114 Fun Facts About Toy

Which department store hosted the first public demonstration of the Slinky in 1945?

Gimbels in Philadelphia let Richard James show the spring walking down a ramp, and customers snapped up all 400 Slinkys within 90 minutes.

Who ran the Slinky company after Richard James left for Bolivia?

Wife Betty James stayed with their six children, rebuilt the nearly bankrupt business and ran it until selling it in 1998.

Who created the Barbie doll?

Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara give paper dolls adult roles, and created a grown-up doll when store shelves were full of baby dolls.

Barbie was based on which German doll that its creator bought on a trip to Europe?

Bild Lilli was sold in German smoke shops as a gag gift for adult men, and Mattel later bought its rights and ended its production.

In the 1960s Random House novels, what is Barbie's full name?

Barbara Millicent Roberts split from Ken in a 2004 Mattel announcement after 43 years together, and the couple reunited on Valentine's Day 2011.

The name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?

Play well is what leg godt means, and the company was a carpenter's wooden-toy workshop before it moulded its first plastic bricks in 1949.

Lego's interlocking bricks were inspired by self-locking bricks patented by which English toymaker?

His Kiddicraft bricks dated from 1939; the Danish company began making its own version a decade later.

Which children's TV host's endorsement helped turn Play-Doh into a hit in the late 1950s?

Captain Kangaroo star Bob Keeshan agreed to use Play-Doh on his show once a week in return for a percentage of its sales.

What was the original name of the puzzle Ernő Rubik invented in 1974?

The Magic Cube stumped even its inventor: after scrambling his first one, Rubik needed roughly a month to work out how to solve it.

Roughly how many possible arrangements does a standard 3x3 Rubik's Cube have?

43 quintillion positions sound hopeless, yet in 2010 a team using computer time donated by Google proved that every one of them can be solved in 20 moves or fewer.

The Etch A Sketch was invented by André Cassagnes, an electrician from which country?

France's Magic Screen drew little interest at the 1959 Nuremberg Toy Fair, and the Ohio Art Company passed on it before a second look changed its mind.

What substance on the back of an Etch A Sketch screen does the stylus scrape away to draw a line?

Aluminium powder clings to the screen by static, so turning the toy over and shaking it lets tiny plastic beads spread a fresh coat and erase the picture.

Which toy was the first ever advertised on television?

Mr. Potato Head's 1952 commercials pitched the toy straight to children instead of their parents, and within months the kits had earned Hasbro more than $4 million.

Why did Hasbro start including a plastic spud body in its face-parts kit in 1964?

Rotting vegetables and safety rules drove the change, and the pieces were made less sharp at the same time because parents found the spikes dangerous.

Cabbage Patch Kids grew out of the fabric Little People dolls sold by which Georgia art student?

Xavier Roberts 'adopted out' his Little People with birth certificates, a concept influenced by Kentucky craft artist Martha Nelson Thomas's Doll Babies.

Which company first mass-produced Cabbage Patch Kids?

Coleco's plastic-headed dolls reached stores for Christmas 1983, and shoppers rioted to get one.

Which talk show host helped spark the 1996 Tickle Me Elmo frenzy?

Rosie O'Donnell's plug helped start a craze in which Christmas shoppers turned violent over the doll.

The Furby, released in 1998, starts life speaking only which made-up language?

Furbish gives way to English as a Furby 'grows', but the switch was pre-programmed: the toy's chip held a fixed stock of Furbish and English words.

Which US agency banned Furbies from its premises in 1999, fearing the toys could record and repeat secrets?

The NSA treated Furbies as recording devices, but the toy's maker, Tiger Electronics, said a Furby had absolutely no ability to record anything.

The name Tamagotchi is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and what?

Watch completes the name, and the toy's creators won a spoof 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for diverting millions of person-hours of work into raising virtual pets.

Silly Putty was created during World War II research into a substitute for what material?

Rubber it could never replace, and the goo sat without a use until marketer Peter Hodgson sold one-ounce blobs in plastic eggs for a dollar.

