors as it was for yesterday’s children. The subject matter also appealed, glorifying the industrial spirit of the United States as it entered its second century. Puzzles showing locomotives, steamships, the Brooklyn Bridge, and airships took their place alongside maps and more traditional scenes of animals and children’s stories.

McLoughlin opened a modem color printing factory in Brooklyn in 1870, and by the 1890s employed seventy-five artists to illustrate books, puzzles, games, and other paper toys. Many illustrations did double or triple duty, thus saving on the cost of artwork. The color plates for many a McLoughlin children’s book also appeared both on jigsaw puzzles and on six-sided cube puzzles (blocks with pictures on each side that could form six different scenes from one book).

Although the earliest McLoughlin puzzles were made of wood, by the 1880s McLoughlin and other firms had shifted to less expensive cardboard. They also saved costs by cutting several puzzles at once; a stack was nailed together at the comers and cut on a band saw. McLoughlin was one of the last companies to switch from wood to cardboard boxes, although for several decades it continued to use wood to strengthen the sides of the boxes.

The advertising puzzle also made its first appearance at this time. The “Silent Teacher” puzzles, produced from the late 1870s to the early part of the twentieth century, were standard map puzzles on one side. But the Rev. E.J. Clemens, the entrepreneur who ran the McLoughlin company in the 1880s, added a new dimension by pasting advertising posters on the reverse. The puzzles thus educated while promoting products like Sherwin Williams paints and White sewing machines.

A few years later businesses began issuing their own premium puzzles. The C.I. Hood Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, was one of the most prolific of these firms. Its “Rainy Day Puzzle,” first published in 1891, went through several editions over many years and successfully promoted Hood’s Sarsaparilla as a panacea for all health problems.

The puzzle industry changed dramatically during the twentieth century. World War I ended the United States’ dependence on imports from Germany, which even then dominated the American toy industry. Diecutting replaced cutting with saws as the standard method for producing puzzles. And, of course, licensed characters by Disney and others took over the toy industry, including puzzles. It is interesting to note that the licensing trend originated in the late 1890s. R.E Outcault’s Yellow Kid appeared on a McLoughlin puzzle in 1896, shortly after his debut as the first comic strip.

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