Short Stuff: Jigsaw Puzzles

Who doesn't love a good puzzle? Tune in to learn a few facts and figures about jigsaw puzzles right now.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you're welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and this is short stuff. Let's get started
starting now. Do you like puzzles? Um? Sure, Wait a minute,
is this like literal jigsaw puzzles? Okay, Um, yeah, I've
got no problem with jigsaw puzzles. That's as far as

(00:27):
I mean anything these days, Chuck, don't you know the
world's ending? Well, I didn't mean like, do you want
to fight a puzzle? I mean do you do you
enjoy sitting down and doing a jigsaw puzzle? Yeah? Sure
I do. I mean it's been a while, but yes,
I like a good puzzle. Um, a jigsaw puzzle in particular,
I'd like to say, like a very heartwarming one, like
maybe a jigsaw puzzle of a Thomas Kincaid painting, or

(00:50):
of flowers or kittens or something, and nothing's terribly hard,
just something like occupying rather than challenging. Yeah. I didn't
uh do a lot of puzzles. I mean I guess
I did when I was a kid, and then probably
didn't for a long time. And we weren't a puzzle
family really, Um, but I did. There was one week

(01:11):
in college where a dude down the street for me.
A friend got a big puzzle and it was just
one of those things in college where you've got time
and three or four of us got together and drank
a lot for like a week and did this huge
puzzle and just had so much fun. And that's the
last puzzle I've done except for, you know, doing little

(01:32):
puzzles with my daughter. That sounds like a fun fun
that's a great puzzle story. It was a lot of fun.
I imagine that whole like weekend starting with a musical
number where like your friends sticks his head out the
front door. He's like, gets here and you stick your
head out and you're like, sort of here, it's here,
the puzzle finally here. Uh, that's exactly That's exactly how

(01:52):
it went down. This is a lot of jibber jabber
for his short stuff, isn't it. Yeah, So we should
just go ahead and get to it and say that
a named Sir John Spillsbury. They called him the dough Boy.
He was a engraver in England and a map maker
in the mid seventeen hundreds and he gets credit in
seventeen sixty six for creating the first jigsaw puzzle when

(02:14):
he Uh, put a map on a piece of wood,
cut it out, cut the countries out, and said, here
you go. Teachers, use this to teach geography. I love
things where it's just like there, it is right there.
That was the first time it ever happened. That's the
beginning of it. There's your origin story. It's nice and tidy.
So UM. It was kind of a teaching tool at first,

(02:35):
but also people were like, it's kind of fun putting
the countries, and let's do this at home too, or um,
at our friend's house over a long weekend while we drink.
So it kind of kind of took off and then um,
in very short order. It also became a marketing tool too,
where companies would kind of, you know, maybe give away,
um a jigsaw puzzle that was a photo of a

(02:58):
mobile gas Asian or something like that. Um. So they
became very ubiquitous pretty quickly. Yeah, and they still do
stuff like that to promote your company. Um. They can
be little marketing tools. I no, Kodak has one that
they sell that they say is the world's largest at
fifty one pieces plus eight and a half feet by

(03:22):
six point to five ft. None of those things are
even close it's not the biggest at all. They're really
full of it, Chuck. I think they can just say
whatever they want their code. What are you gonna do?
I guess so. Yeah, So Codak does sell that one.
It's like four hundred bucks, and I mean, it's nothing
to sneeze at. It's a giant, huge puzzle. Our problem

(03:42):
with it is that they call it the world's largest
jigsaw puzzle. And I'm guessing it's not just us who
have a problem with it, but the people at the
Guinness World Records probably have a bit of a problem
with it too. Either that or Codex lawyers were like,
we have to ward this just perfectly, or else were
getting some trouble here because it turns out that this
Kodak world's Largest Jigsaw puzzle is fairly mediocre compared to

(04:06):
some of the other jigsaw puzzles that are around that
take the cake for world's largest anything. Yeah, there was
one in two thousand eighteen in Dubai that Guinness recognized
and it was an honor of the Year of Zaid,
which is a year long tribute to the person who

