K. Arnold & Co. Toy Company- Part II

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

K. Arnold & Co. (Toy Company)

(Part II)

      I'm changing the type colour to see if it will be easier on everyone's eyes. Louise Baker who also happens to be an art director mentioned that white lettering against a black background is hard on the eyes. It's always great, when someone more informed helps you out!

    I would have changed the background as well, but that would have changed every of of my  291 posts. They would change, and I would have had to reselect the colours for the dates and titles, which as you could image, would have taken forever. I'll do some experimentation to see if it is possible to change the background for just 1 post, and then work from there.

I remember when I taught a small portion of 1 photography course that contained lecture material on page layout and design. It was unbelievable how much "structure"and principles that applied to a magazine or catalogue page!

    I already wrote about the K. Arnold & Co., and I mentioned that I would add 2 more instalments. This is #2 of 3 posts. The company made very fine clockwork (Mechanical energy transfer) toys in the 1930's, but even before that time, they were making accessory steam engine toys. I've included other brands as well, as it's not always possible to fill a post with 10 images from 1 company. These steam-eingine toy accessories were made in the 1920's.

   I'm sure a set-up with 1 steam engine and  several accessory toys such as the 3 above much have been a "real blast" for a child. I'm sure of the child got low to the ground, and had a small wooden toy factory, he/she could imagine what a real factory felt and sounded like. 

So that's it for today.

Thanks for dropping by,

and as always, have a great part of the day or night, 

wherever you may  be.

Stacey

The Penny Toy

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

                 Happy New Year

The Penny Toy

 Happy New Year's to everyone, and have a Healthy and Happy New Year.

   Well, this is the year that our brilliant government initiates the elimination of the penny. They got this fine idea from Great Britian. I'm not happy about this because every transaction will be rounded off to the nearest 5 cents, and we all know that that usually means higher than lower. The lame excuse given was that it cost too much to produce the penny, at the same time they are squandering 35 billion dollars to buy some soon-to-be obsolete American F35 fighter planes. The Americans are now working on the next generation of fighter planes. If they wanted to save money let the US protect us, but I digress! 

   Once upon a time, the penny or cent used to have value, hence the term for these fine little toys. You could even buy nails for carpentry by the penny, hence the term "pennyweight". In the 1950's, I remember being able to buy gumballs for a penny, as well as a penny's worth of peanuts, jellybeans, and so forth. But today, the penny is gone, and so I'll be keeping a few of them to pass on to younger relatives for the future - a memento of times gone by.

    The  Penny Toy was first made in Germany, and with its popularity, spread across Europe to France, and of course, Great Britain. Eventually, the  Penny Toy began to be made in the U.S.A. It's also called the Penny Litho Toy or Penny Tin Litho Toy. 

   The toy was made of thin steel that was plated with a fine coating of tin. From there,the early versions of this toy were hand-painted, but later were lithographed (off-set printed) on metal. Thus you'll sometimes see the same type of toy called either the penny toy, or the tin litho toy.

    They also are usually mechanical or wind-up, allowing for different variations of movement to themselves. There seems to be plenty around, even though they are close to 90 years of age! Also, they are within reach of most people's budgets!

http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/6198659

(please click on the above address to be redirected to where most of the toys belkow were listed)

All of the above toys have moving parts, but I left their descriptions out. I figured that you, the reader would be able to figure out exactly how the toys move. What's amazing, as I mentioned is that so many of these small toys still survive. What is also amazing, is that there were so many different toys based on the same theme of price and mechanical movement. 

Times certainly have changed.

So welcome again to this blog, and I hope I'll have the drove and motivation to continue writing stories about old toys. 

I am always open to invitation from anyone who'd like to be a guest on this blog, or who might want to suggest a topic for writing.

Thanks for dropping by, and

have a great day off  with the start of 2013.

The very best to all.

Stacey

A Great Coincidence (The Gas-Powered Racer Continued))

Sunday, December 30, 2012
               (#2 post of the day)

A Great Coincidence

(The Gas-Powered Racer Continued)

     I just finished writing briefly today about the gas-powered toy racer,when I decided to look around. My "surfing" eventually took me to OpAmerica,where I was surprisingly elated to see a fine 1939 Dooling Brothers 1939 Prototype gas-powered racer. 

