The Extraordinary Karl Bub Automobiles

Sunday, January 25, 2015
Sunny, very cold , getting warmer later

The Extraordinary 

Karl Bub Automobiles

  If yo search for old antique automobile toys on the Internet, you will eventually come upon the name of Karl Bub. This German company mace exceptional toy cars in the first quarter of the both century. They were beautifully hand-crafted, and the company spared no expense to produce a quality product that has lasted for a century, as you'll see below.

Please click here to visit this fine American auction company

We start first with this very large car. It has battery-operated headlights and is 21" long ( 533 mm) - that's large! It  also a wind-up. But the selection go colours and the care in crafting the toy to what the "real car" looked looked is exceptional as well.

Here's a limousine  made around the same time as the opening toy. This one also has battery-operated headlights, and the rear doors open up.

I usually select items in order of their final value at auction.,hence this toy is from 1915, whereas the 2 previous opening toys were from the 1930's. I always a doe those very-early headlights on cars. I haven;t researched these, but I often wonder if they were powered by an alternator in the car, or had candles or fuel inside the "lantern-style'"headlamps. I'll have to check this out!

Another beautiful car - this time a taxi.

ALthough the description does not mention the windshield, this one may have been made from thin panes of glass, as thin or thinner than slide covers if you ever took a biology course. The slide cover would "sandwich" your thin specimen to the glass slide so that keeping everything flat would keep the focus in one plane.

Here's a nice truck that I found that break's up the rest of the toys today.

If you loot at all of the toys today, you'll see that some are very high in proportion to their drivers. The real cars i or trucks wet win fact large, hence the people were small proportionate to the vehicles of the time.

Here's a limousine that definitely has glass windows! What amazes me is that the glass  has stayed intact (but for the rear left panel) without any damage. If you compare the other grey toy Town car, above, you can see that perhaps that one did have glass as well!

There are two things that are interesting to this final presentation of the day. There's a large "Felix the Cat" hood ornament that was a popular cartoon character of the day. But what's also interesting is the fact that the car has no headlights. I've seen this before, and this will also require research. I never really thought about this, so it will be interesting to see if cars perhaps did not all come with headlights - powered by the car alternator, or by fuel or candles inside what appear to be large-sued lanterns!

Thanks for visiting and as always

have a great part of the day or night,

wherever you may be

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com