Silly Putty went into lunar orbit with the crew of which mission in 1968?

Apollo 8's astronauts used the putty's stickiness to hold their tools in place in zero gravity.

Which feature let the first Hot Wheels cars of 1968 roll faster than rival Matchbox cars?

Low-friction wheels made the cars zoom, and Matchbox's maker, caught out, hit back with its own faster Superfast line.

The first batch of Hot Wheels cars released in 1968 is known by collectors as what?

The Original Sweet 16 wore glittery Spectraflame paint over shiny metal, a finish Mattel later swapped for plainer solid colours on most of its cars.

The 1964 launch of G.I. Joe led to the coining of which now-universal toy term?

The original 12-inch line represented four branches of the U.S. armed forces; the 3.75-inch Cobra-fighting relaunch came in 1982.

Which name did Hasbro give its G.I. Joe line in 1970, as war toys lost favour during the Vietnam War?

Adventure Team Joe swapped the battlefield for civilian adventures, hunting for lost mummies instead of fighting wars.

On the 1902 hunt that gave the teddy bear its name, Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that was what?

Tied to a tree after a brutal chase, the bear seemed too unsporting a target for Roosevelt, yet it was killed anyway.

Which German firm produced a stuffed bear in 1902, almost the same moment as the American teddy bear?

Steiff started out selling a felt elephant as a pincushion, but children took it up as a toy, and the firm turned to stuffed animals long before its bear.

Beanie Babies are stuffed with what instead of conventional soft filling?

Plastic pellets filled the $5 toys, and maker Ty refused to supply big chain stores, selling Beanie Babies only through small gift and specialty shops.

Ty announced that certain Beanie Babies would be what, sending collectors into a frenzy?

Retired characters stopped being made, so collectors, never sure which Beanie Baby would vanish next, rushed to buy every one.

Which California toy company popularised the plastic hula hoop in 1958?

Wham-O started the craze by giving hoops away in neighbourhoods, and 25 million sold within four months.

The Frisbee's name comes from a Connecticut company that made what?

By the usual account, pies from Bridgeport's Frisbie company came in tins that college students tossed for fun, and the spelling was changed to Frisbee to avoid legal trouble.

Who designed the Pluto Platter in 1955, the plastic flying disc that became the Frisbee?

Fred Morrison first tossed a popcorn tin lid, then cake pans, and with his future wife sold the pans for 25 cents on Los Angeles beaches.

Buying rival Tru-Vue in 1951 gave View-Master the rights to which studio's characters?

Walt Disney characters soon filled View-Master reels, which had begun as scenic souvenirs such as the Grand Canyon, sold through photography shops.

Which setback helped end Duncan's yo-yo business in the 1960s?

A trademark lawsuit backfired: in 1965 an appeals court ruled that yo-yo had become an everyday word, and the legal costs helped put Duncan out of business.

The word yo-yo probably comes from a language of which country?

The Philippines was Pedro Flores's homeland, and he began making yo-yos in California in 1928 before Donald F. Duncan bought him out about a year later.

Parker Brothers borrowed the name for its Nerf ball from what?

Car enthusiasts' slang gave Nerf its name after Parker Brothers rejected the inventors' whole game and kept only its foam.

Super Soaker inventor Lonnie Johnson had worked as an engineer for which organisations?

The Air Force and NASA engineer was testing a cooling system that used water instead of CFCs when a nozzle he'd hooked to his bathroom sink shot a powerful stream across the room.

Under what name did the first Super Soaker go on sale in 1990?

Power Drencher was renamed Super Soaker in 1991 and, backed by a big television push, became a massive hit.

What is the nickname of the patient on the Operation game board?

Cavity Sam's game began as a student's electric metal maze, and toy designer Marvin Glass was unimpressed until he tried the probe himself and set off the alarm.

Before becoming the Magic 8 Ball, Bookman's fortune-telling toy flopped when sold inside what?

A crystal ball casing was Bookman's answer to the slow-selling Syco-Slate, a cylinder, yet it flopped as well.

