75 Putting the Pieces Together

A simple form of this amusement may be one of the earliest challenges faced by a toddler as he or she begins development with partial awareness of it. Older children may use variations of it, by themselves or with adults either for pleasure. Or as a relatively painless way to learn geography. And adults may spend weeks struggling to assemble a 500-, 1000-, or 1500-piece puzzle. Some researchers find early puzzle prototypes in ancient Greece and Egypt, but there is fairly general agreement that the direct ancestor of today’s puzzles was created by John Spilsbury in the 1760s.

Spilsbury, a London print shop owner and mapmaker, mounted a free set of maps on a thin mahogany board and cut it out with a hand-held fret saw. The immediate success of his product was a learning tool for children, and historical scenes were all sorts of educational puzzles. Alphabet tables, and historical scenes were a few of the subjects of these finely made, expensive works.

The pieces of the early puzzles were usually not interlocking, not until the intro- duction of jig saw in the 1870s that mass-produced puzzles with uniform-shaped pieces made their appearance. It was not long afterward that jigsaw puzzles became generally available in the early 1900s. Still often made of plywood and still quite expensive, they quickly became a popular amusement. Records show that now ones were often purchased on Saturday morn- ings as the weekend’s entertainment and that for a time they superseded cards as the most popular game at social gatherings.

75 拼凑碎片

这种娱乐形式的简单版本，可能是幼儿在开始形成部分认知时面临的最早挑战之一。年龄较大的孩子可能会独自或与成年人一起玩它的不同变体，要么是为了消遣，要么是作为一种相对轻松的地理学习方式。而成年人可能会花数周时间努力组装500片、1000片或1500片的拼图。一些研究者在古希腊和埃及发现了早期拼图的原型，但人们普遍认为，如今拼图的直接前身是约翰·斯皮尔斯伯里在18世纪60年代发明的。

斯皮尔斯伯里是伦敦一家印刷厂的老板兼地图绘制师，他将一套免费地图贴在薄桃花心木板上，用手持线锯切割开来。他的产品迅速成功，成为儿童的学习工具，字母表、历史场景等都是这些制作精美、价格昂贵的拼图的主题之一。

早期拼图的碎片通常是不咬合的，直到19世纪70年代拼图锯出现后，才出现了带有统一形状碎片的批量生产拼图。不久之后，拼图在20世纪初开始普及。尽管它们通常由胶合板制成，价格仍然昂贵，但很快就成为一种流行的娱乐方式。记录显示，当时人们经常在周六早上购买新拼图作为周末的娱乐项目，有一段时间，它们取代纸牌成为社交聚会上最受欢迎的游戏。