(04:27):
founded the U A B S Sorry the U A E. Yeah,
Shaik Zayed been Sultan all nine in Nice. I think,
I think I got it. And this thing was sixty
five almost sixty six thousand square feet. Yeah that's um,
that's pretty pretty impressive if you have you seen it, Yeah,

(04:48):
it was pretty it was awesome. I mean, like the
pieces themselves are giant. They're like about a foot or
so square, and you know, the whole thing was a
little it was like kind of light cardboard, but when
put together, was quite impressive for sure. And Codex had
fifty pieces in change. There was one in Ho Chi
Min City in Vietnam that the students at the university

(05:12):
there put this thing together and it had over a
half a million pieces, right, so um, that was I
think of a giant lotus flower, right, beautiful it is. Um.
So there's definitely bigger puzzles than the one that Codex
touting is the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. Um. But some
people say, okay, that's great. Yeah, that's really time consuming.

(05:34):
But any schmo with all of the pieces can put
that thing together. Other people and this is totally unsurprising
to me that there's like a whole subculture of people
who are like, I want to be challenged by a
jigsaw puzzle. As it turns out, you don't have to
have a football field size jigsaw puzzle to be challenged.
You can do it with some very small surface areas.

(05:55):
There's one in particular called ice Puzzle nine that's just
nine pieces, but it's possibly the hardest jigsaw puzzle on
the planet. All right, well, let's take a break there
and we'll tell you more about ice Puzzle nine right
after this. Have you seen this thing? I have? Have

(06:31):
you seen the video of someone putting it together? No?
I saw a video of the guy putting jigsaw puzzle
twenty three together or twenty nine. So this is a
designer and I think he did both of these. Name
you Osaka. And if you look at ice Puzzle nine,
it's a tray, a blue tray that's about as big

(06:52):
as your two hands put together. It's very small, and
it's only got those nine pieces in there. You know,
they don't look like your standard puzzle pieces there sort
of you know, they can be flattened places and curvy,
just like a puzzle, but like a jigsaw puzzle, but
there's just something a little different. And when you look
at it, when you look at you think how hard

(07:14):
could that be And then I went to a YouTube
that showed a guy putting it together and it was
so easy, and I was like, how do people not
get that? That's how easy it is. And the only
thing I can think of is that it's it's easy
when you see someone doing it, but very hard when
you're just have the puzzle pieces. It must be because
this famous puzzler, Chris Ramsey took him two hours and

(07:36):
nine minutes and said that it was exhausting, right, and
he's yeah, he he doesn't seem to be the kind
who would take like a dive for a puzzle maker,
like he seems legit. You know, there's a There was
another one. I saw a video called from a guy
named the Puzzle Guy. Who have you ever heard Croatian
people talk speak English? I think this is the video

(07:59):
I saw. Okay, so that guy did he Jiggs. He
did Jigsaw Puzzle twenty nine too, and he had some
real trouble with it. In fact, at the end of
the um the puzzle, when he had the last two pieces,
he was explaining how he couldn't get them to fit,
when he accidentally got them to fit and was actually
surprised that he finished the puzzle. Yeah, but it's great, man,

(08:23):
I love I love that accidents so greatation people speak English,
if they just sound so just friendly and amiable, it's awesome.
But as he was putting this together, one of the
big problems with Jigsaw Puzzle twenty nine, which was also
made by u Osaka, as you were saying, um, it
has five corner pieces, so one of the corner pieces
actually fits into the inside of the puzzle, and it

(08:44):
just seems to be extraordinarily difficult to put together. One
of the reasons why it's tough is all the pieces
are exactly the same. It doesn't form a picture. Um,
I should say they look exactly the same, not shape wise,
but but colorwise. They're this translucent blue or whatever. Um.
So you just have to tell from the shape. And
then some of the shapes look like they should fit

(09:06):
certain sizes um of like holes and that what they're called.
The shapes go in the holes in the spaces spaces, um.
But they just don't quite fit. It looks very mad
and it was maddening just to watch the video Yese
and Ice Puzzle nine. I wish I hadn't watched it,
and that I would have just bought it to see
how I would do. Um, and and I think, and

(09:29):
I don't want to give it away. But when you
put the last piece in it, the idea is that
you have to get all the pieces inside that tray.
It's not necessarily what you think of as a puzzle,
which is they all fit perfectly together and form a
perfect picture. Um. That's the only kind of hint I
will give is that, uh, you know, there can be

