Web Puzzles

Dave Evans from Weymouth carved a massive 40,000 piece jigsaw puzzle in April 2013. It was the largest hand-cut puzzle ever made. Unfortunately it collapsed after Dave spent five weeks creating the puzzle

But when the 40,000-piece puzzle he had been working on for weeks collapsed on to the floor, Dave Evens was in bits. The master craftsman had just placed the last piece into the world’s biggest hand-cut wooden jigsaw, which he had created from a montage of photos of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.


Mr Evens had spent more than 200 hours hand-cutting the jigsaw from 6mm plywood before it collapsed.  Luckily Mr Evans had already measured, photographed and filmed his jigsaw for his Guinness World of Records submission.

The Puzzle Mansion holds the Guinness World Record title for having the largest jigsaw puzzle collection assembled by a single person

The main attraction here is the jigsaw puzzle museum of Ms. Gina Gil - Lacuna.  Her collection consists of 1,029 puzzles (but Guinness only considered 1,028) -- beating Brazil's record by a mile -- with a total of 700,004 puzzle pieces that she has done for 27 years.

John Spilsbury was born in 1739 and he is considered the inventor of jigsaw puzzles. John Spilsbury worked as an engraver and mapmaker. He served as an apprentice to Thomas Jefferys, the Royal Geographer to King George III.
He invented the first jigsaw in 1767 and it was a map of the world. John Spilsbury attached a map to a piece of wood and then cut out each country. Teachers used Spilsbury's puzzles to teach geography.

Students learned their geography lessons by putting the world maps back together. Sensing a business opportunity, he created puzzles on eight themes - the World, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

John Spilsbury died on 3 April 1769 leaving us the legacy of jigsaw puzzles, which are used nowadays by people in the whole world.