Pop Culture Nostalgia
Most beloved toys were not invented by anyone sitting at a drafting table thinking, "Now I shall design a beloved toy." They came from engineers chasing different problems entirely, from wartime material shortages, from someone's accidental spill in a factory. The history of play is largely a history of happy accidents and stubborn optimism.
Leon has been spending time in this territory recently, and he has some things to report.
The LEGO brick we know today did not arrive fully formed. It began in Billund, Denmark, where a carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys in 1932, during the Depression, because families were not buying furniture but could occasionally afford a small wooden duck. He named the company LEGO in 1934, from the Danish leg godt, meaning "play well."
The plastic interlocking brick came later, in 1949, inspired by a British brick called the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Brick. The LEGO brick's distinctive stud-and-tube coupling system, which gives it the satisfying click and secure hold, was patented in 1958 and has remained essentially unchanged. Ole Kirk Christiansen died that same year, just as his invention was finding its permanent form.
There is something quietly moving about that timing. He built the foundation; his son Godtfred completed the structure. The workshop that started making toy ducks in a Depression is now one of the most recognizable brands on earth.
During World War II, the United States faced a severe rubber shortage, and the government asked General Electric engineer James Wright to find a synthetic substitute. In 1943, Wright combined boric acid with silicone oil and produced a substance that bounced, stretched, and could copy newspaper ink. It was spectacular and completely useless as a rubber substitute. It was too soft, too stretchy, too prone to flowing slowly into whatever shape it rested in.
For six years, the material circulated among scientists who found it amusing but purposeless. Then a toy store owner named Ruth Fallgatter and her marketing consultant Peter Hodgson encountered it at a party, packed it into plastic eggs, and sold it as a novelty in 1950. The Smithsonian has called it one of the great accidental inventions of the twentieth century.
In 1943, naval engineer Richard James was working with tension springs in a shipyard when one fell off a shelf and walked itself gracefully across the floor. He stood there watching it, then took it home to show his wife Betty. She found a name in the dictionary: slinky, an old Swedish word meaning sleek or graceful.
They demonstrated it at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in 1945. Four hundred Slinkys sold in ninety minutes. Betty James eventually ran the company herself after Richard left, and she ran it with considerable competence for decades. The original Slinky — made in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania — is still manufactured using essentially the same process. They have sold over 300 million of them.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, college students in New England discovered that the tin pie plates from the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, flew remarkably well when tossed. They yelled "Frisbie!" as a warning when releasing them. This is not a legend; it is fairly well-documented history, though the precise degree to which it influenced the plastic disc that followed is debated.
In 1948, California inventor Walter Morrison designed a plastic version he called the Pluto Platter. He sold it to the Wham-O company, which renamed it the Frisbee in 1958, reportedly because the name tested better with consumers who had grown up tossing pie tins.
John Lloyd Wright invented Lincoln Logs in 1916, and he was quite literally inspired by watching his famous father, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, design the foundation of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The elder Wright used interlocking beams to allow the hotel to flex during earthquakes. His son watched, went home, and designed a miniature interlocking log construction toy. Lincoln Logs have been in continuous production ever since, making them one of the longest-running toys in American history.