Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and this is short stuff. Let's get started. Starting.

Do you like puzzles? Sure. Wait a minute, is this like a literal jigsaw puzzle?

OK, yeah, I've got no problem with jigsaw puzzles.

That's as far as I know 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 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, a jigsaw puzzle in particular. I like say like a very heartwarming one, like maybe a jigsaw puzzle with Thomas Kincaid painting, OK, or flowers or kittens or something and nothing terribly hard. Just something like.

Occupying rather than challenging. Yeah, I didn't do a lot of puzzles, I mean, I guess it did when I was a kid and then probably did it for a long time that we weren't a puzzle family, really.

But I did there was one week 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 puzzles with my daughter.

This sounds like a fun. That's a great puzzle story. First of all, it was a lot of fun. I imagine that whole, like, weekend, starting with the musical number where, like, your friend sticks his head out the front door, he's like, it's here. You stick your head out and you're like, oh, here it's in the puzzle. Finally here, huh? That's exactly what we did. That's exactly how it went down.

This is a lot of jibber jabber for a short stuff, isn't it?

Yeah. So we should just go ahead and get to it and say that a man named Sir John Spilsbury, they called him the Doughboy. He was a engraver in England and a map maker in the mid seventeen hundreds. And he gets credit in 1766 for creating the first jigsaw puzzle when he 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 it was kind of a teaching tool at first, but also people were like this kind of fun putting the country's and let's do this at home, too, or at our friend's house over a long weekend while we drink. So it kind of kind of took off.

And then in very short order, it also became a marketing tool to where companies would kind of, you know, maybe give away a jigsaw puzzle. That was a photo of a mobile gas station or something like that. So they became very ubiquitous pretty quickly. Yeah.

And they still do stuff like that to promote your company. They can be a little marketing tools.

And Kodak has one that they sell that they say is the world's largest at fifty one thousand pieces plus twenty eight and a half feet by six point twenty five feet.

None of those things are even close to. Yeah, it's not the biggest at all. No, they're really full of it. Chuck. I think they can just say whatever they want, their chodak what are you going to do? I guess so, yeah. So correctors 11. It's like 400 bucks and I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at. It's a giant, huge puzzle. Our problem 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 Kodak's lawyers were like, we have to word this just perfectly or else they get in some trouble here because it turns out that this Kodak world's largest jigsaw puzzle is fairly mediocre compared to some of the other jigsaw puzzles that are around that take the cake for the world's largest.

Anything?

Yeah, there was one in twenty eighteen in Dubai that Guinness recognized, and it was in honor of the Year of Zyad, which is a year long tribute to the person who founded the UAB shake. Sorry, the UAE. Yeah.

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan. All nine. All right, I think I think I got it, and this thing was 65, almost 66000 square feet.

Yeah, that's that's pretty, pretty impressive if you. Have you seen it? Yeah, it was pretty. It was awesome.

I mean, 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 like cardboard. But when put together it was quite impressive for sure.

And Kodak had fifty one thousand pieces in change. There was one in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam that the six hundred students at the university there put this thing together and it had it over a half a million pieces. Right.

So that was, I think, of a giant lotus flower, right? Beautiful it is.

So there's definitely bigger puzzles than the one that Kodak's touting is the world's largest jigsaw puzzle. But some people say, OK, that's great. Yeah, that's really time consuming. But any schmoe 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 sized jigsaw puzzle to be challenged.

You can do it with some very small surface areas. 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. Hi, I'm Heidi Murkoff, host of What to Expect, a new podcast from My Heart Radio when I first wrote What to Expect When You're Expecting. My mission was simple to help parents know what to expect every step of the way on what to expect will answer your biggest pregnancy and parenting questions about everything from preconception planning to birth plan. Newborns sleep to toddler tantrums.

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Every right that he said on Rapper's Delight was mine. Never let to steal your irony on irony. Listen and follow the speed of sound on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Have you seen this thing I have. Have you seen the video of someone putting it together? No, I saw a video of the guy putting Jigsaw Puzzle 23 together or 29. So this is a designer and I think he did both of these Namu Asaka.

And if you look at Ice Puzzle nine, it's a tray, a blue tray that's about as big 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. They're sort of you know, they can be flat in places and curvy just like a puzzle, but like a jigsaw puzzle. But there's just something a little different and quite right when you look at it. Yeah.

