Toy

• 1. Introduction

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  A set of three stone balls rested in the tomb of a four-year-old girl at the Xi'an Banpo Neolithic site, among the earliest examples of children's toys ever found. The toy is one of humanity's oldest companions, its origin stretching back into prehistory. Dolls representing infants, animals, and soldiers turn up readily at archaeological sites, and the oldest known doll toy is thought to be 4,000 years old. The word itself is a mystery. No one knows where "toy" comes from, though it is believed to have first appeared in the 14th century. So how did an empty cereal box become a fort, a broken TV remote a treasure, and a luxury car a grown adult's plaything? Why did blowing soap bubbles become a fashionable pastime, and how did a loose spring on a factory floor become a household name? The answers run through ancient temples, Enlightenment paintings, wartime laboratories, and the psychology of how children learn to think.

• 2. Buried With The Dead

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  Toys excavated from the Indus Valley Civilization, dated between 3010 and 1500 BCE, include small carts, whistles shaped like birds, and toy monkeys that could slide down a string. The earliest playthings were made from natural materials such as rocks, sticks, and clay. Egyptian children, thousands of years ago, played with dolls that had wigs and movable limbs, fashioned from stone, pottery, and wood. Yet identifying ancient Egyptian toys with certainty is exceptionally difficult. Small figurines and models found in tombs are usually read as ritual objects, while those from settlement sites are more confidently labelled toys. Spinning tops, balls of spring, and wooden models of animals with movable parts fall into this category. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, children played with dolls of wax or terracotta, alongside sticks, bows and arrows, and yo-yos. The toys carried a weight beyond play. When Greek children, especially girls, came of age, custom required them to sacrifice their childhood toys to the gods. On the eve of a wedding, a young girl of around fourteen would offer her dolls in a temple as a rite of passage into adulthood. From the same world came something far more cerebral, a puzzle attributed to one of antiquity's great minds.

• 3. The Geometry Of Play

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  The Ostomachion, or loculus of Archimedes, is the oldest known put-together mechanical puzzle, appearing in the 3rd century BCE in ancient Greece. It consisted of a square divided into 14 parts, and the challenge was to create different shapes from the pieces. Centuries later and far to the east, puzzle-locks were being made in Iran as early as the 17th century CE. The Tangram, originally from China, spread to Europe and America in the 19th century. In 1893, the English lawyer Angelo John Lewis, writing as Professor Hoffman, published a book called Puzzles Old and New, containing more than 40 descriptions of puzzles with secret opening mechanisms. It grew into a popular reference work for puzzle games. The tradition reached its modern peak with the Rubik's Cube, invented by the Hungarian Ernő Rubik in 1974 and popularized in the 1980s. Solving it requires planning, problem-solving, and the use of algorithms. The Greek philosopher Plato had hinted at this connection between play and intellect long before, writing that the future architect should play at building houses as a child.

• 4. A New Idea Of Childhood

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  The Soap Bubble, painted in 1739 by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, captured a pastime that flourished as Enlightenment attitudes reshaped Western ideas about children. Previously, children had often been treated as small adults, expected to work to produce the goods their families needed. The children's culture scholar Stephen Kline argued that medieval children were "more fully integrated into the daily flux of making and consuming, of getting along. They had no autonomy, separate statuses, privileges, special rights, or forms of social comportment that were entirely their own." As these ideas shifted, hoops, toy wagons, kites, spinning wheels, and puppets grew popular, and children blew bubbles from leftover washing-up soap. John Jefferys produced many board games in the 1750s, including A Journey Through Europe. Players moved along a track by the throw of a die, with a teetotum actually used, and landing on spaces would help or hinder them. By the nineteenth century, Western values favored educational toys such as puzzles, books, cards, and board games, alongside religion-themed items like a model Noah's Ark filled with miniature animals. Growing middle-class prosperity gave children more leisure time, drawing industrial methods into toy manufacture. That industrial turn would soon transform what a toy could be.

