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LEISURE AND FUN
Barbie Doll
Whether or not Barbie and Ken represent realistic or appropriate role models for today’s increasingly overweight, inactive boys and girls is debatable, but the answer to whether or not kids like them is found in their enduring popularity—over a billion sales to date. The dolls were named after the son (Ken) and daughter (Barbara) of the cofounders of the toy and game company Mattel, Elliot and Ruth Handler. They teamed up with Harold Mattson in order to expand on their picture-framing company in 1945 and start a sideline in toys. Observing that her children preferred playing with adult dolls, and that the only adult dolls around were one-dimensional cardboard figures, Ruth came up with the idea of a more fully realized adult doll. Though rejected at first by the board, Mattel eventually came around to the idea when she pointed out the success of a similar idea in Germany. In 1959, Barbie dolls went on sale, the first one sporting a black-and-white zebra-striped swimsuit and signature topknot pony-tail, and they were made available as either blondes or brunettes. She sold over 300,000 in the first year of production, and two years later Ken showed up. First marketed as a “teenage fashion model,” Barbie’s appearance has changed many times, most notably in 1971 when the doll’s eyes were changed to look forward instead of sideways. Barbie has 38 pets—including cats and dogs, horses, a panda, a lion cub and a zebra—and she holds a pilot’s license to boot!
Chess
There is much debate about the precise origins of chess. Most people agree, however, that it evolved from the ancient Indian war game Chaturanga, a sixth-century Sanskrit word meaning “four parts.” Indeed, that the Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Greek and Spanish terms for chess all derive from Chaturanga makes a strong case that India is where chess was born. Not that the original game much resembles that of today. Originally conceived for four players and involving dice, it was based on the ancient Indian army, with a king, a counselor, elephants, horses, chariots and infantry. Chess underwent many stages of transformation to become the game of skill that we recognize today. By the seventh century, the game had spread to Persia, and reached Western Europe via the Moorish invaders in the eighth century. From then the modern game became established.
Cigarettes
The first observations of smoking were made in 1492 by Rodrigo de Jerez while on Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the Americas. To him, natives appeared to be drinking smoke from something shaped like a “musket formed of paper.” Rodrigo indulged in a puff or two of tobacco that had been wrapped in palm. However, when he returned to Spain he was imprisoned for having scared people with the smoke that poured from his nose and mouth! He served a seven-year sentence, and when he got out of jail, smoking pipes and cigars had become common in Spain.
Smoking arrived in Britain in the 1560s thanks to Sir John Hawkins and his cousin Sir Francis Drake, who famously introduced pipe smoking to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585. But cigarettes akin to those people smoke today did not come about until much later—invented in 1832 at the Battle of Acre during the Turkish-Egyptian war by an Egyptian soldier. The story goes that, to increase his firing rate, the gunner had taken to rolling gunpowder in paper tubes. When his tobacco pipe broke, he used the same paper to roll tobacco with, thus creating the first cigarette.
The first manufactured cigarettes were produced in France by the manufacturer Française des Tabacs in 1843. All cigarettes were handmade and were therefore very limited luxury goods. Production of handmade cigarettes did not begin in Britain until 1856, and the first brand of cigarette made and sold in Britain was Sweet Threes, launched in 1859. In the United States, the manufacture of cigarettes began in 1860, with the brand Bull Durham Commanding 90 percent of the market. The world’s first mass-production factory started up in Cuba where steam-driven machines were used to create the product that would become the world’s number one consumer killer.
Crossword
The idea for the crossword came to Englishman Arthur Wynne in 1913. Employed in the “tricks and jokes department” of the New York World, he was one day trying to come up with yet another diverting puzzle for his readers when he was struck by the memory of a game he used to play with his granddad called Magic Square or Double Acrostic. The game formed the basis for the first crossword, or “Word-Cross” as he called it. There were 32 clues and the words were separated by black spaces, and it was published in the New York World on December 21, 1913.
The crossword went through several rather dull stages of innovation, but an important development occurred when the list of clues became two lists—horizontal and vertical—the brainchild of C. W. Shepherd, who first saw his crossword format appear in the Sunday Express on November 2, 1924. The craze for crosswords in Britain was a phenomenon—so widespread was their popularity that the British Optical Association voiced worry that they could strain readers’ eyes and bring on headaches. These concerns were largely ignored, and the craze continued unabated.
