Toys have surprisingly grown-up histories. These tiles follow classic playthings, the people who dreamed them up, the crazes that emptied store shelves and the companies behind them. Meet an ivory doll with jointed limbs from ancient Rome, a NASA engineer who found a water blaster at his bathroom faucet, a kaleidoscope craze that outran its inventor's patent, and a toy giant that began by selling scraps of cloth.
Every tile in a Toys game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Classic Toys
nine stories
1The bear behind the teddy was no cuddly cub
On the tile: Teddy Bear1902Myth busted
The popular picture has Theodore Roosevelt sparing a helpless cub. The real animal, cornered near Onward, Mississippi, on November 14, 1902, was a full-grown black bear of about 225 pounds. Hunting guides, including Holt Collier, tracked it with hounds and tied the injured bear to a tree for the president to shoot. Roosevelt considered that unsportsmanlike and refused, then asked that it be put out of its misery. Clifford Berryman's cartoons made the bear small and cute, and New York shopkeepers Morris and Rose Michtom got Roosevelt's permission to sell a stuffed Teddy's Bear.
In 1938, Harold Graves, president of Sawyer's Photographic Services, visited Oregon Caves National Monument and noticed a fellow camera buff, William Gruber, using two cameras strapped together. Gruber explained that he wanted to update the stereoscopes of 19th-century drawing rooms with three-dimensional color slides and a new handheld viewer. By the next morning the two men had a deal. View-Master debuted at the 1939 New York World's Fair with reels of scenic attractions, and its sales exploded after the company acquired stereo rights to Disney characters in 1951.
3An ivory doll with jointed limbs from ancient Rome
On the tile: Roman Doll2nd century AD
In 1889, excavations for the foundations of Rome's Palace of Justice uncovered two sarcophagi side by side, identified by their inscriptions as belonging to a man, Crepereius Euhodus, and a young woman, Crepereia Tryphaena. Her coffin was still intact. Among her gold jewelry, precious stones and an amber distaff lay a finely carved ivory doll whose arms and legs are jointed, along with tiny toiletries. The set dates to about the middle of the second century AD and is displayed at the Centrale Montemartini, part of Rome's Capitoline Museums.
Around 1760, the English mapmaker John Spilsbury pasted one of his maps onto a board and cut around the borders, creating what the National Toy Hall of Fame calls the first jigsaw puzzle. British makers followed with puzzles meant to teach geography, history and Scripture, and the first American puzzles, around 1850, were also maps cut from wood. The real heyday came in the 1930s, when die-cut cardboard puzzles were cheap enough for most Americans even during the Great Depression, and newsstands sold a new puzzle every week.
Pretzel vendors on New York City streets inspired toymakers at Kenner to create the Easy-Bake Oven. To reduce the chance of burned fingers, Kenner skipped a heating element and warmed the oven with two ordinary 100-watt light bulbs. It came with cake and cookie mixes, a recipe book, utensils and slide-through pans, dressed in fashionable turquoise and pale yellow. More than 23 million have been sold since 1963. In 2003, thirty well-known chefs, including Bobby Flay and Rick Bayless, cooked dishes such as lobster pies in Easy-Bake Ovens.
Rubber toys appeared in the late 1800s, after Charles Goodyear's process made rubber easy to shape. The earliest rubber ducks were cast solid as chew toys, and they did not float. By the 1940s the duck had become the familiar floating yellow bird with an orange bill, and for decades most have been made of vinyl rather than rubber. Its bathtub fame was sealed in 1970, when Ernie sang "Rubber Duckie" on Sesame Street. The song reached number 16 on Billboard's chart, and the duck joined the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2013.
When Hasbro introduced G.I. Joe in 1964, it branded him an action figure to distinguish him from dolls, a term now used for hundreds of other toys. Named after the ordinary soldiers of World War II, he wore uniforms representing the U.S. military and had 21 moving parts. As American involvement in Vietnam made war toys less appealing, Hasbro remade him in 1970 as a Land Adventurer who recovered lost mummies and rescued the environment. By late 2004, Hasbro had sold more than 400 million G.I. Joe figures.
In 2008, the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, inducted a toy that is natural and free: the stick. The museum called it possibly the world's oldest toy, noting that animals play with sticks too. In a child's hands a stick becomes a sword, a magic wand, a fishing pole or a light saber. It joined another toy of pure imagination, the cardboard box, inducted a few years earlier. The museum also notes that A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, invented Poohsticks, racing sticks down moving water, for his son.
