… weren’t called puzzles.

They were called ‘dissections,’ where a picture was glued to a flat piece of wood and cut into pieces. Given the production method, these were for the somewhat wealthy. The first person recorded to have made one was a London cartographer who did this with one of his maps around 1760. He likely used a marquetry saw, which was used for cutting different wood colors into shapes to make pictures and images in furniture. This is a knife-like thin curved or flexible saw. The jigsaw wasn’t invented until 1855 (the jig refers to the up and down motion of these saws), and were mostly operated by women because of their similarity to sewing machines.

The word jigsaw puzzle appeared after 1900. By the time of the Great Depression 10 million puzzles were being produced each week, reportedly (but I’m not sure about that number). People would rent them for a nickle a night.