The First Jigsaw Puzzle Was a Map for Teaching Geography

Somewhere in many homes there is a box with a picture on the lid and a thousand small pieces inside: a lighthouse, a harbour, a basket of kittens. Doing a jigsaw is such an ordinary, cosy pastime that it is easy to assume it has always existed. It has not. It started in the 1760s, in London, as a school lesson.

John Spilsbury was a young engraver and mapmaker. He had trained as an apprentice to Thomas Jefferys, who held the title of Royal Geographer to King George III, so he knew how to make a good, accurate map. By 1763 he was advertising himself as an engraver and map dissector in wood. It was an unusual job description, and he was almost certainly the first person to sell what we would now call jigsaw puzzles.

His idea was simple and clever. He took a printed map, fixed it to a thin board of mahogany, and cut it into pieces along the borders, so that each country became its own piece. A child could tip the pieces out and then rebuild the map, putting each kingdom back in its proper place. His puzzles were not called jigsaws. People called them dissected maps.

The oldest one known to survive is from 1766 and is called Europe Divided into its Kingdoms. A copy is kept at The Strong National Museum of Play in New York, and it shows how carefully it was made. The paper on the front and back was lined up with the grain of the wood, so that paper and board would swell and shrink together in damp or dry weather instead of warping.

Spilsbury saw that he had a good business on his hands. He made dissected maps on eight themes: the World, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. They were handmade and expensive, bought by well-off families to help their children with their lessons. Very few survive today, and those that do are prized by museums. Spilsbury himself died young, in 1769, but his idea carried on without him.

Why did it work so well as a lesson? Because a map is exactly the kind of thing that is easier to learn with your hands than with your eyes. Staring at a map, it is hard to remember which country sits next to which. Fitting pieces together forces you to notice. The shape of each coastline and border becomes the thing that tells you where it goes, and after putting Europe together a few times, a child would know it without trying.

Over the following century, puzzle makers moved on from maps to pictures of all kinds, and the pieces stopped following borders and began to lock together with little knobs and holes. But the pleasure is the same one Spilsbury sold: a picture broken into parts, and the quiet satisfaction of making it whole again.