THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (18 page)

Eventually, he built up a moderately successful business and took his four sons into the trade. Establishing a firm, Ole Kirk-Christiansen and his family worked hard until at last their line included about three hundred animals, dolls, and play vehicles.

One day as Ole’s third son, Godtfred, was calling on a Copenhagen toy retailer, the shopkeeper complained about the quality of the toys available on the market. “Where are the toys that appeal to a child’s mind? Where are toys with a purpose?” he challenged.

Godtfred Kirk-Christiansen was disturbed. The Copenhagen merchant was right. There was no distinction to the toys in the family line. Certainly the trucks, trains, and dolls were well made—but were they unique? Hardly.

Arriving at the empty factory late that night, the young man wandered down the aisles, checking the stock. Nothing spurred his imagination—until he reached the small plastic building blocks which the company sold. Fingering them, he thought how limited the arrangements of the blocks were. As he pondered, he absentmindedly built a house with the blocks. Soon it turned into a castle . . .

Then the idea flashed into his mind. Children had been playing with building blocks since the time of the pyramids. What if he and his father and brothers could modify the plastic blocks so that even small children could put together complex designs and structures?

Obviously, they would have to find a way to lock the little bricks together so they wouldn’t fall apart when a toddler started piling them high. Though he didn’t know how to solve the technical problem that night, Godtfred Kirk-Christiansen immediately sat down and drafted a set of principles for what was to become the Lego building toy. (Lego is a contraction of two Danish words meaning “play well.”) He dreamed of a toy that would engage the child actively, not just as a toy but as a whole recreational system with a variety of components that would allow the youngster to build an almost unlimited number of things.

Long months of family consultation and experimentation followed. In the evening the Kirk-Christiansens would sit with their children and watch how the test bricks “handled.” Eventually the clan hit upon the answer: a small plastic brick with extruded knobs that could lock into the underside of any other brick. Selecting a color assortment and making various brick forms on the interlocking principle, the Kirk-Christiansens finally brought out Lego in 1954.

Lego was practically an instant success in Denmark. Toy dealers jammed the single telephone line placing orders. By 1960, all other toys in the plant were discontinued so production could concentrate on the little bricks. Today, the building toy is sold in seventy-five countries, including America, where Samsonite recently returned the rights to Lego.

Until it did, Lego was the star of a growing line of toys, preschool items, sports games, roller skates, snow sporting goods, and juvenile furniture. Close cooperation existed between Samsonite’s unusual factory in Loveland, Colorado-huge replicas of Lego bricks were worked into the exterior design to give the factory the look of a mammoth toy—and the Danish mother firm. Lego bricks must be produced accurately within a thousandth of an inch in order to work, and periodically the licensor in Billund examined Samsonite’s molds to make sure the clutch power of the bricks was satisfactory.

Billund today bears little resemblance to the town of Ole Kirk-Christiansen’s youth. More than a thousand aircraft arrive and depart each week from its jetport, and there are far more people just working at the toy plant than there used to be in the entire village. Thanks to Lego, the company earns over $50 million each year and was responsible for nearly 1 percent of Denmark’s industrial exports.

But one youngster who visited the Billund factory was disappointed to find it wasn’t made of Lego bricks. Godtfred Kirk-Christiansen realized the lad was right, and had an entire miniature city of Lego bricks built on an eleven-acre plot between the factory and the airport. Known as Legoland, it is one of Denmark’s most popular tourist attractions; and the grand prize in Samsonite’s annual Lego building contest is a trip to Denmark to see the tiny village of six hundred buildings, none of them more than three feet tall.

In contrast with the smooth, slick Lego plastic bricks are the wooden spools and dowels of Tinkertoy building kits. While both materials are pleasant to the touch, some model-makers prefer the texture and tradition of wood, and Tinkertoy is probably the most famous wooden building set. While it is one of the perennial popular gifts for a very young child, its wide range of models includes one with a motor that can engage the hands and mind of the most sophisticated modeler.