Mattel cofounder Elliot Handler wanted die-cast cars that would surpass the popular English Matchbox brand, and he wanted them to look like the customized cars he saw on California highways. Mattel enlisted Harry Bradley, an auto designer from Chevrolet, and gave the little cars low-friction axles and a bouncy suspension built for speed. The first 16 models arrived in 1968, and sales topped 16 million in the first year. Mattel went on to produce more than three billion Hot Wheels cars, more than the combined output of the Big Three automakers.
Margarete Steiff, born in Giengen, Germany, in 1847, had polio from the age of 18 months, yet became an independent businesswoman with her own felt clothing shop. In 1880 she saw a pattern for a small fabric elephant in a fashion journal and sewed one as a pincushion. Children adopted it as a toy, and Steiff counts that year as its founding. In 1902 her nephew Richard designed a plush bear with movable arms and legs, and an American dealer ordered 3,000. In 1907 the company made 973,999 teddy bears.
Rose O'Neill, a self-taught illustrator and the only woman on the staff of the humor magazine Puck, introduced her cherub-like Kewpies in the Christmas 1909 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. Bisque Kewpie dolls followed in 1912, and she and her sister traveled to Germany to sculpt them and show the artists how to paint them. Her Kewpie rights earned an estimated $1.4 million. She championed women's suffrage in her cartoons, and at a 1914 rally in Nashville, aviator Katherine Stinson flew over the crowd and dropped Kewpie dolls wearing sashes for the right to vote.
3The Olympic vaulter who stood up for Christmas toys
On the tile: A. C. Gilbert1918
Alfred Carlton Gilbert tied for first in the pole vault at the 1908 London Olympics, earned a medical degree at Yale, and launched his Erector Set in 1913. During World War I, the Council of National Defense banned the manufacture of nonessential items, and toymakers feared ruin. In 1918 Gilbert carried samples from many manufacturers into a meeting with cabinet members, and Commerce Secretary William Redfield recalled learning engineering on a toy steam engine. "The toys did it," Gilbert said. A Boston Post caption called him "the man who saved Christmas for the children."
4The teacher who turned wallpaper cleaner into Play-Doh
On the tile: Kay Zufall1956
Kutol Products of Cincinnati made a soft compound for wiping soot off wallpaper, but as homes switched from coal to cleaner oil, gas and electric heat, the product lost its market. Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher and the sister-in-law of Kutol's Joseph McVicker, read that wallpaper cleaner could be used for modeling projects and tested it with children, who loved it. She told McVicker, and she and her husband, Robert, suggested a new name: Play-Doh. It debuted as a toy in 1956 and has since sold billions of cans.
5A NASA engineer's heat pump became the Super Soaker
On the tile: Lonnie Johnson1990
In the early 1980s, engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter by day and, at night, on a heat pump that used water vapor instead of Freon. A nozzle hooked to his bathroom faucet shot a stream across the room and inspired a water blaster. His prototype, built from PVC pipe and a soda bottle, became the Super Soaker, which went on sale in 1990 and became America's No. 1 selling toy. Johnson holds more than 100 U.S. patents and entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.
LEGO's own history credits a Briton, Hilary Fisher Page, and his company Kiddicraft with inventing the plastic bricks that Ole Kirk Kristiansen and his son Godtfred were shown in the late 1940s. The Danish company redesigned them and in 1949 launched Automatic Binding Bricks, an English name honoring the Allied forces who liberated Europe. In the late 1950s LEGO asked Kiddicraft whether it objected. It did not, and wished LEGO luck, since its own bricks had not enjoyed much success. In 1981 LEGO bought the rights from Page's descendants.
Ruth Handler, a cofounder of Mattel, watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls and decided girls would have more fun with a three-dimensional doll. Baby dolls filled store shelves in the 1950s, so Handler created a grown-up doll with a stunning wardrobe and named it after Barbara. Barbie drew little interest at the 1959 New York Toy Fair, yet within a year she became what the National Toy Hall of Fame calls the biggest-selling fashion doll of all time. She has since changed jobs more than 75 times, from paleontologist to presidential candidate.
In 1952, Jack Odell, a partner in the English die-casting firm Lesney Products, learned that his daughter's school allowed students to bring only toys that fit inside a matchbox. He scaled down Lesney's toy road roller, packed it in a matchbox and sent her off to school. The Matchbox car was born. A cement mixer, a double-decker London bus and a palm-sized racecar followed, and in 1960 Lesney exported 70 million tiny vehicles. In 1953 Odell also designed a model of Queen Elizabeth II's golden coronation coach, which sold more than a million.