    Please redirect to their store so you can see the written description of this great toy. It's certainly an outstanding find considering the toy is almost 74 years old!

http://stores.ebay.com/OpAmerica-Toy-and-Bank-Museum/_i.html?rt=nc&_sid=704960&_sticky=1&_trksid=p4634.c0.m14&_sop=3&_sc=1

(Please click on the above address to be redirected to OpAmerica's fine E-Bay Store)

     What's great about having permission to use Opamerica's photos is that they are taken superbly and professionally. Except for 1 photo, I didn't have to do anything to the rest of the photos.  This was great, as I mentioned before in my last post, that I just came through a 5-day bout with a cold or flu! That helps me a lot, but more so, the credit does go the Opamerica. The owners have an excellent rating on E-Bay, and it's because of their honest descriptions, fine photography, and excellent service. What more could you ask for? 

Thanks again for dropping by,

and have a great part of the morning, afternoon, or evening,

wherever you may be.

Stacey

Gas-Powered Toy Racers

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Gas-Powered Toy Racers

     I've only ever seen a gas-powered toy racer once in my lifetime.  It's not that I was looking for them, but where I lived, nobody could afford such a toy. Also, you needed lots of space to let one of these racers run "flat out" (as fast as it can), and in the 1950's-early 1960's, Montreal (Quebec, Canada) was still slow to change. The Town of Mount Royal shopping centre was developed in the late 1950's, and that was the first one in Canada. If you passed by it today, you wouldn't even take notice - it's so small! Highways and side roads were also about to develop in Montreal, so that would also take time.

    Coming back to my only ever seen 1 of these toys in my lifetime - I would say that you don't see these toys first, you hear them! They are very noisy and loud, and once you hear one, you will never forget what it is. Of course, they don't always work 100%, so they need to be pampered. But once they are up and running, they "fly". They are fast!

   When I was buying and selling toys, I would sometimes go to a local hobby store to buy paints and sandpaper, and small files.  I had played senior (Old age guys) baseball with the 2 owner-brothers, so I could chat with them. They must have carried these toys, but all I ever saw when I came into the store were these 3-5 foot (1 - 1.7m)  gas-powered airplanes and helicopters.  Now those are toys I 'd like to play with, even at 64 years "young".

I only am presenting 3 fine toys today, as I'm still not feeling so good, and for some reason one of the symptoms is not being able to sit still and focus. 

As always,  thanks to Bertoia ,I was able to find 3 nice examples of this type of toy. They are not the oldest of toys, but occasionally, you can see old gas-powered toy cars from the 1940's. I have no idea how old these 3 toys are either.

   
   These are definitely toys that need to be supervised by adults, or have older children who have been carefully instructed as to how to carefully play with these toys. I did read in passing that some of theses toy can hit 90 MPH (145 KPH).  So you can see, where you need lots of space to get these toys to perform to their max and to have the length of an empty shopping centre mall or abandoned runway to be able to play with these toys. However, I'm 110% sure, that whomever does have these toys certainly had gotten lots of satisfaction from having played with these fine toys!

Thanks as always for dropping by,

and have  a great part of the day wherever you may be.

Stacey

Train Toys and History

Thursday, December 13, 2012
                    (sunny and mild)

Train Toy & History

     Today was one of those days where I did not know what I was going to write. I should do more planning in the new year, but of course, I 'll break that resolution on the first day. I decided to go with trains, and then thought about archive sources, then the Canada Archives, and wow! What a fine discovery I made. It's a great resource for mostly photos, maps and other paper materials, and I was able to download some nice historical photos.

    The development and expansion of Canada and the USA had to do a lot with the railroads. In canada, the 2 major players (CPR and CN (Canadian Pacific Railway, and Canadian National) were given large tracts of land as well as money to build the 2 railroads.  Sometimes, the trains near me make noise and when my brother-in-law and sister visit from Toronto I mention to him (a former  PR person with CP) that the trains are noisy. No sympathy from him on this topic. He always says that the trains were here first!