Which company commissioned the first Magic 8 Ball as a promotional item?

Brunswick wanted only a promotional item, yet the toy caught on and was still selling about a million a year in the 2010s.

The original 1963 Easy-Bake Oven was heated by what?

Two incandescent light bulbs took the place of a heating element because Kenner expected parents to worry about safety and wanted to avoid burnt fingers.

Stretch Armstrong's gel filling is made from which boiled-down kitchen ingredient?

Corn syrup, boiled until thick, forms a slow-flowing gel, and the latex skin pulls the stretched toy back into shape.

Which studio bought the Troll doll brand in 2013 and turned it into a 2016 animated film?

DreamWorks bought the rights from the family of Thomas Dam, the Danish woodcutter who first carved the trolls for his own children.

Lincoln Logs were invented by the son of which famous architect?

Frank Lloyd Wright's son got the idea while watching workers build his father's earthquake-proof hotel in Japan.

The two boxers in Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots are Red Rocker and who?

Blue Bomber became a robot only after a real boxer's death stalled the toy, and designer Burt Meyer suggested robots instead of human fighters.

Kenner won the licence for Star Wars action figures in 1976 after which rival company turned it down?

Kenner could not make figures in time for Christmas 1977 and famously sold an empty-box Early Bird certificate instead.

What was Mattel's first successful toy, in 1947?

A ukulele called the Uke-A-Doodle followed the company's start making picture frames, whose leftover scraps it turned into dollhouse furniture.

Hasbro is a syllabic abbreviation of what original company name?

Hassenfeld Brothers began by selling textile remnants in Providence and moved into pencil cases and school supplies before it ever made toys.

Transformers began in 1984 as Hasbro's rebrand of Diaclone and Micro Change robots, then made by which Japanese company?

Takara's robots got a new story from Marvel Comics, which turned the toys into warring Autobots led by Optimus Prime and Decepticons led by Megatron.

Since 2002, in which city has the National Toy Hall of Fame been located?

The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, took over the hall in 2002, and it has since inducted an ordinary cardboard box and a plain stick.

Which toy train brand joined the Easy-Bake Oven in the National Toy Hall of Fame's class of 2006?

Lionel's first train, a box on wheels called the Electric Express, ran on a small motor Joshua Lionel Cowen had built for an electric fan.

Lite-Brite pegs glow when pushed through a sheet of what?

Black paper covers the lit panel in a toy inspired by a 1966 window display of hundreds of coloured lights.

What inside the 1960 Chatty Cathy doll played her phrases?

A vinyl record held lines voiced by June Foray, and that job led to her voicing Talky Tina, the menacing doll in a Twilight Zone episode.

Scott Stillinger invented the Koosh ball while trying to teach his children to do what?

Play catch kept going wrong for his kids, so his first prototype was a mass of rubber bands tied together, soft strands that small fingers could easily grab.

American Girl dolls were introduced in 1986 by the Pleasant Company, founded in which state?

Wisconsin's Pleasant Company grew from Pleasant Rowland's visit to Colonial Williamsburg, after which she paired each doll with books set in a period of American history.

The first Polly Pocket, made in 1983 by a toy designer for his daughter, was built inside what?

A powder compact held that first tiny dollhouse, and after Bluebird Toys took up the idea, the 1989 playsets came as plastic clamshell cases with inch-tall dolls.

Crayola's maker won a 1904 World's Fair gold medal for what?

Dustless chalk answered complaints about poor classroom chalk, part of a school-supply move by a firm then known for red paint used on barns.

Which British die-casting company introduced Matchbox cars?

Lesney Products went bankrupt, and the Matchbox brand ended up owned by Mattel, the maker of rival Hot Wheels.

Erector Sets were patented and first sold in 1913 by A. C. Gilbert of which Connecticut city?

New Haven: Gilbert got the idea for Erector watching steel girders go up to carry railway power lines.

The modern pogo stick was patented in 1920 in which country?