• 5. The Golden Age

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  Carpenter and Westley sold over 200,000 kaleidoscopes within three months in London and Paris, mass-producing the device that Sir David Brewster had invented in 1817. The same company mass-produced magic lanterns for phantasmagoria and galanty shows, using a copper plate printing process, with imagery of royalty, flora, fauna, and structures from around the world. The modern zoetrope was invented in 1833 by the British mathematician William George Horner and popularized in the 1860s. Real wages were rising across the Western world, letting even working-class families afford toys, while precision engineering met the rising demand. Franz Kolb, a German pharmacist, invented plasticine in 1880, and commercial production as a children's toy began in 1900. Frank Hornby created three of the century's most popular engineering-based toy lines: Meccano, a model construction system of metal strips, plates, girders, wheels, axles, and gears joined by nuts and bolts; Hornby Model Railways; and Dinky Toys, which pioneered die-cast toy cars, trains, and ships. The Britains company revolutionized toy soldiers through hollow casting in lead, invented in 1893, setting the industry standard for years. In 1903, a year after publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter created the first Peter Rabbit soft toy and registered him at the Patent Office in London, making Peter the oldest licensed character. The Smithsonian magazine noted that Potter built a retail empire from her "bunny book" worth $500 million today, creating a licensing system that continues to benefit characters from Mickey Mouse to Harry Potter.

• 6. Accidents And Brand Names

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  Earl L. Warrick, the American chemist, was trying to create a replacement for synthetic rubber during World War II when he inadvertently invented "nutty putty." Peter Hodgson later recognized its potential as a plaything and packaged it as Silly Putty. Play-Doh, similarly, was originally created as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943, Richard James was experimenting with springs during military research when one came loose and fell to the floor, flopping around in a way that intrigued him. He spent two years finding the best gauge of steel and coil, producing the Slinky, which sold in stores throughout the United States. After the war, plastics and rising affluence made toys cheaper and more common, and name-brand toys spread across the U.S. for the first time. The Danish company Lego launched its colorful interlocking plastic bricks in the 1950s, based on Hilary Page's Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which London's V&A Museum of Childhood called among the "must-have toys" of the 1940s. The same decade brought Mr. Potato Head, the Barbie doll inspired by Germany's Bild Lilli doll, and Action Man. Around the same arc of change, Western nations enacted child labor laws, ending child labor in places like the U.S. in 1949, entrenching the idea that childhood is a time for leisure rather than work.

• 7. What Toys Teach

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  Wooden blocks, though simple, were praised by the early childhood education expert Sally Cartwright in 1974 as an excellent toy, because they are easy to engage with, predictable, versatile, and open-ended. Andrew Witkin, director of marketing for Mega Brands, told Investor's Business Daily that blocks "help develop hand-eye coordination, math and science skills and also let kids be creative." Research in developmental psychology shows that play with toys supports early cognitive development, including problem-solving, memory, symbolic thinking, and understanding cause and effect. A clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that the developmental benefits of traditional toys, those involving language, creativity, pretending, and peer play, are generally better supported by evidence than the educational claims attached to digital or electronic toys. Mary Ucci, Educational Director of the Child Study Center of Wellesley College, demonstrated how clay sculpting toys such as Play-Doh and Silly Putty positively affect children's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development. Newton's cradle, a desk toy designed by Simon Prebble, demonstrates the conservation of momentum and energy for older audiences. One study suggested that fewer toys help toddlers focus and play more creatively, proposing that four toys rather than sixteen promote healthier play and development.

• 8. The Politics Of Pink And Blue

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  Before 1975, only about two percent of toys were labeled by gender, a figure that stands in sharp contrast to today, when every toy on the Disney store's website is labeled by gender. The journal Sex Roles began publishing research on the topic in 1975, focusing on the effects of gender in youth. Researchers found that children as young as 18 months display sex-stereotyped toy choices. When eye movement is tracked in young infants, girls show a visual preference for a doll over a toy truck, while boys show no preference for the truck over the doll though they fixate on it more than girls do. These differences are well established in the child by the age of three. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith observed 60 children ages three to four playing with nine toys in a preschool classroom, scoring play quality by learning, problem solving, creativity, and peer interaction. Boys generally scored higher for overall play quality, and the best-scoring toys were the most gender-neutral, such as building blocks, bricks, and pieces modeling people. Researcher Susan Witt found that parents are the primary influencers of their children's gender roles, with fathers more likely than mothers to reinforce typical play. Toy companies have promoted gender segregation because it lets them sell the same toy twice; Lego added colors like lavender to certain sets in the 1990s. The pattern is shifting, with Target removing gender identification from its toy aisles and researchers like Carol Auster and Claire Mansbach arguing that toys fitting a child's talents help develop their skills.