Now nearly sixty years old, the popular cylinder full of slotted color-tinted sticks, rods, and spools, is made today in Evanston, Illinois, by the Toy Tinker division of Questor Education Products Co. The basic principle behind Tinkertoy is geometric, depending upon the many possibilities of right, acute, and obtuse angles to fashion skeletal structures. With Tinkertoy, anything from a simple breath-powered windmill to an elaborate crank-driven merry-go-round, revolving “telescope,” or grain elevator can be made.

The toy was first produced in 1914 by an Evanston tombstone cutter named Charles H. Pajeau. One day as he was idly watching some children playing with pencils and empty thread spools, Pajeau saw the possibility of a new look in building sets. Instead of blocks or planks, his projected toy would include shallow spools with numerous holes along the periphery, where dowels with slotted ends could easily be inserted and removed.

Working in a rented garage behind his house, the stonecutter experimented with various kinds of accessories. When he finally had a toy he thought he could sell, he took it to the market. . . with terrible results.

It was not until Pajeau conceived a clever promotional plan that Tinkertoy began to move. Hiring some midgets to dress up like Santa’s elves and play with the toy, he staged a publicity stunt in a window of Grand Central Station and repeated it at Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Soon Tinkertoy began selling, and it never stopped.

The continued growth of the toy is phenomenal. Despite its familiarity, or perhaps because of it, it sells more than two million kits annually. As recently as 1971, volume was 25 percent ahead of the same period a year earlier. What’s more, says Questor, the number of Tinkertoys manufactured each season is larger than the total U.S. birth rate for any given year.

The basic Tinkertoy is the same today as when Pajeau first produced it in 1914, packaged in the same colorful canister, which can be used in making a water wagon and other models.

A few years ago, the company added a new product to the line, a Giant Tinkertoy set with 315 wooden parts, all of them sixteen times bigger than their counterparts in the regular Tinkertoys. With the giant kit, the child can put together (hopefully outdoors) a castle higher than the living-room ceiling or, if he wishes, a derrick with a nine-foot-long boom.

Though Toy Tinkers make other plastic playthings, Tinkertoy is the major item in the line. Distributed in every kind of toy outlet, the versatile construction set is a basic piece of play equipment in nursery schools and kindergartens, and finds its way into aerospace labs, university science lecture halls, and—not surprisingly—geometry classes.

Another popular wooden construction toy is Playskool’s Lincoln Logs series. Consisting of notched wooden lumber and green roof tiles, each Lincoln Logs kit enables the youngster to build rustic cabins, barns, and covered bridges just like the American pioneers.

The Lincoln Logs series claims a particularly prestigious inventor—John L. Wright, son of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The toy dates back to 1916, when John was in Tokyo with his father, who was supervising the building of the Imperial Palace Hotel. Though the details of the story have been buried with the years, a Playskool official believes that John Wright got the idea for Lincoln Logs from his father’s extensive use of timbers in the new hotel, which later helped it to withstand earthquakes that destroyed nearby buildings.

John L. Wright returned from Tokyo with an idea for a building toy which would capitalize on Americans’ love for wood, as well as the lure of early U.S. history. Going home to Merrill, Wisconsin, he attempted to market the toy under the firm name of John L. Wright Inc. He was unsuccessful at first, but in 1924, Wright arranged for the Chicago Dowel and Wood Products Co. to handle production and soon afterward the fame of the toy began to spread.

The name, Lincoln Logs, was perfect. As one Playskool employee put it, “Lincoln Logs is synonymous with plain log cabins. It is not a gimmicky name. It tells the parent he is buying a rugged meritorious staple toy.” Chicago Dowel, later called the Novel Toy Co., made the product until 1943, when Playskool bought it outright from Wright.

Once or twice since then, Playskool has tried to promote Lincoln Logs through tie-ins with other products, especially the Davy Crockett craze. “But it didn’t mean a damned thing,” said Playskool’s Bill Heck. “The sales strength of Lincoln Logs always comes back down to the same thing: fascination with the rustic wooden look and the rugged, simple pioneer life.”

