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.

(далее…)


Tags: , —