Germany: the name pogo is thought to come from the first letters of inventors Max Pohlig's and Ernst Gottschall's surnames.

The name of the block-stacking game Jenga comes from a word meaning 'to build' in which language?

Swahili: Leslie Scott grew up speaking it, and her family's block-stacking game began with wooden blocks bought from a sawmill in Ghana.

Engineer Denys Fisher built the prototypes of Spirograph using pieces from which construction toy?

Meccano: Fisher's engineering firm was making weapons parts for NATO when his drawing machines turned him into a toymaker.

Which Little Tikes ride-on outsold the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus in the United States in 1991?

The Cozy Coupe sold about 500,000 units that year, when the Accord managed 399,000. The red and yellow car first went on sale in 1979.

Before inventing the Erector Set, A. C. Gilbert won gold at the 1908 Olympics in which athletics event?

Pole vault gold, shared with fellow American Edward Cook, came five years before the toy went on sale. Gilbert also invented the box that vaulters plant the pole in.

The instant pets sold to children as Sea-Monkeys since the 1960s are really which tiny creatures?

Brine shrimp were first packaged this way in 1957 by Harold von Braunhut, who called the product Instant Life. The Sea-Monkeys name arrived in 1962.

London engraver John Spilsbury is credited with the first jigsaw puzzles, made around 1760 by cutting up what?

Printed maps mounted on wood and sawn along national borders were sold as geography lessons. The puzzles were known as dissections long before the jigsaw name.

Which fast-food chain offered miniature Teenie Beanie Babies with children's meals from 1997 to 2000?

McDonald's saw its biggest rush in the first year of the Happy Meal promotion. Demand fell with every later run, even though more of the toys were made each time.

Eleanor Abbott designed Candy Land in a 1940s hospital ward while recovering from which disease?

Polio had put Abbott on a ward full of children, and she created the game for them. With no reading needed, even the youngest patients could play.

Which party game became a hit after Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1966?

Twister had been attacked by rival toy makers as too risqué for family play. After that broadcast it took off, and 3 million games were sold in 1967.

Which free, no-frills plaything did the National Toy Hall of Fame induct in 2008 without a nomination?

The stick was praised by curators as possibly the world's oldest toy. The cardboard box had gone in the same way three years earlier.

Counting units made each year, Lego has been called the world's number-one manufacturer of which car part?

Tyres for toy vehicles leave the Lego factory at a rate of about 306 million a year, by a 2006 BusinessWeek count. Each is tiny, but the tally tops any full-size maker's.

Matchbox cars began when Jack Odell shrank a toy road roller so his daughter could take it where?

To school, where pupils could bring only toys small enough to fit inside a matchbox. Odell's scaled-down roller passed the test and gave the brand its name.

Which doll with red yarn hair and a triangle nose did illustrator Johnny Gruelle patent in 1915?

Raggedy Ann got her name from two James Whitcomb Riley poems, The Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie. Gruelle moved to protect the name weeks after filing his patent.

Which board game grew out of The Landlord's Game, patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904?

Monopoly, sold by Parker Brothers from 1935, was based on a game Magie designed to warn against land-grabbing. Her version was meant to promote the tax ideas of the economist Henry George.

Ernő Rubik built the first prototype of his famous cube while teaching design in which European capital?

Budapest was where Rubik taught at the applied arts academy and built geometric models as a hobby. After first scrambling his wooden prototype, he needed a month to solve it.

What did the first Barbie doll wear when it debuted at the New York Toy Fair in March 1959?

A striped swimsuit in a zebra pattern, worn with a topknot ponytail, was the whole first look. Buyers could choose a blonde or a brunette.

Ralph Baer, co-creator of the electronic toy Simon, is widely known as the father of what?

Video games reached living rooms through Baer's prototype, which Magnavox released in 1972 as the Odyssey, the first home console. Simon followed later that decade.

Kewpie dolls, based on Rose O'Neill's 1909 comic-strip characters, take their name from which Roman god?