French electrician André Cassagnes built a drawing toy from glass, aluminum powder and a joystick, and called it L'Écran Magique, the Magic Screen. At the 1959 toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany, manufacturers passed, concluding he wanted too much money. The Ohio Art Company paid $25,000 for the license, more than it had ever paid, renamed the toy Etch A Sketch, and replaced the joystick with two knobs so it would resemble the exciting new gadget of the day, a television. Saturation advertising on TV made it a must-have for Christmas 1960.
Scottish scientist David Brewster patented the kaleidoscope in 1817, but one of his instruments was shown to London opticians before any number could be made for sale, and copies spread fast. Brewster later reported an estimate that no fewer than 200,000 kaleidoscopes sold in London and Paris in three months. His chosen manufacturer, Philip Carpenter, could not meet demand. The craze delighted rich and poor, young and old, yet Brewster judged that perhaps not one thousand of those instruments were built on proper scientific principles, and the invention brought him no direct financial reward.
Toys like the yo-yo appear on Greek vases from about 2,500 years ago, and the name itself came from the Philippines. In 1928 Pedro Flores, a Filipino immigrant, opened the Yo-yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara, California. His yo-yos looped the string around the axle instead of knotting it, which let a yo-yo sleep, spinning at the end of the string, and opened the way to more tricks. Flores promoted yo-yo contests. Entrepreneur Donald Duncan bought his company, hired Flores as one of his first demonstrators and turned the toy into a national craze with mass advertising.
During World War II, two chemists hunting for synthetic rubber, James Wright at General Electric and Earl Warrick at Dow Corning, separately mixed silicone oil with boric acid. The goo bounced and slowly oozed but made a poor rubber. In 1949 an advertising consultant, Peter Hodgson, saw it, renamed it Silly Putty and sold it in plastic eggs for Easter 1950. After a New Yorker article that August, orders topped 250,000 in three days. Neither chemist got rich; Warrick received one dollar for his patent. In 1968 it orbited the moon aboard Apollo 8.
Children had played with hoops for centuries, and Wham-O's founders heard from an Australian friend about bamboo rings used in exercise classes there. They made their hoops from Marlex, a new Phillips Petroleum plastic, named them after the Hawaiian hula, and promoted them person to person in parks, on playgrounds and on college campuses. Wham-O says it sold 25 million in less than four months, and the National Toy Hall of Fame calls the hoop the biggest fad of the 1950s. Not everyone approved: Japanese officials banned public hula hooping during that decade.
In 1975, Gary Dahl was an advertising executive in Los Gatos, California, when he came up with the Pet Rock. The smooth stones came packed in a cardboard box with a tongue-in-cheek instruction pamphlet for their care and feeding, and they required no work and no time commitment. Dahl estimated he had sold 1.5 million at roughly $4 each by the time the fad fizzled. His way with words lasted: in 2000 he was a grand prize winner in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which rewards dreadful prose.
Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, and its toy licensee, Kenner, could not make action figures in time for Christmas, even after cutting production time to seven months. So Kenner sold a promise. Its Early Bird Certificate Package held a Star Wars Space Club membership card, a cardboard display stand, stickers and a mail-in certificate for four figures, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2, promised before spring 1978. In early 1978 a news report counted several hundred thousand certificate holders still waiting. Today the package is a cherished collector's item.
7The Magic Cube that sold 100 million in two years
On the tile: Rubik's Cube1980
Hungarian design teacher Ernő Rubik assembled his first cube puzzle in 1974 and called it the Magic Cube. His key insight was that small blocks hinged on a rounded core could move freely while the whole puzzle kept its cube shape. After the Ideal Toy company renamed it Rubik's Cube and put it in stores in 1980, puzzlers bought 100 million within two years. The craze even produced its own complaints, cube's thumb and Rubik's wrist, and in the 1980s support groups helped cubaholics kick the habit.
Cabbage Patch Kids began as handmade cloth dolls by Georgia artist Xavier Roberts, who insisted they were not sold but adopted, with each new parent raising a right hand to vow undying love. After Coleco began mass-producing $25 plastic-headed versions, the 1983 holiday season turned frantic. In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a crowd of 1,000 that had waited eight hours turned violent at a Zayre store, and a manager armed himself with a baseball bat to defend his counter. Coleco said it was chartering planes to fly in 200,000 more dolls a week from Hong Kong.
9A virtual pet first designed to be worn like a watch
On the tile: Tamagotchi1996
Tamagotchi, created by Akihiro Yokoi of WiZ and Aki Maita of Bandai, went on sale in Japan on November 23, 1996, and became a big fad, especially among high school girls. The digital pet was first imagined as something worn like a wristwatch, which explains the name: tamago, Japanese for egg, plus uotchi, watch. It ended up keychain-sized and reached the United States on May 1, 1997. That year Yokoi and Maita won a satirical Ig Nobel Prize in economics for diverting millions of hours of work into caring for virtual pets.
