Jigsaw Puzzles in American History

Jigsaw puzzle american history

Jigsaw Puzzles in American History

In the spring of 2020, millions of people around the world went into lockdown sales of certain items started to surge. We saw a huge spike in sales of toilet paper and hand sanitizer and bleach and jigsaw puzzles. Now. This might not actually be that surprising jigsaw puzzles are a really good way to kill time or to connect with something that makes us feel cozy and happy or to get away on an imaginary vacation?

 

Pretty soon, people were showing off their puzzles on Instagram, even celebrities we’re showing off. This is a picture posted by the actress Sofia Vergara. This is her husband, the actor Joe Manganiello. He was doing a Downton Abbey jigsaw puzzle daytime TV. How is Ellen DeGeneres she invited viewers to come along.

 

She was doing a four-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. The Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, went so far as to say jigsaw puzzles are essential. This is a quote from him, saying I’ll, give you an example of an essential outing. Our kids are at home. Now, as our most kids and my wife, Jenny went out yesterday and bought them a whole bunch of jigsaw puzzles.

 

In other words, they are essential. Whatever the reason jigsaw puzzle companies started reporting record sales in spring 2020, Philip Franck, the CEO of Robbins Berger Games, North America said his company’s sales, went up three hundred and seventy percent compared to 2019. Another puzzle maker Springbok announced in May that its staff was working. Seven days a week 20 hours a day and that it had implemented processes to triple its usual shipping capacity to keep up with the demand, all of which got me thinking about the history of jigsaw, puzzles and like a lot of items. Jigsaw puzzles have a really fascinating history, jigsaw puzzles, as we know that date back to the 18th century, john Spilsbury, the guy you see here who was then a young map engraver living in London.

 

He is generally credited with popularizing the earliest puzzles in 1762. He started advertising sales of his dissected maps. He made these by mounting maps onto a sheet of mahogany wood and then cutting out the countries along the boundary lines. These were sold as learning aids for children and very quickly. They became wildly popular among the British super, wealthy people like Queen Charlotte, who you see here with some of her children, the woman who was the Royal governess to Queen Charlotte and King George, the third she claimed to have invented dissected maps.

 

Oh, she almost assuredly did not, but she did definitely have a collection of them that she used when she was teaching the Royal children. The idea of using wooden cutouts as a way to teach geography very quickly spread here is a similar dissected map of the world. Again, cut by hand along the outlines of the different countries, wooden map puzzles have remained staple educational tools ever since this map of the United States obviously dates from later, it’s actually cut in a sort of a zigzag pattern. Here’s a 1960s version which each with each state cut out there are still versions being made today, usually in plastic, but going back to the story in the 18th century. It did not take walk after the introduction of those early dissected maps for educators to realize that these kinds of puzzles can be really effective in teaching other topics to children, so throughout the 18th and the 19th century puzzles were used to teach topics like religion.

 

Here is a puzzle depicting the miracles performed by Jesus and history. Here’s a historical chronology showing sovereign’s over time now for most of the later 18th and the 19th century puzzles remained within these parameters. They were mostly educational, mostly marketed for children and mostly for the wealthy puzzle. Making was a very labor-intensive process. Each one was pretty much made by hand not to mention the expense of getting the good quality images and then the wood that’s going to be good quality and not splinter, even when they introduced cheaper white wood, starting in the 1830s puzzles, really remained strictly for the Wealthy and you can see it in things like Jane Austen’s, 1814 novel Mansfield Park Austen in this book indicates the impoverished status of her heroine Fanny Price in a scene where Fanny actually gets ridiculed by her cousins, because she’s unable to put together a dissected puzzle.

 

Map of Europe – and these were called by the way dissected puzzles, not jigsaw puzzles. The jig saw itself returned, referring to the particular type of saw it actually wasn’t, even invented until decades, after the invention of dissected maps, the tool itself, which was sort of the equivalent of today’s coping saw or front saw it, was this narrow blade and saw that Could cut curves and irregular patterns, so the question is: when did these puzzles go from being an educational tool for children to something marketed to adults as a form of home amusement? Well, that began around 1900, which is when retailers began, offering the very earliest puzzles for adults setting off a craze. It appears to have started in England and then spread to the United States. These were often made with colorful images.

 

They were using the latest lithography techniques. Sometimes, people who made these by hand would use images taken from magazines or from lenders. They did sometimes have finer value, but primarily they were popular just for the entertainment value. Now we would probably find the puzzles of those days maddeningly challenging many of them came without any kind of guide or photo to show you what the completed image was. Sometimes the pieces were actually cut directly on the color lines.

 

So, in an image like this one, there might be no adjacent pieces to show you where the gray of the elephant fits next to the blue sky or the white clouds behind it and to make things even worse. The pieces did not interlock, so in inadvertently, jostle or a sudden cough could just destroy a whole evenings work. Early 20th century jigsaw puzzles were still strictly for
the wealthy. A 500-piece puzzle might cost $ 5. That’s the equivalent of about a hundred and thirty dollars.

 

Today it was an expensive luxury for an ordinary worker whose monthly income might be something around $ 50, but that did not stop the upper classes from falling in love with jigsaw puzzles. If you went to a weekend party in Newport or some other wealthy country resort, you would often find puzzles that people would work on communally at the at the weekend or the party. A significant innovation came about with the introduction of interlocking pieces. These are pieces that make it much harder to spill or upset a puzzle. Mid process, Parker Brothers, pastime puzzles were so successful that, for a little while starting in 1909, the company stopped making board games and turned all of its factory production over to jigsaw.

