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The Man Who Changed How Boys
and Toys Were Made
by Bruce Watson
Viking Press;
ISBN: 0670031348
October 24, 2002
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A.C. Gilbert made more than toys. He manufactured future engineers
and scientists. For 50 years, toys made by the A.C. Gilbert Company stood
above the crowd of cheap doo-dads and gewgaws peddled to make a quick buck.
Gilbert himself -- athlete, magician, toy tycoon, radio pioneer -- was an
assemblage of diverse parts. An American original, he was part Horatio
Alger, part Jim Thorpe, and part P.T. Barnum. Conservative and
strait-laced, he nonetheless embraced the most progressive views on
education. In an age when learning was by rote, Gilbert encouraged children
to make up their education as they went along. He knew kids learned this
way because he had been a boy in the truest sense, in our truest, bluest
era.
Growing up in the 1890s, Gilbert came of age in a time almost devoid
of irony or cynicism. Concepts such as honor, duty, and success were touted
in public on a daily basis and except for Mark Twain, few dared snigger or
scoff. Terms like "plucky" and "alert" were applied to boys like Gilbert
without the slightest sarcasm. Pride was still pride and heroes were not
yet doomed to be toppled from their pedestals by scandal or skeletons in
closets. Stiffened by such moral fiber, Gilbert drove himself to become a
mass of muscle in a slight frame. From 1900 to 1910 he was America's
greatest amateur athlete. A national champion collegiate wrestler, he also
won sprints and hurdles, quarterbacked a college football team, and set
world records in the pole vault. But although he had devoutly followed the
Protestant work ethic, Gilbert then thumbed his nose at it.
In 1909, shelving his M.D. from Yale University, he chose to practice
boyhood instead of medicine. While others went to work, he made a living by
making and selling magic tricks. Two years later, he invented the Erector
set. It was an instant success, allowing him to remain a boy in a
businessman's body. Throughout his life, he had a childlike delight in fun
tempered by a business sense that made him a millionaire back when that term
was still gilded. While other toy makers were content to surrender their
toys to the market's whims, Gilbert created the modern toy industry by
selling fun all year round. He promoted his products with a dizzying array
of contests, monthly magazines, and engineering "institutes." In sprawling
full-page magazine adds filled with a homespun paternalism, Gilbert spoke to
boys as if they were his friends. And they wrote back, sending him some
300,000 letters a year, many of them signed "your loving son."
Between 1913 and 1966, Gilbert sold more than 30 million Erector
sets, earning its nickname as "the world's greatest toy." But it's hard to
consider it a toy. During the late 1920s, the top-of-the-line Erector set,
packed in a wooden box two-and-a-half feet square and eight inches thick,
weighed 150 pounds, and made hundreds of models including a five-foot long
zeppelin and a four-foot Hudson steam locomotive. The set sold for $70, a
month's wages during the Depression. But along with Erector Sets, A.C.
Gilbert made science in a box. He manufactured weather kits, astronomy
kits, chemistry sets, microscopes, telescopes, and mini-labs that let kids
play with physics, hydraulic engineering, mineralogy, sound, light,
telegraphy, civil engineering, magnetism, even atomic energy. Gilbert's
toys allowed boys (and any girls who could get their brothers' permission)
to apprentice at an early age, trying on the world of science and industry
to see how it fit. But above all, A.C. Gilbert made memories.
Excerpt from "The Man Who Changed HOw Boys and Toys Were Made" by Bruce
Watson (Viking-Penguin) pp. 4-5.
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