Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  Frisbee originated on an American college campus in the 1940s, but it had a historical antecedent.

  Rattles: 1360 B.C., Egypt

  Dried gourds and clay balls stuffed with pebbles were people’s earliest rattles, which were used not for play but to frighten off evil spirits. Rattling was invoked by tribal priests at the time of a birth, sickness, or death, transitions in which early peoples believed they were especially susceptible to evil intrusions. Societies that bordered the sea constructed religious rattles from bivalve shells filled with pebbles.

  The first rattles designed for children’s amusement appeared in Egypt near the beginning of the New Kingdom, around 1360 B.C., and several are displayed in that country’s Horniman Museum. Many were discovered in children’s tombs; all bear indications that they were intended to be shaken by children: Shaped like birds, pigs, and bears, the clay rattles are protectively covered in silk, and they have no sharp protuberances. A pig’s ears, for instance, were always close to the head, while birds never had feet, legs, or pointed beaks. Many rattles are painted or glazed sky blue, a color that held magical significance for the Egyptians.

  Today, in tribal Africa, rattles are still made from dried seed pods. And their multiple uses are ancient: making music, frightening demons, and amusing children.

  Teddy Bear: 1902, United States

  Despite the popularity today of toy bears with names such as Bear Mitzvah, Lauren Bearcall, and Humphrey Beargart, the classic bear is still the one named Teddy, who derived his moniker from America’s twenty-sixth President.

  In 1902, an issue of the Washington Star carried a cartoon of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, drawn by Clifford Berryman, stood rifle in hand, with his back turned to a cowering bear cub; the caption read: “Drawing the line in Mississippi.” The reference was to a trip Roosevelt had recently taken to the South in the hope of resolving a border dispute between Louisiana and Mississippi.

  For recreation during that trip, Roosevelt had engaged in a hunting expedition sponsored by his Southern hosts. Wishing the President to return home with a trophy, they trapped a bear cub for him to kill, but Roosevelt refused to fire. Berryman’s cartoon capturing the incident received nationwide publicity, and it inspired a thirty-two-year-old Russian-immigrant toy salesman from Brooklyn, Morris Michtom, to make a stuffed bear cub. Michtom placed the cub and the cartoon in his toy-store window. Intended as an attention-getting display, the stuffed bear brought in customers eager to purchase their own “Teddy’s Bear.” Michtom began manufacturing stuffed bears with button eyes under the name Teddy’s Bear, and in 1903 he formed the Ideal Toy Company.

  The American claim to the creation of the Teddy Bear is well documented. But German toy manufacturer Margaret Steiff also began producing stuffed bear cubs, shortly after Morris Michtom. Steiff, who at the time already headed a prosperous toy company, claimed throughout her life to have originated the Teddy Bear.

  Margaret Steiff, who would become a respected name in the stuffed-toy industry, was a polio victim, confined to a wheelchair. In the 1880s in her native Germany, she began hand-sewing felt animals. As German toy manufacturers tell it, shortly after the Clifford Berryman cartoon appeared, an American visitor to the Steiff factory showed Margaret Steiff the illustration and suggested she create a plush toy bear. She did. And when the bears made their debut at the 1904 Leipzig Fair, her firm was overwhelmed with orders. It seems that the Teddy Bear was an independent American and German creation, with the American cub arriving on the toy scene about a year earlier.

  President Theodore Roosevelt inspired the teddy bear, which became the most popular children’s toy of the 1910s.

  The stuffed bear became the most popular toy of the day. During the first decade of this century, European and American manufacturers produced a variety of toy bears, which ranged in price from ninety-eight cents to twelve dollars, and factories supplied them with sweaters, jackets, and overcoats. For a while, it appeared that dolls were about to become obsolete.

  Crossword Puzzle: 1913, New York

  The concept of the crossword puzzle is so straightforwardly simple that it is hard to believe the puzzles were not invented prior to this century, and that “crossword” did not enter American dictionaries as a legitimate word until 1930.

  The crossword puzzle was the brainchild of an English-born American journalist. In 1913, Arthur Wynne worked on the entertainment supplement, Fun, of the Sunday edition of the New York World. One day in early December, pressured to devise a new game feature, he recalled a Victorian-era word puzzle, Magic Square, which his grandfather had taught him.

  Magic Square was a child’s game, frequently printed in nineteenth-century British puzzle books and American penny periodicals. It consisted of a group of given words that had to be arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally. It exhibited none of the intricate word criss-crossings and blackened squares that Wynne built into his game. And where Magic Square gave a player the words to work with, Wynne created a list of Down and Across “clues,” challenging the player to deduce the appropriate words.

  In the December 21 edition of the World, American readers were confronted with the world’s first crossword puzzle. The Sunday feature was not billed as a new invention, but was only one of a varied group of the supplement’s “mental exercises.” And compared to the taxing standards of today’s crossword puzzles, Wynne’s was trivially simple, containing only well-known words suggested by straightforward clues. Nonetheless, the game struck the public’s fancy.