(09:51):
space in that trade. They just gotta all fit in there, right,
That makes sense. That's a good hint. I don't want
to ruin it. So speak of ruining, man, did you
see the video of Dave Evans from Dorset, England, who uh,
basically created the I guess it was certified as the
world's largest hand cut wooden jigsaw puzzle. No. So this guy,

(10:15):
this poor guy, he created a jigsaw puzzle, an enormous one.
It was like, um, twenty ft by eight feet and
if you're in the UK, it's six meters by two
and a half meters. It was just this giant puzzle
and he had it completed. He spent two weeks putting
it together, after assembling, like cutting it and then it
took him another two weeks just to put it together.

(10:37):
And he had in this giant piece of plywood in
his workshop showing it off and it somebody was filming
it and it just collapsed and he walks into the frame.
It just like about to lose his mind. He just
can't believe that just happened. Was captured. Yes, yeah, that

(10:57):
moment was captured on video and his reaction was captured
on video. It's worth it's worth checking out because you
just agonize for the guy. It took him another sixteen
days with a bunch of assistants to put it back together. Well,
here's another interesting record, and this these are the records
that kind of cracked me up. There are two people

(11:18):
seemingly battling it out for the largest collection of jigsaw
puzzles record. Uh Louisa figure Redo I Guess of South Paulo,
Brazil and then Georgina gil Lacuna of the Philippines. Um
have over a thousand puzzles each, and they keep kind
of coming back and forth. And this is just such
a weird record because the only thing you have to

(11:40):
do is just buy more puzzles. Yeah, that's it, That's
all there is to it. Yeah, like where does it end?
I guess one of them is gonna have to kick
the bucket. I guess so. But then someone else takes
over the collection and they're like, I'm gonna buy eight
more puzzles. I'm winning. You would hope so, but but
I mean, like, um, you would hope that your arch
nemesis would have enough class to be like, my puzzle

(12:02):
collection must be destroyed upon my death. Oh that's what
you do. Yeah, just set it ablaze or distributed in
a bunch of different pieces to different people. Now, set
it ablaze. Don't give it to children, all right? You know,
how about this, chuck, If you're in favor of setting
in a place, you could give them to children a need,

(12:22):
But you have to stipulate in your will that a
piece is taken from every single one of those puzzles,
and those pieces are set ablaze. How about that? Yeah,
that's the worst. We've gotten a lot of hand me
down puzzles, which is what happens when you have a
kid and all of them are missing pieces. Why you
should just know not to even take a hand me
down puzzle because it's happen, you know. So, Uh, you
want to talk about this last thing, this seventred person puzzle.

(12:47):
March of last year or two thousand nineteen, more than
seventeen hundred people um got together to form the largest
human jigsaw puzzle on record. And this one was cool
because it raised awareness for autism spectrum to order. And
the piece itself that they formed out of human beings
is the symbol for the Autism Speaks organization. And I

(13:08):
think there were I don't know if there was controversy,
but that was surely no one like got mad about this,
but the question did arise. Is it a puzzle if
it's just a puzzle piece, or is it a puzzle
piece if there's no puzzle for it to fit into?
Oh well that too, uh, And Ginnis said, you know
what this is, everybody. This is a largest human image record.

(13:31):
In other words, everyone getting together, and when you look
at it from space it looks like something else. Some
marketing research assistant saved the day. Oh yes, I guess.
The last thing we have to say about jigsaw puzzles
is that that one great Simpsons reference where there there's
some people sitting at a bed and breakfast putting a

(13:51):
jigsaw puzzle together. It's clearly of a donkey, and a
woman puts a piece into like the donkey's shoulder and says, oh,
it's a donkey. Right. That's like, well, you're not watching
what we do in the shadows, are you. No, I'm
saving it all up, I think. All right, Well, for
the fans, just let me say that's like Jackie Daytona

(14:13):
and his toothpick. Okay, there you go. I don't want
to know anything else about it. Well, thanks for joining
us on short Stuff, everybody. Short Stuff is apt Stuff
you should know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,