When you look at you think, well, how hard 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 just have the puzzle pieces.

OK, it must be because this famous puzzler, Chris Ramsey, took him two hours and nine minutes and said that it was exhausting.

Right. And he 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 is another one. I saw a video from a guy named the Puzzle Guy. Who have you ever heard Croatian people talk, speak English?

I think this is the video I saw. OK, so that guy, was he he did Jigsaw Puzzle twenty nine two and he had some real trouble with it. In fact, at the end of the 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 when the exit really took hold.

Yeah, but it's great. I love I love that accent.

It's so great to Asian people speak English. 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 29, which is also made by you, Asaka, as you were saying, it has five corner pieces. So one of the corner pieces actually fits into the inside of the puzzle. And it 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 or I should say they look exactly the same, not shape wise, but but color wise, they're just translucent blue or whatever. So you just have to tell from the shape. And then some of the shapes look like they should fit certain sizes of like holes in what they're called. The shapes go in the holes in the spaces, spaces, but they just don't quite fit. It looks very mad. And it was maddening just to watch the video.

Yes.

And I suppose all nine I wish I hadn't watched it and that I would have just bought it to see how I would do. And I think and I don't want to give it away, but when he 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. That's the only kind of hint I will give is that, you know, there can be space in that tray.

They just got to fit in there. Right. So it makes sense. That's a good hint. I don't want to ruin it. So speaking of ruining man, did you see the video of Dave Evans from Dorset, England, who basically created the the I guess it was certified as the world's largest hand cut wooden jigsaw puzzle now.

So this guy, this poor guy, he he created a jigsaw puzzle, an enormous one. It was like twenty feet by eight feet. And if you're in the UK, it's six metres by two and a half metres. 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. And he had it 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 to frame. It just like about to lose his mind, he just can't believe that just happened. I mean, that moment was captured. Yes, yeah. That 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 16 days with a bunch of assistance to put it back together.

Well, here's another interesting record, and these are the records that kind of cracked me up.

There are two people seemingly battling it out for the largest collection of jigsaw puzzles record Louisa Figural Radio, I guess, of Sao Paulo, Brazil. And then Georgina Gil Lacuna of the Philippines have over a thousand puzzles each. And they keep kind of going back and forth. Right. And this is just such a weird record because the only thing you have to 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's gonna have to kick the bucket. I guess so.

And then someone else takes over the collection and they're like, I'm going to buy eight more puzzles, I'm winning.

You would hope so. But I mean, like you would hope that your arch nemesis would have enough class to be like my puzzle collection must be destroyed upon my death.

Oh, that's what you do. Yeah. To set it ablaze or distributed in a bunch of different pieces to different people.

Now set it ablaze. Don't give it to children who need it. All right. No. How about this, Chuck? If you're in favor of setting in a place, you could give them to children in need. But you have to stipulate in your will that a peace is taken from every single one of those puzzles. 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.

What you should just know not to even take a hand-me-down puzzle because I happen, you know.

So you want to talk about this last thing, this 700 person puzzle. Sure.

Since March of last year, twenty nineteen, more than 700 people got together to form the largest human jigsaw puzzle on record. And this one was cool because it raised awareness for autism spectrum disorder. And the piece itself that they formed out of human beings is the symbol for the Autism Speaks organization. And I think there were I don't know if there's controversy, but that was surely no one 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?

Well, that, too. Yeah. And again, I said, you know what, this is everybody. This is a largest human image record. In other words, everyone getting together. And when you look at it from space, it looks like something else. Right.

Some marketing research assistant saved the day. Oh, yes. Yeah. I guess the last thing we would say about jigsaw puzzles is that that one great Simpsons reference where there's some people sitting in a bed and breakfast putting a jigsaw puzzle together, it's clearly of a donkey and a woman puts a piece of the donkey shoulder and says, oh, it's a donkey, right?

It's like, oh, well, you're not watching.

What we do in the shadows are you know, I'm saving it all up, I think.

All right.

Well, for the fans, just let me say that's like Jackie Daytona and it's toothpick. OK, there you go. I don't want anything else about it. Well, thanks for joining us on short stuff, everybody. Short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, My Heart Radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?