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Historical Background: Puzzles have been a source of amusement and entertainment since the 3rd century B.C. It was in Greece that the oldest known "mechanical puzzle" consisted of a square cut into 14 parts. The object of this game was to create as many different shapes from these parts as possible.

As early as the 1600s, "puzzle-locks" were invented in Iran. There is mention of a game called "Sei Shona-gon Chie No-Ita" in a 1742 Japanese book. At the turn of the 19th century, the Chinese Tangram puzzle was created. The Tangram puzzle became a popular pastime in China, and its popularity spread to Europe and North America over the next two decades.

Tangram puzzles became so popular, in fact, that a company called Richter (Rudolstadt, Germany) began manufacturing Tangram-like puzzles of different shapes and sizes. These puzzles would later be known as "Anker-puzzles."

If there were a "golden age of puzzles," it was probably around the end of the 1800s and early part of the 20th century. It was during this period that the first patents for puzzles were granted. Since then, new types of puzzles have been created due to the inventions of new materials (particularly plastics) and manufacturing technologies (such as injection-tool molding).

Besides mechanical puzzles, there are other types of puzzles: "assembly puzzles," "disassembly puzzles," "interlocking puzzles," "disentanglement puzzles," "fold puzzles," "lock puzzles," "trick vessels," "impossible objects," "dexterity puzzles," "letter-dissection puzzles," "sequential movement puzzles," and "simulated mechanical puzzles" (mechanical puzzles on computers).

Our Pyramid Puzzle (2103) was invented by E.T. Johnson in 1940. His puzzle would later be marketed under the name "Pyramid Twins." Today, the Pyramid Puzzle is recognized as one of the world's most ingenious two-piece puzzles ever invented! And because of its deceiving simplicity, the Pyramid Puzzle remains a popular puzzle for kids of all ages as well as puzzle collectors.

Fun Fact: The largest known puzzle collection is in England and contains around 50,000 puzzles. It took seven people over 100 years to acquire puzzles for this collection!

Fun Fact: The Pyramid Puzzle is a four-sided polyhedron called a tetrahedron. This type of pyramid is one of the five Platonic bodies that includes the hexagon (cube), dodecahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron.

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