Rainy days, there's bound to be at least one during your vacation day at the beach. I think families secretly crave them after days of crisping our skin under the sun. They provide us with an excuse to escape to a movie or play a game together or, my favorite, peacefully settle around a jigsaw puzzle while listening to the pounding drops of a passing thunderstorm.
Leave it to the ingenuity of a dedicated teacher to invent what we now call the "jigsaw puzzle." "For the purpose of teaching geography," John Spilsbury, a teacher in England, created the first jigsaw puzzle in the year 1767. Adhering his maps to flat hardwood, he used a fine saw to cut along the borders of the European countries, and the jigsaw puzzle was born (until the jigsaw was actually invented, however, this was called the "dissected puzzle.") Hand-painted and made of wood, the puzzle was a map of England and Wales, with each county making up a separate piece.
People actually seemed to enjoy this learning tool enough to begin creating jigsaw puzzles for entertainment. The earliest known light-hearted puzzle was a 1785 depiction of John Gilpin's wild ride on a runaway horse from a comedic ballad by William Cowper. None of these were interlocking, of course, until nearly a decade later when power tools were invented.
The first jigsaw puzzle for children, "The Smashed Up Locomotive," was designed by Milton Bradley in 1880. By printing a lithograph of a steam engine locomotive and cutting it into pieces, the "smashed up" effect was achieved when a child opened the box and saw the locomotive all in pieces. Because of his Puritan upbringing, Bradley's nature was to seek order. Therefore, the object of the "The Smashed Up Locomotive" was to make the locomotive whole once again.
And I guess, maybe, that's why so many of us enjoy our "puzzle time" - it allows us a brief respite, one quiet moment to piece together a little jigsaw island of order in the sea of our crazy chaotic lives.
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