jigsaw puzzle

A puzzle consisting of a mass of irregularly shaped pieces of cardboard, plastic, or wood that form a picture when fitted together. Also called picture puzzle.

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Background

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. The pieces are assembled by the user to reform the original picture. Although the origin of the word puzzle is unknown, it is known that the first jigsaw puzzles were made in the 1760s by European cartographer John Spilbury. In 1762, Spilbury hit upon the idea of gluing maps onto thin mahogany and cedar panels and cutting them up with a fine marquetry saw. He marketed the results of efforts and they became quite popular. Before his death in 1749, Spilbury sold hundreds of puzzles. In the mid-1780s, the next generation of puzzle makers expanded their craft to reach consumers who were not interested in maps. They made puzzles from broadsheets, tabloid size magazines printed with humorous poems or stories. However, broadsheet puzzles were not profitable because their subject material quickly became outdated and new ones had to be printed. Nonetheless, broadsheet puzzles proved that there was a market for puzzles other than maps. Puzzle makers experimented with new images including the alphabet and multiplication tables, Biblical passages, and pictures of historical events and people.

Puzzle popularity increased in England during the following decades, and there is evidence that puzzles arrived in the New World sometime before 1800. Around the same time, the process of color lithography was developed which allowed better quality pictures to be produced more efficiently. This improved the quality and variety of puzzles; some clever manufacturers even made double puzzles with a different scene on each side. In the 1860s, puzzle sales continued to boom as two major companies flooded the market with a variety of puzzle types. These key players were Milton Bradley and the McLoughin Brothers. The 1890s saw the development of die cutting methods, which eliminated the need to cut puzzle pieces by hand. This process allowed puzzles to be mass produced and made them much cheaper. The next few years brought two more significant innovations. First, Parker Brothers, another famous game manufacturer, introduced custom shaped figure pieces into its Pastime brand puzzles. These figure pieces where shaped like recognizable objects, such as dogs or birds. The second innovation was the development of irregular, interlocking pieces. The interlocking format became the standard design because they held the puzzle together and reduced chances that the puzzle would be disturbed during assembly.

Although puzzle sales flagged somewhat in the early 1900s, by the late 1920s and the onset of the Great Depression, there was resurgence in popularity. In 1933, sales peaked at an astounding 10 million per week. With lack of steady employment, people turned to puzzles and other forms of home entertainment instead of outside entertainment like restaurants and nightclubs. Many unemployed architects, carpenters, and other craftsmen made their own jigsaw puzzles for sale or rent. As the puzzle craze of the 1930s continued, drugstores and circulating libraries offered puzzles for rent; they charged 3-10 cents per day depending on the size of the puzzle. For a brief time in 1932, retail stores offered free puzzles with the purchase of toothbrushes, flashlights, and hundreds of other products.

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 labor 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.

Raw Materials

Graphics/artwork

Virtually any artwork can be used for puzzle making but most major manufactures use lithographic prints because they are high quality, inexpensive, and easily mass produced. Many of the pictures used in puzzles are based on famous photographs or paintings, but some custom puzzle makers let the customer supply their own photographs or pictures.

Backing material

Mass market puzzle manufacturers use card-board (also known as chipboard) as a backing material because it is cheap and easy to cut. Higher quality custom-made puzzles still use wood, usually in 5-ply birch. In both cases, adhesive is used to bond the artwork to the backing material.

Cutting equipment

The original wood puzzles were cut with jigsaws, also known as scroll saws, and customized wooden puzzles are still made that way today. These saws have a vertical blade that goes up and down through a fixed horizontal table. The puzzle sheet is guided through the blade by hand to cut the desired pieces. The blades used today are very fine, about 0.016 in (0.041 cm) thick. This allows intricate cuts to be made, which take out very little wood, so the puzzles fit together well. It also leaves a very smooth edge surface, with only a minimum of chipping and fuzzing on the back, which can be sanded off. The majority of puzzles today, however, are the cardboard-backed types and these are mass-produced with die cutting equipment.

Design

Puzzle design varies depending on the type of artwork and the style of puzzle desired. The design of the cuts is hand drawn by artists and, consequently, no two puzzles are alike. Quality puzzles are designed to artfully combine the picture with the design of the cut pieces to enhance the enjoyment of the user. Puzzle artists are cautious in their design not to cut through major features of the artwork such as a person's face. The artists control the puzzle's skill level by varying the number of pieces and the complexity of the cuts. Typically, the more pieces the puzzle is cut into, the more difficult it is to assemble. Some puzzle makers make their puzzles even harder to assemble by avoiding straight-edged border pieces. The lack of a straight border makes the edge pieces harder to locate.