Modelers choosing between buying Lego, Lincoln Logs, or Tinkertoy probably consider the look and feel of each toy first. After that, the choice is a question of how easy each is to work with. While the large, sturdy pieces of Tinkertoy are simple to handle, Lincoln Logs requires a greater sense of balance. Lego bricks snap together neatly, but a grown-up’s fingers can get sore from playing with them.

But these three products are easy to master in comparison with America’s most popular building toy, the Erector set. Made today by the Gilbert division of Gabriel Industries, Erector is also a toy of construction, this time in metal.

Basic Erector equipment consists of multiholed angled girders, nuts and bolts, and various accessories such as an electric motor, wheels, steel panels, pulleys, gears, and axles. A wealth of models can be constructed from the toy, including walking robots, drawbridges, and lunar modules. But while a toddler’s fingers can easily press together two Lego bricks or insert a Tinkertoy stick into a spoolhole, Erector requires the fledgling architect to read parts lists for each model, follow blueprints, and assemble girders with small wrenches, screwdrivers, and similar tools.

Erector is one year the senior of Tinkertoy, probably making it the oldest remaining American building toy. The toy’s inventor is easily the most colorful figure in the history of this country’s toy industry, the winner of an Olympic pole-vaulting championship who established two world records in his sport. A. C. Gilbert was first known in the business world as co-partner in the Mysto Manufacturing Co., which in its day supplied some of the finest magic equipment to both professional and amateur conjurers.

One day in the autumn of 1911, making one of his frequent trips on the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, Gilbert mused as he stared out the window. The Mysto firm was quite successful at the time, but Gilbert was not really satisfied. He could not envision the kind of success he yearned for in the magic business, because of its narrow market. Toys, on the other hand, could be sold to millions of children, and there would be a new crop coming up every year. . .

Still lost in thought, Gilbert subconsciously observed the sights along the rail line. New power lines were going up at the time, and girders were being erected all along the tracks. “I suppose the idea was germinating in my mind during several trips,” Gilbert was to write in his autobiography. But on that day, his thoughts suddenly took shape: young boys might well jump at the opportunity to build things out of toy girders.

Gilbert went home and immediately cut out some cardboard girders. He tried out different sizes, shapes, and lengths until he had a fairly good idea of what ought to go into his toy kit.

Next he went to his factory and had a machinist turn out a set of girders and parts in steel, following the cardboard prototypes. “When I saw that sample I knew I had something,” Gilbert later wrote. Sitting down with the miniature building set, he got out a box of nuts and bolts and tried to assemble a square girder. It wouldn’t work. Finally, Gilbert devised a lip along the edge of each piece to help in assembly. This lip, Gilbert later asserted, was the most important single factor in Erector’s subsequent success, since it enabled the modeler to make a square girder with four pieces attached by two bolts.

Gilbert’s colleagues were unimpressed by their partner’s proposed building toy, especially since they knew that making it would require a heavy investment in expensive presses, dies, and research. But Gilbert had faith in his idea, and his father supported him by buying out one of his partners’ interests in Mysto. Gilbert meanwhile purchased the other associate’s shares of stock.

Through 1912, Gilbert devoted his energies to planning and tooling up Erector. The following Toy Fair saw Mysto showing the new toy at the Broadway Central Hotel. The first sets included an electric motor which, according to Gilbert, made Erector the first construction toy to feature motion as part of its play value. That, plus the relative ease of assembly (two bolts to make a girder), earned the toy an enthusiastic reception at the Fair.

In those days, there was a Toy Fair in Chicago, in addition to the one in New York. Erector was shown there, too, again with good results. Gilbert returned to the Mysto plant with a stack of orders so big that his company could not possibly afford to fill the preseason demand.

Gilbert went to his bank to negotiate a loan. But in spite of the sheaf of orders he showed them, the bankers could not envision the large profits Gilbert expected by year’s end.

Luckily, Gilbert managed to talk William H. Douglass of the Mechanic’s Bank in New Haven into visiting the Mysto plant. Known as a man of considerable vision, Douglass took one look at Gilbert’s figures and the orders placed at the two Toy Fairs and told the young man to begin manufacturing Erectors.

By the end of the year, Erector sets were in the stores and Gilbert’s loan was completely repaid.