The Birth of Barbie and Other Classics
Oh, his parts pop off at the push of a button--the bulging eyes, the ridiculous ears--and he chatters now, like some of his other cool toy friends, but don’t let any of that fool you. Mr. Potato Head is the same happy guy in a black bowler hat that he was when a New York man named George Lerner invented him in 1952. Lerner came up with the idea for the little guy after noticing how his kids loved playing with their food. The classic toy first was sold as pieces of a funny face that kids could stick into real vegetables. Only the rarest of toys have the same superstar status, popular decade after decade while staying true to their original designs.
Here is the story behind a few other enduring toy wonders:
* In the early 1900s, an inventor named A.C. Gilbert was fascinated by the use of steel girders in building construction. He was sure that kids were also interested in the phenomenon and in 1913 began selling Erector sets.
* John Lloyd Wright was fired by his famous father, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, from a building project in 1916. The younger Wright came up with an idea for a children’s toy, inspired by the interlocking beams used in his father’s design of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The toy was called Lincoln Logs in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in a log cabin.
* In 1943, Scottish engineer James Wright, who was working for General Electric, combined boric aid and silicone oil in a test tube. He tossed a glob of the gooey compound on the floor, and it bounced. Marketing expert Peter Hodgson named the compound Silly Putty, which was sold for the first time in 1950. His son, Peter Hodgson Jr., now a professor of Russian literature retired from UCLA, also worked in marketing Silly Putty.
* In 1958, two childhood friends heard that Australian children were using a bamboo ring for exercise. Arthur “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr, who had founded a company called Wham-O in San Gabriel, fashioned a loop of their own made of ash wood and bound with rawhide. In four months, Wham-O sold 25 million Hula-Hoops.
* In the late 1950s, Ruth Handler, a co-founder of a small toy company called Mattel, would take her young daughter, Barbara, to dime stores in Beverly Hills. Barbara would buy paper dolls and dress them up in the fashions of the day. In 1959, Handler unveiled a teenage fashion model doll named after her daughter and aimed at inspiring girls to dream of their futures. More than a billion Barbie dolls and products have been sold in more than 140 countries.