Cupid gave the winged baby figures both their name and their look. O'Neill said the idea for the characters had come to her in a dream.

Which 1975 fad by ad man Gary Dahl came in a carrier with air holes and straw bedding?

Pet Rock was dreamed up in a bar while Dahl's friends complained about their real animals. He launched it at a San Francisco trade show and was swamped with orders.

The 1990s playground craze Pogs took its name from a Hawaiian brand of which product?

Fruit juice sold as POG blended passionfruit, orange and guava, and children flipped the caps from its bottles. The game was played that way long before anyone packaged it.

The teddy bear that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh was bought in 1921 from which London department store?

Harrods sold the bear to A. A. Milne as a present for his son Christopher Robin. The Winnie half of the name came from a real bear the family saw at London Zoo.

The interlocking design of Lincoln Logs was based on the architecture of which Tokyo landmark?

The Imperial Hotel stood on interlocking beams meant to ride out earthquakes, and it survived the Tokyo quake of 1923. The toy's inventor had worked on the building.

In the film Citizen Kane, the dying word Rosebud turns out to be the name of which childhood toy?

A sled with Rosebud as its trade name is what the eight-year-old Kane was riding on the day he was sent away. Staff clearing his mansion throw it into a furnace, none the wiser.

The chain-reaction board game Mouse Trap was inspired by the contraption cartoons of which American artist?

Rube Goldberg never earned a cent from it: designer Marvin Glass admitted the debt but refused to pay royalties. The elderly cartoonist chose not to sue.

Which backyard game did US regulators ban from sale in 1988 after thousands of injuries?

Lawn darts had heavy pointed tips, and at least three children's deaths were blamed on them. A bereaved father's campaign pushed the safety commission to act.

Hasbro could spot copies of the original G.I. Joe by a cheek scar and which flaw on the right hand?

A misplaced thumbnail, set on the underside of the thumb, began as a sculpting slip. Hasbro kept it because, like the scar, it helped win cases against cheap imitations.

Brooklyn couple Morris and Rose Michtom, makers of one of the first teddy bears, founded which toy company?

Ideal went on to make the Betsy Wetsy doll, which stayed in production for more than 50 years. The name passed to Mattel in 1997.

View-Master reels were introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair as an alternative to which souvenir?

Postcards were the main business of Sawyer's, the photo firm that sold the viewer. The 3D reels soon overtook the flat cards that had paid its bills.

Which range of chunky Lego bricks, launched in 1969, is made for toddlers too young for the standard ones?

Duplo bricks are twice the size of standard ones in every dimension, which makes them hard to swallow. The name comes from the Latin for double, and hollow studs let the two kinds lock together.

Which Kyoto company, founded in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards, sold toys such as the Ultra Hand?

Nintendo spent decades on cards before toys such as the extending Ultra Hand, designed by Gunpei Yokoi. He went on to create the Game Boy.

Wooly Willy, a 1955 toy, lets children draw hair on a bald cartoon face using a magnetic wand and what?

Metal filings left over from making other toys gave the Herzog brothers of Pennsylvania the idea. The wand drags them into beards, moustaches and shaggy eyebrows.

Matryoshka dolls, which nest one inside another, were first made in the 1890s in which country?

Russia's first nesting set was carved by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by the folk painter Sergey Malyutin. The name is a pet form of the woman's name Matryona.

In the first Transformers toy line, Autobot leader Optimus Prime disguises himself as which vehicle?

A semi-truck, probably modelled on a 1980 Freightliner, hides more play: its trailer opens into a combat deck with a small scout robot inside.

Ever since marketer Peter Hodgson first packaged it in 1950, Silly Putty has been sold inside what?

A plastic egg holding an ounce of putty cost a dollar, and Hodgson borrowed $147 to pack the first batch. A magazine mention then sold 250,000 eggs in three days.

Which optical toy did Scottish scientist David Brewster invent and patent under a name he coined in 1817?

Kaleidoscope was a word Brewster coined from the Greek for beautiful, form and to look. He had noticed the effect while experimenting with polarised light.