The first cryptic crossword was compiled for the Saturday Westminster in 1925 by “Torquemada,” or Edward Mathers, who took for his pseudonym the name of a spirited Spanish Inquisitor. The cryptic variety delighted English puzzlers, but not their American counterparts. The most cryptic crossword ever devised was the work of Sir Max Beerbohm, who fulfilled his fantasy of creating a puzzle “with clues signifying nothing—nothing whatsoever”!
Newspapers gained popularity in America throughout the 1920s, but the New York Times was initially reluctant to embrace the activity, calling crosswords “a primitive form of mental exercise.” This all changed in 1942 when the bombing of Pearl Harbor motivated editor Lester Markel to reflect that readers may enjoy something diverting to occupy themselves during such dismal times: “We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours—or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other.” The first puzzle appeared in the Times on February 15, 1942, and contained direct one-word solutions “with a flavor of current events and general information.” At first, puzzles ran only on Sundays, but by 1950 they were a daily occurrence. Today the New York Times crossword is the most enduring and popular crossword in the country.
During the war, several crosswords in the London Daily Telegraph came under the scrutiny of Allied security officers, as words that were secret codenames used in Operation Overlord kept occurring. The crossword compiler Leonard Dawe was arrested and investigated, but it was concluded that it was all a coincidence down to troops stationed in the area using the words in passing while in the presence of the innocent Dawe’s children, who then repeated the words to their father. It has since been claimed that Dawe himself picked up the words by eavesdropping on soldiers around army camps, but the matter remains a bit of a puzzle, and there are no clues as to what the correct answer is.
Fireworks
We shoot millions of them into the sky every Independence Day, but fireworks were around long before the Fourth of July.
The story goes that gunpowder came about by accident around 2,000 years ago when a Chinese cook chanced to mix the then common kitchen materials charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter. It burned well and, when packed into a bamboo tube, exploded. A thousand years later, gunpowder was used by Chinese monk Li Tian, who was living in the Hunan province in the vicinity of Liuyang City, to create the firecracker—today the Liuyang region produces a vast amount of the world’s fireworks. The loud explosions were (and still are) thought to be effective in warding off evil spirits. His invention is annually celebrated in China on April 18, and firecrackers still feature hugely in Chinese New Year celebrations to embrace a new year with an absence of any nasty spirits.
Some sources say the Crusaders brought gunpowder back from their travels, but explorer Marco Polo is largely given credit for introducing it to Europe in the 13th century. Initially it was used in weapons—rockets, cannons and guns in particular—but it was the Italians who first produced fireworks. They get a mention in Shakespeare, and Elizabeth I was so fond of them that a new post—Fire Master of England—was created! Today, fireworks continue to delight humans, and terrify dogs and cats, the world over.
Frisbee
It is perhaps surprising to think that the origin of the Frisbee is linked to the world of pies, especially because one would not normally associate pie-eating types with the sorts who like to run after a bit of plastic spinning in the air. However, without the pie we would not have the Frisbee, as it was Connecticut baker William Russell Frisbie whose pie tins were embossed with his name. His pies were hugely popular with New England college students, and they soon discovered that the empty pie tins flew gracefully through the air. Thus, a new game was born on American campuses, although debate still continues among Frisbee obsessives as to which college housed “he who was the first to fling.” Some at Yale University have the audacity to suggest that an 1820 undergraduate called Elihu Frisbee threw a chapel collection tray across campus and, in doing so, invented the Frisbee. But most agree it was the pie-tin-throwers.
The first commercial, pie-tin-like disc was produced in 1948 by Walter Morrison, who cited a popcorn can lid that he tossed around one Thanksgiving Day as his inspiration. He eventually produced the Pluto Platter and sold the rights to Richard Knerr, of Wham-O toys. On hearing the Frisbie baking story, Knerr cleverly capitalized on it, changing the Pluto Platter into the Frisbee (note the altered spelling) and shrewdly marketing it as a new sport in 1964. Unsurprisingly, sales soared . . .
