Jigsaws on-line

The idea of a jigsaw puzzle on the web may seem a little strange - possibly naff. In reality, those who work on line (well some of them) work with an intensity which would be unheard of in bygone ages, and which is often unproductive. Five minutes away breaking an entangled chain of thought can often be the most productive thing to do. Welcome.

Jigsaw puzzles have been with us since the mid 1700s. They were originally made with a fretsaw. A picture was pasted onto a thin wood, and the fret saw used carefully to cut the various pieces.

A fret saw is a very narrow blade made to move up and down vertically. It ios held with in the jig, and the wood is moved across the plate of the jig against the saw blade. I was given one for Christmas when very young, and spent many hours making this and that, but more often cursing the dulled and then broken blades. It has left an unhealthy romance for the smell of wood shavings.

Jigsaws in the real world are coming to be a thing of the past. An electronic jigsaw puzzle has several real advantages:
- You cannot lose any pieces.
- In this world we have much less time than in the past. On a computer screen, a 100 piece puzzle is about the most we can comfortably handle. A one hundred piece puzzle is solved in a short time span.
- We can provide a much wider range of puzzles.