The Wiffle ball, invented in Connecticut in 1953, takes its name from whiff, a sandlot term for what?

A strikeout was a whiff to David Mullany's 12-year-old son and his friends. The ball's eight oblong holes let even a child throw a sharp curve.

Chutes and Ladders is the American version of Snakes and Ladders, a game that originated in which country?

India knew the game as Moksha Patam, in which ladders stood for virtues and snakes for vices. Milton Bradley's gentler American edition dates from 1943.

Which Japanese electronics giant launched Aibo, a robot dog for the home, in 1999?

Sony sold out its first online batch of Aibo in 20 minutes. It dropped the dog in 2006 to cut costs, then announced a new generation in 2017.

Radio Flyer founder Antonio Pasin began building wooden toy wagons in 1917 in which American city?

Chicago shops bought the first wagons from Pasin, who had arrived from Italy at 16. He later borrowed the car industry's methods to stamp them from steel.

Which toy company made the original Tickle Me Elmo, which it began developing as a Tasmanian Devil doll?

Tyco lacked the Sesame Street plush licence at first, so the giggling toy began life as Tickle Me Taz. Winning those rights changed the plan.

Mattel's green toy Slime, introduced in 1976, was sold in a miniature version of what?

A trash can held the oozing green goo, made mostly from guar gum. A board game with a foot-tall, slime-dribbling monster followed in the late 1970s.

K'Nex inventor Joel Glickman hit on his rod-and-connector idea while toying with what at a wedding?

Drinking straws bent into shapes set Glickman wondering what he could build if they snapped together. The finished sets reached American toy shops in 1992.

Which card game did Merle Robbins invent in Ohio in 1971 and first sell from his barbershop?

Uno means one in Spanish and Italian, the word a player must call when down to a single card. The Robbins family mortgaged their home to print the first 5,000 copies.

A. C. Gilbert's 1950 Atomic Energy Lab, a science kit for children, included real ore of which element?

Uranium ore came in four glass jars, with a Geiger counter and a cloud chamber that made particle trails visible. The kit cost $49.50, a small fortune for a toy in 1950.

Which company introduced the Red Ryder BB gun, named after a comic-strip cowboy, in 1940?

Daisy began as a Michigan windmill maker that gave away an air rifle with each sale. The guns proved so popular that by 1895 the firm had dropped windmills altogether.

Which non-drying modelling clay did art teacher William Harbutt formulate in Bath, England, in 1897?

Plasticine was made for Harbutt's sculpture students and went into factory production in 1900. Its refusal to dry out later made it the stuff of Wallace and Gromit.

Which Crayola colour was renamed Peach in the early 1960s, partly in response to the civil rights movement?

Flesh, called Flesh Tint until 1949, kept its shade and lost only the name. Crayola made a similar change in 1999, when Indian Red became Chestnut.

Which Japanese toymaker launched the Tamagotchi, a pocket-sized digital pet that needs feeding, in 1996?

Bandai's Aki Maita created it with Akihiro Yokoi of the firm WiZ. Owners raise the creature through its life stages using just three buttons.

Queen Mary's Dolls' House, a 1920s miniature with working lifts and plumbing, is shown at which royal castle?

Windsor has shown the house since 1925. Architect Edwin Lutyens gave it electric lights, flushing toilets and a library of tiny books by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle.

Brio, best known for its wooden toy trains, was founded by a basket maker in 1884 in which country?

Sweden's Ivar Bengtsson started the firm in the small southern town of Boalt. The wooden railway that made its name did not arrive until 1958.

Tonka trucks were first made in the 1940s by Mound Metalcraft, a garden-tool firm in which US state?

Minnesota's Lake Minnetonka, close to the factory, supplied the brand name. The founders had set out to make garden tools and took on toy trucks as a sideline.

In the game of marbles, what is the traditional name for the larger marble a player shoots with?

A taw, also called a shooter, is flicked at the smaller target marbles, which players call ducks. The old game of ring taw is named after it.