    When I think of trains, there are those old western with trains, the Burt Lancaster movie (The Train), and  the Songs" Pardon me Boy, Is that the  Chattanooga Choo-Choo" , and Johnny Cash's "I hear the Train a-comin".  I also once took a train ride to Toronto in a sleeper car with my grandmother in the later 50's when I probably was 5 or 6.

www.collectionscanada.qc.ca

(please click on the above address to be redirected to the site)

In those days, the "royals" or the Royal Family as they were called

 then would travel on private cars with their own train engines of course!

http://www.lloydralstontoys.com

(please press on the link to see the nice selection of trains that were sold)

     Children and adults have always been interested in train collecting. I've seen marvellous train "cities" in Toronto at a toy convention, where an entire village and many complete trains and cars were set up overnight for the visitors to the show.  I do see trains pass by near my house when commuters are travelling to the western end of Montreal, and I see the freight cars with their loads mostly of containers for ships. Occasionally, I 'll even see the new car train carriers, but now they're all blocked so graffiti "artists" or vandals can't damage the cars.  I'll even see the rarer 

mega-capacity liquid car carriers with their special reinforced frames protecting the hazardous contents. 

    In Outremont, we also lived near the train tracks, but in those days, you could actually go on to the tracks. I did the "place the penny on the track to turn it into a flat piece the size of a dollar! I can't remember if I crawled under a fence opening or not. However, I wasn't interested in trains that much. In the mid-1950's that was the beginning of the end of the coal  steam engine trains, and the new gas (kerosene) engines were starting to come on to the rail lines.  Also, about 1954-56 was the end of the electric wooden streetcars in Montreal, to be replaced by busses.

   They always say "those were the good old times", and probably so, but each generation has and will have their own memories of their generation. I sometimes wonder what this generation will remember,when they're so busy Twittering, Face-booking, texting, and e-mailing?

Thanks for Dropping by,

and have a nice part of the day 
wherever you may be.

Stacey

The Zeppelin Toy

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The Zeppelin Toy

     When you think of the dramatic changes in the world from the late 19th to the first third of the 20th century, you realize how anything unique and new would have people infatuated and in awe. Inventions such as Marconi's wireless communication, the telephone, electricity, cars, and flight all heralded change in the world.

     The Zeppelin was invented by a German engineer named Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin. It was invented towards the end of the 1890's and saw rapid development at the beginning of the 20th century. It was a metal-framed airship filled with hydrogen gas (highly explosive) to life it off the ground. Power was from engines,and ballast (to maintain its parallel and vertical orientation to the ground was with liquid gasses.

You Can See How Large These Airships Were

 Popularity of the Zeppelin was also found in postage from Around the World

Even Today, the Zeppelin has over 2,000,000 sites on Google

The earlier toy versions were "pull toys", whereby a child would pull the toy with a cord alone the road.  The Chicago & Los Angeles  models by the Strauss company were different. They would be tied to the ceiling with a strong cord . THe staple-shaped black item on the top-centre of the toy is where the cord was attached. The wind-up mechanism turned the twin propellers at the back of the toy, and it "flew" around the room.

The above toy was also a sting ceiling-tied toy. This one certainly has the propellers to  turn around the room fast!

There was even an A.C.Gilbert Erector set made as a Zeppelin.

For those who don't know the Erector set from the Gilbert company was the American version of the famous British invention of the Meccano set.

The 1920's "heavyweight" versions of the Zeppelin Toy.

These are cast-iron toys and were pulled along the road.

A Well-Played With Zeppelin

      The Zeppelins were used for trans-Atlantic travel, and national travel. Sadly, when WWI arose, they were used as offensive weapons to drop bombs on England (from Germany).  The demise in popularity of the Zeppelin came about with the terrible disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. The  Zeppelin was at the U.S. Naval Station when something happened to ignite the massive airship. Lots of people died, and the disaster was captured on movie film. There are some conspiracy theorists who maintain that the U.S. government sabotaged the airship as the world was coming to grips with the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

    There are currently some projects on the table and in model form, with regard to the redevelopment of the airships or Zeppelins. Using safer-type gasses (e.g. helium), the idea is for the  their use in remote areas such as logging in mountainous areas that are difficult for traditional trucks and logging machines. 

Thanks for dropping by, 

and have a great day, wherever you are.

Stacey