1760s — John Spilsbury and the dissected map
The first commercial jigsaw puzzle is usually credited to John Spilsbury, a London cartographer and engraver who in the early 1760s glued maps to thin sheets of mahogany and cut the borders of each country with a hand-held marquetry saw. The product was sold as a teaching aid — children learned European geography by physically reassembling it. The pieces were country-shaped, not the interlocking shapes we know today. The word 'jigsaw' itself wouldn't apply until the powered jigsaw appeared in the late 1800s.
The shift from education to entertainment
By the Victorian era the dissected map had migrated into adult parlours, but only as a children's curiosity. The real shift was the move from hand-cut wood to die-cut cardboard, beginning around the 1880s. Cardboard was dramatically cheaper, allowed for the interlocking tab-and-blank shape that defines the modern puzzle, and made full pictorial puzzles practical for the first time. Landscapes and still lifes started to outnumber maps.
The Great Depression boom
The defining moment for the jigsaw puzzle as a cultural artefact came in the early 1930s. Faced with crashed disposable incomes and long evenings at home, American and British households turned to puzzles as a slow, repeatable, infinitely reusable entertainment. At the peak, an estimated ten million puzzles were sold per week in the United States. Many of the puzzle conventions we still take for granted — the box-lid reference image, the 500- and 1000-piece counts, the family-Sunday ritual — solidified in that period.
Cardboard, plastic, and the move online
Through the back half of the twentieth century the puzzle changed less than you might think. Cardboard quality improved, image sources expanded from landscape paintings to photography and pop-culture art, and a small premium market for hand-cut wooden puzzles persisted. The first browser-based jigsaw puzzles appeared in the early 2000s, usually as small Flash games. Web-native puzzles became dominant after the move away from Flash, and the daily-puzzle format started to look familiar in the late 2010s.
Today: free, in your browser
The current shape of the hobby is a hybrid. Many people still own and finish physical puzzles on a kitchen table, but the daily session — the 20-minute break with a cup of coffee — has largely moved online. The advantages are obvious: nothing to buy, nothing to store, no missing pieces. The disadvantage is the loss of the tactile dimension, which a few independent sites and the iOS app's haptics try to claw back. The instinct behind all of it, though — sit down for a moment, sort the pieces, finish the picture — is the same one that pulled a 1760s schoolchild to a wooden European map.