History of jigsaw puzzles: Piecing together the timeline
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The jigsaw puzzle market was valued at around $14 billion in 2023, and the format has even been retooled for digital gamification purposes.
But how did we get here? Where did the jigsaw puzzle come from? And why are they such a ubiquitous pastime?
In this article, we’re going to put the timeline back together, and trace the jigsaw from its first iteration as blocks of wood, through its so-called “golden age,” to online gamified jigsaw puzzles becoming an effective marketing and communications tool.
The birth of jigsaw puzzles in the 18th century
In the 1760s, British cartographer John Spilsbury mounted one of his maps onto wood, cut around the countries, and gave it to the local school as an educational aid.
Though he gave it the catchy title of a “dissected map,” he had in fact just invented the jigsaw.
He probably couldn’t have comprehended the billion-dollar industry it would become, nor the custom digital puzzles business would make for marketing, but Spilsbury was wise to the potential of his innovation, and created eight dissected maps, covering: the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, England and Wales, and Ireland and Scotland.
In addition to being a sought after educational tool, it became a trendy pastime for the wealthy, and was such an enduring earner that his widow continued to sell them after his death with her second husband, Harry Ashby – Spilsbury’s former apprentice.
Fun fact: Jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts are referred to as dissectologists, in reference to Spilsbury’s original name for his invention.
Evolution of jigsaw puzzles in the 1800s
In the mid-1800s, jigsaws grew in popularity among adults, and the treadle jig saw (a type of saw, for clarity) was invented – allowing “dissection makers,” or jigsaw puzzle makers to cut more intricate shapes, and much faster too.
The combination of lithographic printing and the invention of plywood also contributed to them becoming easier to make and having higher quality finishes.
The name “jigsaw” became associated with jigsaw puzzles in the late 1800s, but the term “jigsaw puzzle” has only been traced back to 1906.
The jigsaw puzzle in the 20th century and its “golden age”
Technically, jigsaw puzzles were being used in marketing as early as the 1920s – particularly by companies linked to travel, such as train builders, creating jigsaw puzzles of their steam engines and their destinations to market their brands and their locations. (It’s not impossible that you’ve even put some of these together at your grandparents’ house, or come across some in a charity shop.)
It was in the 1930s during the Great Depression that jigsaw puzzle popularity got the wind in its sails, with manufacturers producing millions of puzzles a week, and people renting them out.
They gave people a cheap, semi-creative but fully satisfying way to pass time when they had little income, and think about something other than the hardship they were facing. (Incidentally, this is a recurring theme in history of games being used to distract populations from misery and boredom, with reports of the Lydians using games to boost morale during a great famine some 2,000 years ago.)
Key dates: In the 1930s, Victory Puzzles started producing puzzles with the finished image on the box. Prior to this, dissectologists were working blind. With the Drimify gamification platform’s puzzle builder, when creating online marketing games and employee experience journeys (EX), you can replicate this convention of physical puzzles by enabling a preview of an image.
From wood to cardboard: The second seismic shift in puzzle production
If the invention of the treadle jig saw was the first cosmic leap in advancing puzzle production, the shift from wooden jigsaws to cardboard jigsaws was the second.
It was a leap of necessity, as plywood supplies were affected by WWII, so it wasn’t necessarily a boost in quality or user experience, but it did make production more efficient and the puzzles a lot cheaper to buy, massively increasing the market.
Bigger, biggerer, biggest: The puzzle industry’s obsession with size
At some point it became a trend for the major puzzle manufacturers to design and brag about having the biggest puzzle, with the number of pieces becoming a major marketing point.
In the same way that recreational runners work their way up through a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon, and a full marathon, or a triathlete goes through sprint, Olympic, 70.3, and full Ironman distances, dissectologists can go from jigsaw puzzles with piece counts in the hundreds, to the 60,000-piece “What a Wonderful World” – the largest commercially available jigsaw puzzle in history, manufactured by Dowdle. (But imagine getting near the end and realising you’re a piece or two short?)
The difference between puzzling for fun and gamification: When it comes to creating your own digital jigsaw puzzle for tackling business needs, it’s not about complexity, it’s about striking the right balance between being challenging enough to be engaging, but achievable enough for most people to complete the user journey and absorb your messaging.
On Drimify’s jigsaw puzzle template, you can set the size of your puzzle from as simple as four pieces, to as complex as 64.
Remember, you’re not in the jigsaw puzzle business, you’re using jigsaws as a tool to support YOUR business. The goal comes first.
Did you know? Most 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles are actually 1,014 or 1,026 pieces. This is due to the grid-based system used to design modern physical jigsaw puzzles, against which images are aligned. Visual appeal is a higher priority than precise puzzle-piece counts.
Digital transformation: Jigsaw puzzles in the 21st century
In the early 2000s, jigsaw puzzles found their way online, and with the development of mobile and internet technology, they became more and more widely available.
But an online puzzle for the sake of pure puzzling, while practical for the fact that pieces can never go missing, are somewhat limited by screen-size. Imagine taking a crack at “What a Wonderful World” on your phone? Or even a 1,000-piece puzzle?
This would take the joy out of puzzling entirely, and make for an incredibly frustrating user experience.
However…
Integration with gamification and marketing platforms
The mechanics of the jigsaw are still compelling, even on a smaller scale (say, up to 25 pieces on a mobile), so gamification platforms like Drimify built jigsaw puzzle templates that could be customised for marketing and other business uses.
For context, the term “gamification” was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, and this boils down to applying game mechanics to influence behaviours and encourage desired actions in target users.
Whether for marketing, HR, or internal communications, most business interactions involve trying to communicate an idea or encourage an action. Applying game mechanics taps into people’s competitiveness and appetite for challenges and discovery, maximising their focus and engagement in your messaging.
Jigsaw puzzles, in condensed online form, perfectly suit this bill. They’re also highly visual, essentially acting as a digital reveal, or unveiling, creating great potential for marketing and branding.
Ultimately, the jigsaw puzzle has always been a gamification tool, even before the term was coined. From helping children learn about geography in the 1700s, to promoting train engines and ocean liners in the 1900s, to modern digital iterations being utilised for everything from internal comms to marketing.
Putting together the possibilities
If you want to see what your online digital jigsaws could look like, and see how they might help your business, create a free Drimify account, and start building today.
You can learn how to work the platform in just seven minutes, and you even get a free trial to test it out across device types and with different integrations.
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