Hula Hoop
Twirling a plastic ring around your waist isn’t so popular with kids these days, possibly due to the proliferation of other, perhaps more interesting pursuits like texting and violent video games. However, back in the 1950s the activity was a positive craze, with children everywhere desperate to get their hands (or waists) on American company Wham-O’s groovy plastic toy—the idea for the hoops was brought to them from Australia, where children used bamboo hoops, and by the end of the decade they had already sold 100 million of them! Children of other nations were less fortunate—they were banned in Japan because of all that indecent hip-wiggling, and the Russian government wasn’t so keen either. What none of these eager hoop-fiends knew was that their trendy game was nothing new—hoops have been played with ever since ancient times, though then they were made of grapevines and tough grass rather than plastic. In 14th-century England, “hooping” was popular, but was deemed bad for backs and hearts and was soon banned. Hooping became “hula hooping” when 18th-century British sailors observed the similarity between the Hawaiian “hula” dance and the gyrating movements required to keep a hoop revolving around a waist!
Jigsaw
It was the combination of John Spilsbury’s map-making and engraving skills that brought about the invention of the jigsaw. During the 1760s, Spilsbury started making some maps aimed at children to develop their knowledge of geography. He thought that a smart way for children to memorize the position of England’s counties in relation to each other would be to employ his engraving skills. He mounted the maps onto wood to reinforce them, and then he neatly scored around the counties to separate them for the purposes of an exercise where the shapes were removed and mixed in order for England to be pieced back together again. Spilsbury made jigsaws commercially available in the late 1760s. Jigsaw puzzles were originally made using a jigsaw, which started out as a handsaw, but the modern version is a power tool with an electric motor.
Jukebox
For the record, it is worth noting that music boxes and players were in use before jukeboxes. Located in fairgrounds and amusement arcades, they were coin-operated and played one tune per “pay.” But the arrival of the jukebox truly blew them out of the water. The first jukebox used an electric Edison phonograph that was connected to four listening tubes with a “nickel in the slot” device attached to each one. The jukebox was installed by Louis Glass in 1889 in San Francisco at the Palais Royal Saloon. In 1905, a 24-track jukebox arrived on the scene, the precursor of jukeboxes as we think of them. Each recording was on a cylinder. Disc-playing jukeboxes followed shortly, with a 1906 model playing 24 10-inch discs. Various stages of development led to the 45 rpm vinyl record jukebox in the 1950s, manufactured by the Seeburg Corporation, and this became the industry standard until the arrival of CD jukeboxes in the 1980s. The “juke” in “jukebox” comes from the African American slang word “jook,” which means “dance.”
Kite
Kite-flying was not invented as a summer activity to go alongside a picnic in the park. The motivation was a little more practical than that. The kite was used by the Chinese military to carry messages over long distances—the information was conveyed by the color of the material used. In the latter part of the 18th century, after being introduced into Europe, kites were used to measure wind speed, and then by the Wright brothers for carrying out preliminary investigations into flight theory before launching the first powered aircraft.
The fascination with holding on to a piece of canvas blowing around in the sky hasn’t died yet. Proof of this is the popularity of kite-surfing and stunt kites. The advent of massive “power kites” has enabled a person (often a single man with few friends) to become airborne for a few seconds at the risk of a severe ankle sprain on crashing back to the ground. This is always amusing for smug couples strolling in the park.
Lego
Lego has been a part of children’s toy boxes for the last 50 years. Endless varieties of structure can be erected with the brightly colored plastic building blocks, and it is a hardwearing toy that lasts for generations.
Lego was the mastermind of a skilled craftsman, yet the Danish carpenter who invented it was producing something quite different than plastic toys: wooden ladders! It was after the Wall Street crash of 1929, when the Depression ensued, that the impoverished Ole Kirk Christiansen was inspired to come up with possible sidelines to make some extra cash. He was a creative, family-oriented man, and he set about making children’s toys from pieces of wood left over from making ladders. He began ambitiously, coming up with some rather fancy toys. Kids loved his creations, but were more impressed with the wooden bricks he had begun to construct. They found them a more interactive choice of toy, and they could build whatever they wished, which saved Ole a task. Christiansen named his new company Lego. Lego is a hybrid of leg godt, which means “play well.”
