History of puzzles

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The puzzle as a jigsaw game was probably first invented in 1766 in England by the copper engraver and card merchant John Spilsbury (1739-1769). For this he stuck a map of Europe on a wooden board and sawn it along the national boundaries into 50 individual parts. The purpose of the jigsaw game was to reassemble the individual parts into a map and thus to facilitate the teaching of geography. As usual as today, the parts were not yet interlocked. These so-called interlocking puzzles emerged first in the second half of the 19th century.

At the beginning of the 20th century the mass production of the puzzles, which had previously been made by hand, began. This allowed the once expensive games to be offered cheaper and thus increase their popularity. Starting from the beginning of the 1970er years the number of pieces of the individual puzzle slowly became larger. Initially, mainly jigsaw puzzles with 500 to 1.000 pieces were produced, there were already puzzles with up to 5.000 pieces at the end of the decade. In the 1980er years a new era started again as puzzle with up to 12.000 pieces were manufactured.

In the new millennium, from the year 2007, Educa's largest serial-made puzzle of the world was Life, The greatest puzzle with 24.000 pieces. This record could only be countered again by Ravensburger in 2010, when they launched the 32.256 pieces puzzle Double Retrospect, which was four years later again outnumbered by Educa with the 33.600 pieces puzzle Wild Life. The biggest puzzle ever since 2016 can be referred to Ravensburger again, when they presented the puzzle Unvergessliche Disney Momente with 40.320 pieces. To complete the puzzle you need at least an area of 6.80 by 1.92 meters.