The History of Sliding Puzzles
Sliding teaser started with a bang in 1880 . In a thing of months after its innovation , masses all over the human race were plunge in try on to work what came to be known as the 15 Puzzle . It consisted of a 4 - by-4 grid , with 15 numbered foursquare and one blank left empty . The melodic theme was to scramble the numbers , then rearrange them into numerical order by sliding them successively into the empty space .
This first sliding puzzle was fabricate by an upstate New York postmaster named Noyes Chapman , who descend up with the idea during the 1870s . Boston woodworker Matthias J. Rice offer a commercial-grade version in 1879 [ generator : Slocum and Sonneveld ] . He called it the Gem Puzzle ; other versions were sold as the Boss Puzzle , the Game of Fifteen and the Mystic Square [ source : logical - games.org ] . The craze took off in the other months of 1880 , a puzzle madness that would not be repeated untilRubik ’s Cubebecame wildly popular in the 1980s .
Factories could not keep up with the demand for the 15 Puzzle . So many the great unwashed were caught up in the fad that employer were concerned about worker ignoring their tariff to work on the puzzle . Legislators in Germany were seen judge to solve them . Sliding puzzle mania was bring up in popular songs and plays . Newspapers ran tongue - in - cheek account of participant driven mad by them [ source : Slocum and Sonneveld , Bogomolny ] .
A dentist from Worcester , Massachusetts offered a bent of tooth and $ 100 to any person who could fix the puzzle from a certain rootage transcription . He afterwards rear the prize to $ 1,000 . People all over the country tried to win this luxurious inwardness , but none succeeded . What they did n’t know was that only half of all the potential arrangement of pieces can be solved . The dentist ’s stage set - up was not solvable [ source : Slocum ] . The furore faded by the summertime of 1880 , but the 15 Puzzle remained as a classic slider .
The next ontogeny in slide puzzle came about in 1909 when Lewis W. Hardy contrive the first slew puzzle using piece that were orthogonal rather than square . He call it the Pennant Puzzle , giving it a baseball melodic theme . It was also jazz as Dad ’s Puzzle [ generator : Sharples ] . Ma ’s Puzzle , which followed in 1927 , bring in two cubic decimeter - shaped piece , ca-ca it even more difficult to solve [ source : Storer ] .
Over the year , there were many novelty variations on the sliding puzzle . " Capture the Kaiser , " featuring pictures of the German ruler , came out during World War I. The 1932 presidential election campaign between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt was commemorated in a slider . A mystifier from 1934 called " describe up the Quinties " had players sliding squares with delineation of the notable Dionne fin [ germ : Rob ’s Puzzle Page ] .
Since the calculator began to play a role in designing and solve puzzles , the variety ofpuzzleshas increased . Hundreds of movie have been transformed into skidder , and progressively more difficult arrangements of geometric shapes have challenged solvers .
Move on to the next division to have a facial expression at some of the different types of sliding puzzler .
