Every now and then a puzzle or game sweeps a population. We had Rubik's Cube in the early Eighties, Sudoku in the 2000's, and now Flappy Bird. But too often, due to technology, these spread incredibly rapidly. But do we have examples of a more sedate pace of spread of a puzzle?

I was therefore delighted to learn that the tangram was a puzzle that became popular in the West over a century ago, during a time of slower information diffusion. A puzzle from China around 1,000 years ago that requires arranging seven pieces into different shapes, it didn't make it to Europe and the United States until trade brought it there in the Nineteenth Century. It then became enormously popular, and even seemed to have a second wave of popularity around the time of World War I. As per Wikipedia:

The tangram had already been around in China for a long time when it was first brought to America by Captain M. Donnaldson, on his ship, Trader, in 1815. When it docked in Canton, the captain was given a pair of Sang-Hsia-koi's (author) Tangram books from 1815. They were then brought with the ship to Philadelphia, where it docked in February 1816. The first Tangram book to be published in America was based on the pair brought by Donnaldson.

The puzzle was originally popularized by The Eighth Book Of Tan, a fictitious history of Tangram, which claimed that the game was invented 4,000 years prior by a god named Tan. The book included 700 shapes, some of which are possible to solve.

The puzzle eventually reached England, where it became very fashionable indeed. The craze quickly spread to other European countries. This was mostly due to a pair of British Tangram books, The Fashionable Chinese Puzzle, and the accompanying solution book, Key.Soon, tangram sets were being exported in great number from China, made of various materials, from glass, to wood, to tortoise shell.

In fact, it even is referenced in Hans Christian Anderson's story 'The Snow Queen': "It was like the Chinese puzzle game that we play at home, juggling little flat pieces of wood about into special designs."

Games and puzzles tap into something deep within the human psyche, and seeing how they spread through a population—no matter the time period—is fascinating.

Top image:Nivet Dilman/Wikimedia Commons/CC