The London Engraver Who Sawed Europe Apart to Teach Children Geography

The object is a map of Scotland, printed on paper, glued to thin mahogany, and sawed into twenty pieces along the borders of its counties. It sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum, about forty centimeters tall, made around 1766. To put Scotland back together, a child had to learn where each county sat. The puzzle was the lesson.

John Spilsbury made it. He had apprenticed under Thomas Jefferys, later Geographer to King George III, and by 1763 he was advertising himself in a London directory as an engraver and “Map Dissector in Wood, in order to facilitate the Teaching of Geography.” Not a toy. A teaching method, sold to wealthy households at seven shillings to a guinea — a sum an ordinary family could not consider. Lady Charlotte Finch used dissected maps to teach the children of George III, keeping her sets in a special cabinet.

Spilsbury died in 1769, around thirty.

For another century nobody called these things jigsaws. They were dissections. The name arrived from the workshop around 1880, when puzzle cutters took up the treadle-driven saw whose blade jigged up and down — a machine Spilsbury never saw, attached to an object he never stopped calling a map.