Gilbert, a legendary American success story in the mid 20th century, was receding into the haze of history until late last year, when a witty and enjoyable biography appeared: “The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made” by Bruce Watson. Shortly thereafter, a December television movie, “The Man Who Saved Christmas,” brought Gilbert to life in the person of Jason Alexander. (Gilbert “saved Christmas” in 1918 by convincing the Council of National Defense to abandon a planned wartime ban on toy sales.)
Gilbert was many things–an Olympic gold medalist, a trained physician, a savvy marketer, one of the first radio broadcasters, a stage magician–but above all else he was a nonstop toy inventor. His greatest creation was the Erector set: that collection of steel girders, nuts, bolts, plus miscellaneous wheels and pulleys that could be used to build anything from a yard-high Ferris wheel to a suspension bridge across your living room. Throughout his life he continued to tinker at the leading edge of toys–toward the end of his career introducing the “U-238 Atomic Energy Lab” that included both a Geiger counter and a “Gilbert Cloud Chamber” to detect the passage of subatomic particles.
It was another toy inventor who introduced me to the Gilbert revival–a Californian named Steve Beck who, like Gilbert, has a range of talents. Beck is a long-time video artist whose works have been displayed in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre. As an engineer, his work with video display cards is legendary in the Apple Macintosh community. Yet Beck consistently returns to inventing toys, currently heading research and development for 4Kids Entertainment, the toy company behind the Pokemon and now Yu-Gi-Oh! phenomena. “Building toys is a challenge that speaks to the child in all of us,” Beck says, “which is a very fundamental place. And it’s also a kind of magic.”
Toy inventors like Gilbert and Beck have certain things in common: an innate playfulness, persistent curiosity, and the engineer’s drive to solve problems. And toys present plenty of engineering problems: once you have a great idea, the challenge remains to design it for maximum durability and minimum cost. These days that often requires a background in electrical engineering, as toys increasingly contain multiple chips and tiny motors. Just as in real life, energy efficiency has become a major issue. Although battery technology has improved dramatically–“Batteries Not Included” is fading as a phrase, because batteries have longer shelf lives–“we still need more efficient toys,” says Beck.
For several years Intel maintained a team to support the use of their chips in toys, and some toy engineers attend technology industry conferences as diligently as do designers of grown-up hardware. At this year’s Toy Fair, yet more leading edge technology appeared, such as “shape-memory alloy actuators”–metal that can be bent into any shape but which returns to its original form when electric current passes through it. Or a new ink that conducts electricity, making possible T-shirts printed with keyboards you can actually play, or inflatable radios.
In a curious paradox, toys need to be made of inexpensive parts–but at the same time, when you’re manufacturing millions of units, it’s possible to create highly sophisticated technology that would cost an individual many times more to build from scratch. That’s why the Web has dozens of hobbyist sites devoted to electronic toy modification: there’s no cheaper source for advanced technology than, say, a singing Big Mouth Billy Bass straight off the shelves of your local toy store. In short: toys designed by engineers get remodeled by other engineers.
Gilbert saw his Erector sets as most fundamentally a tool for inspiration and education–something to get boys thinking about how they would change the world once they were out on their own. Even biographer Bruce Watson felt the pull–after a long and not wholly successful effort at building a lift bridge with an Erector set, he found that “every bridge I had once passed unnoticed now commanded my attention. I noticed gears. I sensed the tension, fatigue and stress that a well-made structure is designed to withstand.” Arguably, Erector sets inspired a generation of engineers–in fact, the original prototype for the first mechanical heart was built with an Erector set.
The toy-engineer connection remains strong. Schools like Tufts and the University of Pennsylvania have used toy making as a learning activity in beginning engineering courses. And toys sometimes appear later in the curriculum as well. Beck, for example, teaches a symposium at the University of California in “Entertainment Engineering,” drawing 300 to 400 students to hear his tales about everything from initial designs to manufacturability. But beyond the engineering, says Beck, he talks to students about the need for what the industry calls “toyetic” qualities. In Beck’s view that makes a toy designer more than an engineer: a “toyet,” he suggests, as in “poet.” And that seems like a verbal invention that even old A.C. Gilbert would appreciate.
