Jerry Slocum was born in Illinois and received his education at the University of Illinois and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Trained as an aerospace engineer with a minor in experimental psychology, Slocum began his career designing cockpit displays for military fighter aircraft. He served at Hughes Aircraft Company for thirty-eight years until his retirement in 1993. Slocum began collecting mechanical puzzles as a child. In 1955, he launched a lifetime of research activity on the history and design of mechanical puzzles with an article in Science & Mechanics magazine. Slocum has published several books on puzzles, including The 15 Puzzle Book, The Tangram Book, The Book of Ingenious & Diabolical Puzzles, and Puzzles Old & New. Upon his retirement, he established the Slocum Puzzle Foundation as a nonprofit public benefit corporation to promote the study of puzzles and support their use as educational tools. In 2006, Slocum announced that he would donate his world-renowned collection of over 32,000 puzzles, 4,000 puzzle-related books, and his papers to the Lilly Library.