Lego progressed from making building blocks out of wood to making them out of plastic. Each block was designed with a hollow underside so that one could slot neatly on top of the next. Rather in the way that Lego pieces get passed from one generation to the next, the Lego business did the same. Ole’s son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen not only took up where his father left off but also made a major improvement to the design. To the hollow underside of each unit he added cylindrical bits of plastic that tightly connected with studs on top of the brick and held each structure together more firmly, yet still allowed them to be pulled apart for the building of another structure.
The Christiansens patented the idea and the portfolio was extended to include larger bricks for younger children. They also added plastic Lego figures for children to add life to their creations, and so it went on.
Monopoly
For years no household was complete without a Monopoly board, and no family game of Monopoly was complete without the spectacular fallings-out that tend to happen when relatives congregate to see who can be the most ruthlessly successful property magnate. Thirty years before Charles Darrow became famous for inventing the version of the Monopoly board game we play today, Lizzie Magie was the woman who created the original idea in 1904. Magie was firmly opposed to capitalism and wanted the game to highlight the potential misery caused by buying and selling habits, and to point a finger at the perpetual wealth generated by real-estate moguls. She called it the Landlord’s Game and was granted a patent that year. Charles Darrow picked up where she left off and made his own version, reversing the name of the game to Capitalism, for which he was also granted a patent in 1935. The game came out of a vacation in Atlantic City, a place he and his wife frequented, when Darrow devised a game that incorporated the names of streets there. He modeled the playing figures that everybody is fond of on the charms hanging from his wife’s bracelet. He was undeterred when at first his creation was rejected by the big games companies, so he went back to his workshop and worked away at producing 5,000 copies of the game. It finally made the shops in the United States in 1935, and by 1936 a UK version with London streets was made available. Today, Monopoly is sold in 80 countries and produced in 26 languages. To date more than 200 million games have been sold worldwide.
Roller Skates
In 1760, the first attempt at roller skating didn’t go well. Joseph Merlin, a Belgian violin-maker, showed up to the London masquerade party of the famous Mrs. Cornelly. Steaming into the Soho ballroom on skates he had designed himself, he played the violin with aplomb as he soared across the room. Seconds later he found himself unable to stop or turn and, according to a report from the time, “impelled himself against a large mirror valued at over £500, smashed it to atoms, broke his instrument and wounded himself severely.” Unsurprisingly, Joseph’s new leisure pursuit didn’t catch on fast. In fact, it didn’t catch on until more than 60 years later when another skating pioneer, Robert John Tyers, showed off his “Volitos” in 1823. In some way resembling modern inline skates, or Rollerblades, Tyers’s skates had five wheels in a straight line to be attached to each foot. There were no nasty accidents, and he garnered a few followers, but it was not until 1863, when New Yorker James L. Plimpton patented his four-wheeled roller skates with a rubber cushion above each wheel, allowing the skater to turn a smooth curve by simply leaning to one side, that the roller-skating craze swept America and then the world.
Rubik’s Cube
The Rubik’s Cube, also known as the magical cube, was the inspiration of Hungarian architect Ernö Rubik. Rubik’s hobby was sculpting, but he had a particularly keen interest in geometry and multidimensional forms. During one of his many experiments, he stacked a number of little blocks together into a larger cube and placed different brightly colored stickers on each cube. He became fascinated with the smaller blocks and the many possible positions they could occupy within the larger cube. When he tried to get the cubes to return to their original positions within the larger cube, he realized he had a real puzzle on his hands. In 1975 his application to patent the toy was accepted and the Magical Cube, as it became known in Hungary, went on sale in 1977. The toy was later judged formally and went on to win the German Toy of the Year award in 1980. By 1982 more than 100 million cubes had been sold. Different-sized versions of the same cube began to be manufactured, and in 2006 international Rubik’s Cube champion Frank Morris solved the even more challenging 7×7×7 version of the cube, invented by Greek (and possibly geek) Panagiotis Verdes, in just under 6½ minutes.