 

Puzzles interlocking pieces were part of the improvements, as was advancements in technology which really brought down the price technology. Actually permitted. Die-Cut jigsaw puzzles to be made out of inexpensive cardboard by 19:32. In 1933, you had die-cutting machines that could stamp out. Production runs of millions of cardboard puzzles.

 

That is what set the scene for the great heyday of jigsaw puzzles the 1930s during the Great Depression. This is a 1930s puzzle from Germany showing you it was not just during not just in the United States. It was worldwide at the peak of this craze in 1933 jigsaw puzzles in the United States reached 10 million per week. Drugstores and libraries began offering puzzle rentals. If you couldn’t afford to buy one, you could rent one for anywhere from three to ten cents a day.

 

Now there are some reasons why jigsaw puzzles hit a chord at precisely this moment in history. Certainly, a lot of it is because they offered cheap entertainment at a time when outside entertainment, like movies and nightclubs, and even restaurant meals were prohibitively expensive for many people, home amusements were really soaring in popularity and, unlike previous economic crashes, during the Great Depression electric lighting Was much more ubiquitous which gave a real boon to the home, entertainment industry, budget-friendly indoor amusements, like bridge and Canasta and monopoly did really well in the 1930s. We see a similar phenomenon decades later during the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when board game sales went up 6 %, which was one of only a handful of economic indicators that went up instead of down that year for struggling Americans who were finding financial success harder to achieve even job satisfaction, even jobs, hard to come by puzzles also Offered a tiny sense of accomplishment, there’s that little thrill that you get when you snap a piece into place, or you finally figure out some. You locate some piece that you couldn’t find there was that little thrill of achievement.

 

Many corporations in the 1930s started using puzzles as promotional items. You could pick up a free puzzle when you bought something like in this case a 39 cent bottle of cosmic essence, milk of magnesia. You can get puzzles when you bought toothpaste or cigars. Here’s a tiny, little cardboard card puzzle that you could pick up with. I think this was cigar sales in the fall of 1932 newsstands started carrying a weekly jig of the week for 25 cents.

 

People would rush out to newsstands every Wednesday to pick up that week’s puzzle and try to solve it before their neighbors did that actually spawned other weekly series like picture puzzle weekly, there was a jiggers weekly and movie cut ups, obviously based on movie images. Actually, one indicator of just how wildly popular jigsaw puzzles were in the 30s is that
they started showing up in popular culture Laurel, and Hardy made a movie in 1933 called me and my pal, which was all about the jigsaw puzzle, craze the story. It’s actually Ally’s wedding day. Stan is the best man and he shows up with a wedding present of a jigsaw puzzle and this puzzle, so engrosses Stan and Ollie and their Butler and then a cab driver and then a cop and a delivery boy. That alley ends up missing his wedding and losing out on a financial fortune and at the end of it all it turns out.

 

There is a piece missing from the center of the puzzle. It’s really funny! You can find that movie on eBay, I’m sorry on YouTube, but 1930s puzzles didn’t just offer. Entertainment they offered employment. Many beautiful hand-cut, often wouldn’t jigsaw, puzzles from this era were made by unemployed carpenters and architects, and still the skilled craftsmen who realized they could, but pretty good quality saw for as little as $ 20 and start making their own perfectly unique.

 

Hand-Cut puzzles from their home workshops or garages by the way, wouldn’t jigsaw, puzzles if you’d never know if you’ve never done. One they’re incredibly satisfying in very different ways from cardboard puzzles, in fact, wouldn’t jigsaw puzzles, remain popular among diehard puzzle fans. This is an image from the website for power, puzzles, puzzles, began in 1932 and they specialized in very intricate, often custom-made wooden puzzles. They came with pieces and very irregular shapes. They often had unique edges.

 

Can you see the unique edge on that Saturday evening post puzzle, which made it even more challenging to finish there’s no easy corners dig. Some puzzles remain really popular throughout world war. 2. Here’s a pretty creative one! This is a puzzle, sort of a take on the geography puzzle with Europe made into a puzzle that allied countries are trying to put Europe back together again.

 

So after World War 2, the Fed kind of waned. Although jigsaw puzzle fans continue to enjoy improvements in both lithography and in die-cutting puzzles throughout the 20th century, kept getting ever and more beautiful and ever more challenging today, we’re actually seeing design innovations like 3d puzzles and single color puzzles. There are even puzzles made with translucent pieces that are really challenging to do. You can get custom-made puzzles in 1964, Springboks set off a minor craze when it marketed its jigsaw of Jackson, Pollock’s convergence, they marketed it as the world’s most difficult jigsaw. Puzzle.

Springbok actually was really one of the first popularizers of using great works of art, as the topics for jigsaw puzzles, which is very common today, still jigsaw puzzles, have always had their devoted fans and they’ve always seen little rises in popularity during economic downturns.

People who are enjoying puzzles today are enjoying them for a lot of the same reasons that people in the 1930s did jigsaw puzzles are a really inexpensive form of home entertainment. You still get that little thrill when you finally figure out some difficult piece and they still offer a way of socializing, as in the 1930s, most people today work jointly with at least one other person on a puzzle, and many people turn it into family activity. What’s different today is that today many people pursue jigsaw puzzles as an alternative to screen based entertainment, given that we spend so much of our lives on the screen. Whatever the case in a world, that’s full of uncertainty and global challenges, there’s something really satisfying about bringing order out of chaos piece by piece by snapping those individual puzzle pieces into place.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip through history. If you did take a minute and hit that subscribe button down there and I’ll, let you know when other videos are up thanks for joining me, see you next time!

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