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 after it was shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair, 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."
Frank Hornby of Liverpool had no training in math or physics and was working as a bookkeeper around 1900 when he started making sheet-metal toys for his children. He found that metal strips and plates drilled with evenly spaced holes, joined by small nuts and bolts, could build almost anything. With his boss's support, he patented the system in 1901, and it became Meccano. Then he did it twice more, launching Hornby toy trains in 1920 and die-cast Dinky Toys in 1934. Meanwhile Meccano Magazine, begun in 1916, built a community of fans.
5The 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.
6A 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.
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 made tricks possible. 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 about bamboo rings used for exercise in Australia. They made their hoops from Marlex, a new Phillips Petroleum plastic, named them after the Hawaiian hula, and seeded the market by giving hoops away in neighborhoods. Executives even carried hoops onto airplanes so people would ask about them. Wham-O said it sold 25 million within months, and sales reached $45 million in the first year. Not everyone approved: Japanese officials banned public hula hooping in the 1950s.
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 produce action figures in time for Christmas. So Kenner sold a promise. Its Early Bird Certificate Package held a display stand, a club membership card, stickers and a mail-in certificate for four figures, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2, to arrive between February and June 1978. Big retailers such as Sears and J.C. Penney refused to stock it, and only a few hundred thousand kits sold. Decades later, the package became a coveted collector's item.
6The 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.
The must-have toy of 1996 began about four years earlier as Tickle Me Chimp, by Ron Dubren and Greg Hyman. Toy designers next turned it into Tickle Me Taz, after the Tasmanian Devil, before Tyco Preschool settled on Elmo from Sesame Street. Press its tummy and the 16-inch doll giggled; on the third tickle it shook and laughed wildly. It reached stores in July 1996 for about $28, and by December Tyco planned to ship a million while admitting that would not meet demand. A charity auction had already sold one for $750.
8A virtual pet first designed to be worn like a watch
On the tile: Tamagotchi1996
Toy executive Akihiro Yokoi said his idea came from an advertisement in which a boy could not take his pet turtle on vacation. Working with Aki Maita of Bandai, he first imagined the pet as a wristwatch and named it Tamagotchi, from tamago, egg, and uotchi, watch, before switching to a keychain. On its first day of U.S. sales, May 1, 1997, FAO Schwarz in San Francisco sold all 3,000 by 3 p.m. That year Yokoi and Maita won a satirical Ig Nobel Prize for the hours lost to virtual pet care.
9Furby was banned as a spy, but it could not record
On the tile: Furby1999Myth busted
In 1999 the National Security Agency banned Furbies from its headquarters, worried the chattering toys might record and repeat classified information, and a naval shipyard told security staff to seize any they saw. The fear was unfounded. A Furby started out speaking its own language, Furbish, and seemed to pick up English over time, but its words were preprogrammed and it had no ability to record anything. Its maker, Tiger Electronics, issued a statement that "Furby is not a spy." The craze was real, though: about 14 million sold in 1999 alone.
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 workshop, founded by Elliot and Ruth Handler with their friend Harold "Matt" Matson. The name was fashioned from Matson and Elliot, leaving out Ruth, who would later invent Barbie. The first products were picture frames, and Elliot soon started making dollhouse furniture from the frame scraps. After the Handlers bought out Matson, Mattel turned to toys. Its first major success, in 1947, was the Uke-A-Doodle, a plastic ukulele designed to make music fun for young children.
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, boyhood friends Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin ran a business training falcons. To teach the birds to dive at prey, they lobbed meatballs with a homemade slingshot, and one prospective customer said he did not want a bird but would like a slingshot like that. So they bought a band saw and made slingshots in the Pasadena garage of Knerr's parents. They started the company in 1948 and named it Wham-O for the sound their first product 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.
Antonio Pasin was 16 when he arrived in New York from Italy in 1914, after his family sold their mule to pay for the trip. 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 of Liberty. By about 1930 he was stamping wagons from metal on assembly lines, which earned him the nickname Little Ford. He called the wagon the Radio Flyer, after two obsessions of the day, radios and airplanes. Priced under $3, it sold about 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.
8A toy company founded to help a town weather hard times
On the tile: Fisher-Price1930
Fisher-Price was founded in East Aurora, New York, in 1930, during the Great Depression. Herman Fisher brought experience in advertising and selling games, while Irving Price and Helen Schelle had worked in retail businesses that sold toys. Price's wife, the children's book illustrator Margaret Evans Price, helped design the first line. The founders believed children love toys "that do something new and surprising and funny." That first year the company made 16 toys, including Granny Doodle and Doctor Doodle, wooden ducks that quacked when pulled. Fisher-Price is still headquartered in East Aurora.
Hans Beck, a cabinetmaker who built model airplanes, began designing toy figures for the German company Brandstätter in 1971, though the owner was not very interested at first. Then the oil crisis of 1973 and 1974 sent plastic prices soaring, and Brandstätter's large plastic toys became too expensive. Beck was asked for a play system offering high value through relatively small parts. Launched in 1974 as Playmobil, his figures stood just under 3 inches tall and were promoted as ideal for a child's grip. The first sets were knights, construction workers and Native Americans. By 2009, more than 2.2 billion figures had been made.