Scrabble
It was during the 1930s that out-of-work architect Alfred Butts started to think about the immense popularity of certain games. He realized that games of chance were particularly popular, so he thought about incorporating a random element into a game. He also wanted to devise a game that would focus on vocabulary skills, as he was an avid reader of the New York Times and knew how popular the crossword had become (see page 6). He decided to come up with a game that was half luck, half skill. His first idea was Lexico, similar to the Scrabble that we know today, but without a board on which to arrange the tiles. His idea was turned down by the most influential games companies, so he thought about making it more substantial and tightening up the rules a bit. He decided the game would be better played on a board so that contestants could sit around and have a central focus. He also scored each letter by tallying the frequency with which it occurred from one page to the next in the New York Times. He called it Criss Cross (which referred both to the criss-crossing squares on the board and the word “crossword”). He then teamed up with James Brunot, who had the legal know-how and marketing skills to get the game on the market in 1946. Brunot renamed it Scrabble, and from then on all Butts had to do was collect the royalties. In the early 1950s Brunot sold it to Selchow & Righter, a games company better equipped to deal with mass-production, and they sent its popularity into orbit. Scrabble is now sold in more than 120 countries.
Slinky
Richard James was a struggling nautical engineer working in a shipyard in Philadelphia when he stumbled upon his abstract idea for a toy. Walking past a table on the ship, he happened to see an abandoned spring component from an engine roll from the table. He was amazed to see the spring travel onward across the deck in incremental rolling jumps, and immediately he had the idea for a toy of some sort. He went home and set about copying the helical design in order to work out the best dimensions for it, and in which material it would work the most smoothly. It ended up being about the size of an orange in diameter and seemed to work most effectively when made from metal. His wife, Betty, catchily named the toy the Slinky after seeing the word, which means “sleek and graceful,” in the dictionary. In 1948, the pair produced and boxed up hundreds of the neat little toys to take to a presentation in a department store where they demonstrated the Slinky’s potential to a large audience. Slinky fans snapped up the Jameses’ stock so quickly that they rushed home and set about opening their own company with plans to build a factory to cope with rising production levels.
Swimming Pool
Although there is evidence to suggest crudely built swimming pools were around as early as 3000 BC, it was in Rome that Emperor Gaius Maecenas built the first heated pool. It was fueled by a furnace-based central-heating system. The Romans used swimming pools for training the military and preparing athletes for competitive events. They were also used for relaxation regimes.
Teddy Bear
Morris Michtom, a toy-shop owner in Brooklyn, made the first teddy bear. His creation was inspired by an incident involving President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1902, Roosevelt, a fan of hunting, joined a group on a shoot. The day was a bit of a flop and, toward the end of it, Roosevelt was ushered in the direction of a badly injured bear cub that his fellow hunters thought he would enjoy being able to shoot outright. The president was appalled by the suggestion and said he couldn’t possibly kill the poor lame cub. After the trip the story was soon leaked to the papers, and numerous features—including a strip by cartoonist Clifford Berryman—were plastered across the newspapers. In the same year Morris Michtom was the first to jump on this idea commercially when he made a soft-toy version of the injured bear. Michtom named his creation “Teddy’s Bear” and even politely wrote to the president seeking permission to sell it under his name. Permission was granted and the comforting, much-loved figure sold thousands.
Yo-Yo
It is said that the word “yo-yo” originates from a dialect spoken in the Philippines during the 19th century, and that it means “come back”—it is rumored to have started out there as a weapon that was sometimes made more lethal with attachments of blades and studs. They were then used for catching prey or as a means of defense. Evidence of people enjoying yo-yo-like toys recreationally can be seen in Greek sketches dating back to 500 BC. Though popular in the centuries that followed, it wasn’t until the 1930s that the market really exploded as a result of some clever marketing by one Pedro Flores, who opened a factory that focused solely on yo-yo production. Various other entrepreneurs got involved in the action and such was the huge popularity of the yo-yo by the 1930s that more than 300,000 units a day were being produced by just three US factories.
The yo-yo developed over the years, improvements chiefly aiming to minimize friction so that string-winding speed and ease could be optimized. The development that really excited yo-yoers around the world was the addition of the ball bearing to the axle, which helped the yo-yo spin on the end of the string for amazingly long periods of time, thus allowing increasingly fancy tricks to be performed. Yo-yo geeks from around the globe meet annually in Florida to show off their spinning skills.
