Interlocking Burrs - Budget

The true origin of the BURR type mechanical puzzle is not really known but it is thought that the term refers to the finished shape of the basic burr puzzle looking like a seed burr. 

Basic burr puzzles are sometimes called the Knot or the Chinese Cross, and identified by a lot of people as Chinese, is not really Chinese at all.  Well, it might be, just that no-one really knows for sure.

Some historians believe the first burrs came about from Chinese joinery from about the 4th century BC. The technique the woodworkers used for making the corner connections in buildings has definite similarities to a standard burr puzzle although no documentary evidence of making a puzzle for recreation exists.

It is known for sure that it’s one of the oldest mechanical puzzles in the world. The first documentation of the puzzle is not a physical puzzle but a depiction in the 1698 engraving by Sébastien Leclerc’s called L’Académie des sciences et des beaux-arts. But probably there had to have been a physical puzzle made for that artwork to be taken from; possibly from China? Nobody knows for sure.

But I bet you never really associated Lithuania with burr puzzles. But that country’s oldest known toys were made of wood. The most favourite toys were wooden puzzles, including burrs. Lithuania celebrated that history by featuring a wooden interlocking burr puzzle on the 2015 Lithuanian issue of the Europa stamp.

The first known use of the word BURR for this type of interlocked knot or cross was by an American Metagrobologist, Edwin Wyatt, who featured some of these interlocking knot puzzles in his book “Puzzles in Wood” published in 1928.  They reminded Wyatt of the Bur (or Burr) seed and so he used the term to describe them in his book and its still used now.

Nowadays many interlocking burrs are designed in a fantastic open-source program called BurrTools. Andreas Rover began designing the program back in 2009 as a way of solving and testing solutions for puzzles and now many puzzles would freely admit they could not live without it. Thanks, Andreas!