Welcome to National Puzzle Day! It's also National Corn Chip Day if you care about that at all.
I found an interesting site that has all of these listed, so I'll probably be using those as one idea for what to do for posts here sometimes. National Day Calendar is the link, in case you want to investigate it at all. Looking through for your birthdays or things like that is fun, and sometimes I find one that I want to celebrate myself. You'll probably hear about those days.
Today is National Puzzle Day, so I thought I'd tell you a bit about puzzles. Specifically, I plan to tell you about Jigsaw Puzzles.
The first Jigsaw Puzzle was created in 1760 something by a mapmaker named John Spilsbury, who drew out a map of the world and cut it into pieces so that he could teach kids some geography, or so some of the stories tell at least. The tool he used to cut his wooden map up was a saw, which is where the puzzles get their names. Hilariously, a 'jigsaw' wasn't really invented or given that name until the late 1800's.
In the 1800's, they started becoming popular with adults too, and pictures were used instead of geography. With new inventions, things got a lot better and puzzles got a lot easier to make. The treadle saw allowed for more complicated shapes and it got easier to make chunks of wood wouldn't fall apart when cut, since cutting small pieces that you could play with multiple times might be hard. Then, during the Great Depression, they were rather popular as something people could do at home, and it just took off.
In hilarious things, the 1,000 piece puzzle actually has to have a few more pieces so that the shapes work out right, people who want a challenge can get an all-white puzzle to try, and the puzzle with the most pieces ranks in with more than 550,000. Excuse me, I need to cringe about even thinking of trying a puzzle even close to that hard.
Hopefully you found this interesting, or puzzling, and now you have something fun to tell people next time you have to look at a map or do a jigsaw puzzle. Sources are below if you want to know more.
Sources:
Wentworth Puzzles-- History of the Jigsaw Puzzle
Los Angeles Public Library-- History of Jigsaw Puzzles
No comments:
Post a Comment