2026-07-07 · history
The Birth of the Jigsaw Puzzle (1760s) — The Man Who Cut Up Maps, and a Verb Unchanged for 260 Years
In 1760s London, the map engraver John Spilsbury mounted printed maps on wood and cut them apart along national borders, selling them as 'Dissected Maps' — the commercial starting point of what would later be called the jigsaw puzzle. This essay revisits the context in which the format was born as a tool for teaching geography, the structural insight that where you cut is itself the design, and the lineage that runs from Depression-era die-cut cardboard to the 2021 VR title Puzzling Places — a format that survived 260 years without ever changing its verb.