How a London Mapmaker Sawed Up a Map of Europe and Accidentally Invented the Jigsaw Puzzle

In the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum sits an engraving of Scotland, mounted on mahogany and cut into twenty pieces, about forty centimeters tall. It was made around 1766 by a London engraver named John Spilsbury, and to reassemble it a child had to learn where Scotland’s counties sat in relation to one another. The puzzle was the lesson. The world now traces every jigsaw puzzle back to objects like this one — though Spilsbury never called it a puzzle, never called it a jigsaw, and never owned the saw the thing would later be named after.

He had a different name for it. In a London directory of 1763 he advertised himself as an engraver and “Map Dissector in Wood, in order to facilitate the Teaching of Geography.” That last clause is the whole business in eight words. He was not selling a toy. He was selling a method.

How the object was made

The work began with a finished map. Spilsbury took a printed sheet — Europe, say — glued it face-up onto a board of thin mahogany, and worked a fine-bladed marquetry saw around the political boundaries already drawn on the paper: the edge of a county, the coastline of a country, the line between one crown’s territory and the next. France came away from Spain. The continent came apart into fifty pieces. What was left was a tray of wooden countries that a child could be handed, jumbled, and told to put back together.

The method was simple and the labor was not. Spilsbury had trained for exactly this. Born in 1739, he began a seven-year apprenticeship in 1753, at about fourteen, under Thomas Jefferys — a leading English cartographer, later Geographer to King George III. An apprentice in that shop learned to cut fine lines into copper, to register colors, to handle the geography of the known world as raw material. By 1763 Spilsbury had his own premises in Russell Court, near Covent Garden, and a slow hand saw earning its keep along the edges of kingdoms.

What the object was for

The idea behind it was already in the air. John Locke, writing on education in 1693, had argued that learning should be made “a play and recreation” for children rather than imposed as a task — the alphabet taught with lettered dice and playthings — and that geography should come first among the subjects of knowledge, a child learning with pleasure to point out any country on the globe. By the mid-eighteenth century, fashionable English households were absorbing that view, and geography — knowing the shape of the world Britain was busy trading with and conquering — had become a marker of a proper education.

The dissected map slotted exactly into that demand. Spilsbury’s trade card advertised more than twenty different versions; the subjects ran to eight — the World, the four known continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and then England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in close-up. From a child’s own islands out to the whole known world, every kingdom fit back into its place on the board.

This was not a cheap diversion. The maps ran from about seven shillings up to a guinea — serious money in the 1760s, far beyond an ordinary family. The customers were wealthy, and the most famous of them lived in a palace.

Lady Charlotte Finch was governess to the children of George III and Queen Charlotte for thirty years, overseeing the schooling of more than a dozen royal children. She used dissected maps in the royal nursery and kept the sets she commissioned in a special puzzle cabinet. The future kings and princesses of Britain learned the borders of Europe by taking them apart and putting them back.

Whose object it really was

The clean story credits Spilsbury with inventing the jigsaw puzzle in the 1760s. The honest version is more crowded.

More than two centuries later, the researcher Jill Shefrin turned up earlier traces of what looks like the same idea. In a letter to her sister from December 1759 — years before Spilsbury’s own advertisement — Mary Delany wrote that she wished she knew how to get a set of “Madame Beaumont’s wooden maps.” That is Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, the French educator and writer best remembered for the version of Beauty and the Beast that the world still reads. She spent years teaching in England, and her wooden maps appear in letters of 1759 and 1762 — she may even have been selling them as early as 1756, before Spilsbury cut his first board for sale. Not one of her maps survives, though, so no one can say for certain that they were dissected.

So Spilsbury may not have made the thing first. What he had was a shop, a trade, and a willingness to make the same object over and over for paying customers. He was almost certainly the first commercial producer of dissected maps — the man who turned a clever teaching aid into a product line — and that, more than pure invention, is why his name survived and de Beaumont’s nearly didn’t.

He did not enjoy it for long. Spilsbury married Sarah May of Newmarket in 1761 and died in April 1769, around the age of thirty. Sarah kept the business going, then married Harry Ashby — an engraver who had worked in Spilsbury’s own shop — and Ashby went on selling the puzzles. By the end of the century, London had something like twenty makers turning out cut-up maps for children, and scripture and history soon joined geography under the saw.

The saw that renamed it

For more than a century, no one called these things jigsaws. They were dissections, dissected maps, and they stayed what Spilsbury’s was: wooden, hand-cut, and expensive.

The name arrived from the workshop, not the nursery. The jig saw was a machine — a vertical blade worked by a foot treadle, jigging rapidly up and down, the motion that earned the tool its nickname. Around 1880, saws of that family — jigsaws, fretsaws, scroll saws, the names blurred — became the puzzle cutter’s tool of choice, and the puzzle took the tool’s name. Cardboard puzzles appeared in the same decades; makers were slow to switch, fearing cardboard would look cheap next to wood — and cheap, in the end, is exactly what the puzzle would become. The phrase itself — “jigsaw puzzle” — waited until 1906 to appear.

Spilsbury never saw any of it. His Europe in the British Library is still cut the old way, along the edges of kingdoms — made by a man who was gone before the thing on his bench, bearing none of his vocabulary, became the toy half the world keeps in a closet.