The Manufacturing
Process

Nearly 2,000 hours are required to produce a puzzle from start to finish. This process typically stretches over about 12 months. The key steps include printing and laminating the artwork, cutting the pieces, and packaging the finished puzzle.

Printing

• The first step is to select the artwork and print it in a suitable format. The most common process used to print artwork for puzzles is lithography. Lithography uses a plate, which is specially treated to absorb either water or oil. The portion of the plate, which is not to be printed, is wetted with water while the printable portions are coated with grease, which attracts the oil-based ink. When ink is applied to the plate, it sticks only to the grease coated image. As the plate is brought into contact with paper, the image is transferred. Many puzzle pictures may be prepared on the same lithography sheet to save paper and minimize press time. After printing, the litho sheets are laminated onto 0.087 in (0.22 cm) thick chipboard. They are allowed to dry for several days before they are sent to die cut press.

Cutting

• Puzzle pieces today are mass-produced in a process known as die cutting. A die cutting press uses a sharp, flat metal ribbon to stamp out the individual pieces. The artist's drawings of the cuts are sent to rule-bend experts who bend razor sharp steel rules into the shape of the puzzle pieces. For a 500-piece puzzle of average complexity, it may take 400 hours to make a die. Three or four such dies maybe made for puzzles of the same size and shape. The metal rules are then pounded into a wood mounted die. One side of this metal ribbon is fixed in a wooden block. Whep this block is pressed with sufficient force onto the softer cardboard backing, the backing surface is cut into the desired shape. When the laminated artwork is sent through the die cut press, the die is forced down under high pressure. When the die is extracted, the artwork and underlying cardboard are left with cuts in the shape of die.

Packaging

• After leaving the die press, the sheets go through a breaker, which separates the puzzle pieces and drops them into their package, typically a cardboard box. Today, it is standard for the box to feature a picture of the completed puzzle as a guide. Manufacturers began offering this feature in the mid-1930s. These boxes then go through final packaging, shrink wrapping, etc. Finally, they are shipped to retail stores.

The Future

While the artwork used in puzzles is constantly changing to keep pace with current consumer tastes, there have been few manufacturing innovations in recent years. Nonetheless, there are areas from which future developments are likely to come. As noted above, quality customized wooden puzzles are gaining in popularity. One company, i.C. Ayer & Co. has developed novel computer-controlled water jets to automate the cutting of wooden puzzles. One new type of puzzle takes two-dimensional jigsaw puzzles and transforms them into three-dimensional puzzles. These puzzles feature die cut pieces which, when assembled, form a three dimensional sculpture. This approach is so novel it has been granted a United States patent (U.S. Patent # 5251900). Lastly, jigsaw puzzles of the future may be electronic without either cardboard or wood. These virtual puzzles are constructed by computer, and exist only on monitor screens. Special software allows puzzle aficionados to continue to enjoy the challenge of reassembling the scrambled pictures without the need for a physical construct.

Where to Learn More

Books

De Cristofor, R.J. The Jigsaw/Scroll Saw Book. Blue Ridge, PA: Tab Books, 1990.

Sabin, Francene and Louis. The One the Only, the Original Jigsaw Puzzle Book. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1977.

Williams, Anne D. Jigsaw Puzzles An Illustrated History and Price Guide. Radnor, PA: Wallace-Homestead Book Company, 1990.

[Article by: Randy Schueller]

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a puzzle that requires you to reassemble a picture that has been mounted on a stiff base and cut into interlocking pieces

It has been suggested that puzzle globe be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

For the Rolling Stones song, see "Jigsaw Puzzle"

A jigsaw puzzle is a tiling puzzle that requires the assembly of numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tessellating pieces. Each piece has a small part of a picture on it; when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture.

Jigsaw puzzles were originally created by painting a picture on a flat, rectangular piece of wood, and then cutting that picture into small pieces with a jigsaw, hence the name. John Spilsbury, a London mapmaker and engraver, is credited with commercialising jigsaw puzzles around 1760^[1].

Most modern jigsaw puzzles are made out of cardboard, since they are easier and cheaper to mass produce. An enlarged photograph or printed reproduction of a painting or other two-dimensional artwork is glued onto the cardboard before cutting. This board is then fed into a press. The press forces a set of hardened steel blades of the desired shape through the board until it is fully cut. This procedure is similar to making shaped cookies with a cookie cutter. The forces involved, however, are tremendously greater and a typical 1000-piece puzzle will require a press which can generate upwards of 700 tons of force to push the knives of the puzzle die through the board. A puzzle die comprises a flat board, often made from plywood, which has slots cut or burned in the same shape as the knives that will be used. These knives are set into the slots and covered in a compressible material, typically foam rubber, the function of which is the ejection of the cut puzzle pieces.