During the global economic crisis, Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen began making wooden toys in 1932, along with ladders, ironing boards and Christmas tree stands. Asked to guarantee a loan, one of his siblings replied, "Can't you find something more useful to do?" In 1935, focusing on toys, he needed a new name. According to the company's own history, he supposedly held a naming contest among his employees, with a bottle of his homemade wine as the prize, and won it himself by playing with the Danish words leg godt, meaning play well.
Mattel began in 1945 in a Los Angeles garage, founded by Elliot and Ruth Handler with an old friend, Harold "Matt" Matson. The name was fashioned from Matson and Elliot, leaving out Ruth, who would later come up with Barbie. The first products were picture frames, and Elliot soon designed dollhouse furniture from the leftover wood and plastic. Before long, poor health forced Matson to sell his share to the Handlers. The company's first big hit came in 1947: the Uke-A-Doodle, a miniature plastic ukulele that drew large orders.
In 1923, three Hassenfeld brothers who had emigrated from Poland started a business in Providence, Rhode Island, selling textile remnants. They used the cloth to cover pencil boxes, then began making the boxes themselves. When their pencil supplier raised prices and started selling cheaper boxes of its own, Henry Hassenfeld vowed to make pencils, and in 1935 the company did. Its first toys included doctor and nurse kits and modeling clay. Hasbro kept making pencils until 1980, when it spun off Empire Pencil, by then the nation's largest pencil maker.
Before Hula Hoops and Frisbees, Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin were University of Southern California friends who liked hunting with falcons. To fling bits of meat up to their birds, they used a homemade wooden slingshot, and slingshots became their first product. The pair bought a saw from Sears on the installment plan, made slingshots in a garage and sold them by mail to readers of sporting magazines such as Field & Stream. They started the company in 1948 and named it Wham-O for the sound a slingshot made when it hit its target.
Just after World War II, three Minnesotans founded Mound Metalcraft in the basement of a local schoolhouse to make garden tools. In 1947 they bought a competing company and inherited a toy steam shovel in the deal, which gave them the idea of making toys. Their pressed-steel digger and working crane sold 37,000 units in the first year, so they abandoned garden equipment and renamed the company Tonka, after nearby Lake Minnetonka. The bright yellow Mighty Dump Truck, introduced in 1965, became Tonka's best-selling toy for the rest of the century.
6Lionel's first train was built to sell something else
On the tile: Lionelc. 1900
Around 1900, Joshua Lionel Cowen designed his first electric train as an attraction for a store window, meant to advertise another product. Instead, customers asked to buy the train. Cowen founded the Lionel Manufacturing Company to meet the demand and built its name on detailed trains, smooth three-rail track and transformers that let children control the speed. Advertisements promised that Lionel trains made a boy feel like a man and a man feel like a boy. In the 1950s, Lionel accounted for about two-thirds of all toy trains sold in the United States.
Antonio Pasin was 16 when he arrived in New York from Italy in 1914, after his parents sold the family mule to pay his passage. Working in Chicago, he built little red wagons at night and sold them by day, and in 1923 he founded the Liberty Coaster Company, named for the statue he had admired in New York Harbor. In 1930 he began mass-producing a stamped-metal wagon called the Radio Flyer, a patriotic nod to a famous Italian invention, the radio. Priced under $3, it sold 1,500 a day even during the Great Depression.
Binney & Smith, maker of familiar red barn paint, entered the school supply business in 1900 after hearing teachers complain about poor-quality chalk. Adapting a black grease pencil used to mark containers, the company made nontoxic wax crayons in eight colors. Alice Binney coined the name Crayola from craie, French for chalk, and a word for oily, and the crayons went on sale in 1903 for a nickel a box. Color names changed with the times: Flesh became Peach in 1962, and Prussian Blue became Midnight Blue as people forgot the country.
9The oil crisis that shrank toys to Playmobil size
On the tile: Playmobil1974
The German company Geobra Brandstätter made hula hoops and other large plastic products. In 1971 its owner asked designer Hans Beck, a trained cabinetmaker who built model airplanes, to develop toy figures. Then the 1973 oil crisis drove up the cost of plastic, which is made from oil, pushing the company toward products that used less of it. Beck's figure, launched in 1974, stood 7.5 centimeters tall, fit well in a child's hand and could move its head, arms and legs. The first sets featured knights, construction workers and Native Americans. By 2009, about 2.2 billion had been sold.