Typical images found on jigsaw puzzles include scenes from nature, buildings, and repetitive designs. Castles and mountains are two traditional subjects. However, any kind of picture can be used to make a jigsaw puzzle; some companies offer to turn personal photographs into puzzles. Completed puzzles can also be attached to a backing with adhesive to be used as artwork.

During recent years a range of jigsaw puzzle accessories including boards, cases, frames and roll-up mats has become available that are designed to assist jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts.

Variations

A puzzle without a picture: Ravensburger Krypt

Jigsaw puzzles typically come in 300-piece, 500-piece, 750-piece, and 1,000-piece sizes, however the largest commercial puzzle has 24,000 pieces and spans 428 cm by 157 cm.^[2] The most common layout for a thousand-piece puzzle is 38 pieces by 27 pieces, for a total count of 1,026 pieces. The majority of 500-piece puzzles are 27 pieces by 19 pieces. Children's jigsaw puzzles come in a great variety of sizes, rated by the number of pieces. A few puzzles are made double-sided, so that they can be solved from either side, which adds a level of complexity, because one cannot be certain that one is viewing the correct sides of the pieces and the guy who made it is a wena.

There are also three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Many of these are made of wood or styrofoam and require the puzzle to be solved in a certain order; some pieces will not fit in if others are already in place. Also common are puzzle boxes: simple three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles with a small drawer or box in the center for storage.

Wikipedia logo, which is a globe puzzle

Another type of jigsaw puzzle, a kind of cross between 2-D and 3-D puzzles, is a globe puzzle. Like a 2-D puzzle, a globe puzzle is made of cardboard and forms a single layer. Like a 3-D puzzle, the final form is a three-dimensional shape. Most globe puzzles have designs representing spherical shapes such as the Earth, the Moon, and historical globes of the Earth. The Wikipedia logo is an example of a globe puzzle.

There are also computer versions of jigsaw puzzles, which have the advantages of requiring zero clean up as well as no risk of losing any pieces.

Puzzle pieces

Many puzzles are termed "fully interlocking". This means that adjacent pieces are connecting such that if you move one piece horizontally you move all, preserving the connection. Sometimes the connection is tight enough to pick up a solved part holding one piece.

Some fully interlocking puzzles have pieces all of a similar shape, with rounded tabs out on opposite ends, with corresponding blanks cut into the intervening sides to receive the tabs of adjacent pieces. Other fully interlocking puzzles may have tabs and blanks variously arranged on each piece, but they usually have four sides, and the numbers of tabs and blanks thus add up to four. The uniform-shaped fully interlocking puzzles are the most difficult, because the differences in shapes between pieces can be very subtle.

A "whimsy"^[3] piece in a wooden jigsaw puzzle

Some puzzles also have pieces with noninterlocking sides that are usually slightly curved in complex curves. These are actually the easiest puzzles to solve, since fewer other pieces are potential candidates for mating.

Most jigsaw puzzles are square, rectangular, or round, and have edge pieces that have one side that is either straight or smoothly curved to create this shape, plus four corner pieces if the puzzle is square or rectangular. Some jigsaw puzzles have edge pieces that are cut just like all the rest of the interlocking pieces, with no smooth edge, to make them more challenging. Other puzzles are designed so the shape of the whole puzzle forms a figure, such as an animal. The edge pieces may vary more in these cases.

The method of cutting pieces varies from puzzle line to puzzle line. Two puzzles of the same size and series from the same manufacturer usually have exactly the same cut, since the cutting dies are complex and expensive to make and so are used repeatedly from puzzle to puzzle. This enables disparate puzzles to be combined in odd ways. Larger puzzles are commonly cut into two or more sections.

More recently, technology such as computer controlled laser and water-jet cutting machines have been used to give a much wider range of interlocking designs in wood and other materials. These methods however have the undesirable effect of removing a small amount of material giving a loose fit with the adjoining pieces.

Beginning in the 1930's jigsaw puzzles were cut using large hydraulic presses which now cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cuts gave a very snug fit, however the cost limited jigsaw puzzle manufacture only to large corporations. Recent roller press design achieve the same effect, at a lower cost.

Strategies

For those new to puzzles it is recommended that you choose one consisting of multiple areas with contrasting designs and colors. This enables the narrowing down of potential portions of the puzzle where a particular piece will fit. Also, you should start by separating the edges from the inside pieces. Then connect the outside edges, and work inward.

See also

• Parker Brothers
• Lost in Translation (poem)
• Tenyo

References

1. ^ History of Jigsaw Puzzles by Daniel McAdam
2. ^ World's largest puzzle
3. ^ 'Whimsies' & The History of The Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Jigsaw puzzle

• The First Jigsaw Ever Sold, from the British Library website
• American Jigsaw Puzzle Society

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)