  Within months, Wynne’s “mental exercise” was appearing in other newspapers, and by the early 1920s, every major U.S. paper featured its own crossword puzzle. The publishing firm of Simon & Schuster released the first book of crossword puzzles, and in 1924, crossword books held the top four positions on the national best-seller list. Booksellers nationwide experienced an unexpected bonus: dictionaries were selling at a faster rate than at any previous time in history.

  In 1925, Britain succumbed to crossword mania, with one publication observing that “the puzzle fad becomes a well-entrenched habit.” Soon the puzzles began to appear in almost every language except those, like Chinese, that do not lend themselves to a letter-by-letter vertical and horizontal word construction. Crossword puzzles were such an international phenomenon by the early ’30s that women’s dresses, shoes, handbags, and jewelry were patterned with crossword motifs. While other games have come and gone, crossword puzzles have continued to become more and more challenging. Regularly enjoyed by more than fifty million Americans today, the crossword puzzle is rated as the most popular indoor game in the country.

  Board Games: 3000 B.C., Mesopotamia

  In 1920, British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered among the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur a gaming board considered to be the oldest in the world. Each player had seven marked pieces, and moves were controlled by the toss of six pyramidal dice, two of the four corners tipped with inlay. Three dice were white, three lapis lazuli. Though the game’s rules are unknown, the board is on display at the British Museum and its markings suggest it was played like backgammon.

  Vying for the record as oldest board game is senet, the most popular game in Egypt some 4,300 years ago. Played by peasants, artisans, and pharaohs, the game consisted of a race across a papyrus playing board, with each player moving five ivory or stone pieces. The game was such a popular pastime that it was placed in the tombs of pharaohs; Tutankhamen’s game of senet was discovered when his tomb was opened in the 1920s.

  Board games began as a form of divination, with a scored board and its marked pieces the equipment of sages and soothsayers. The historical crossover point from religion to recreation is unknown for many games. But as late as 1895, when the French army attacked the capital of Madagascar, the island’s queen and her advisers turned for a prophetic glimpse of the battle’s outcome to the ancient board game of fanorona, a relative of checkers. The advances, retreats, and captures of
the game’s white and black pieces represented divine strategy, which was followed even in the face of imminent defeat.

  Chess. One of the oldest board games to survive to the present day, chess was thought to have been devised by a Hindu living in northwest India in the late fifth century A.D. Or by the ancient Persians, since they played a similar game at that time, and since the expression “checkmate” derives from the Arabic phrase al shah mat, meaning “the king is dead.”

  Recently, however, the discovery in the Soviet Union of two ivory chessmen dating to the second century A.D. preempts the Indian and Persian claims.

  In the eleventh century, Spain became the first European country introduced to chess, and through the travels of the Crusaders the game became a favorite of the cultured classes throughout Europe.

  Checkers. The game of checkers began in Egypt as a form of wartime prognostication about 2000 B.C. and was known as alquerque. There were “enemy” pieces, “hostile” moves, and “captures.” Examples of the game have been found in Egyptian tombs, and they, along with wall paintings, reveal that alquerque was a two-player game, with each player moving as many as a dozen pieces across a checkered matrix. Adopted and modified slightly by the Greeks and the Romans, checkers became a game for aristocrats.

  Parcheesi: 1570s, India

  The third all-time top-selling board game in America, Parcheesi originated in sixteenth-century India as the royal game—a male chauvinist’s delight.

  The game’s original “board” was the royal courtyard of Mogul emperor Akbar the Great, who ruled India from 1556 to 1605. The game’s pawns, moving in accordance with a roll of the emperor’s dice, were India’s most beautiful young women, who stepped from one marked locale to another among the garden’s lush flowering shrubs.

  The dice were cowries, brightly colored, glossy mollusk shells, which once served as currency. A shell landing with its opening upward counted as one step for a pawn. The country’s most exquisite women vied for the honor of being pieces in the emperor’s amusement of pacisi, Hindu for “twenty-five,” the number of cowrie shells tossed in a roll.

  During the Victorian era, the India entertainment was converted into a British board game, Pachisi. Its scallop-shaped path, traversed by ivory pawns, was a replica of the footpaths in Akbar’s garden. In America, as Parcheesi, the game became a favorite of such figures as Calvin Coolidge, Thomas Edison, and Clara Bow, and it was trademarked in 1894 by the firm of Selchow & Righter, which would later manufacture Scrabble. The board’s center, marked “Home,” a pawn’s ultimate goal, originally was Akbar’s ornate garden throne. One of the Indian pacisi gardens survives today at the palace in Agra.

  Monopoly: 1933, Pennsylvania

  Two of the most enduring modem board games—one known technically as a “career” game, the other as a “word” game—are, respectively, Monopoly and Scrabble. Both entertainments were conceived in the Depression years of the early 1930s, not as a means of making a fortune but merely to occupy their creators’ days of unemployment and discontent.

  In reaction to the poverty of the Great Depression, Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed engineer from Germantown, Pennsylvania, created the high-stakes, buying-and-selling real estate game of Monopoly.

  Financially strapped and emotionally depressed, Darrow spent hours at home devising gaming board amusements to occupy himself. The real-life scarcity of cash made easy money a key feature of his pastimes, and the business bankruptcies and property foreclosures carried daily in newspapers suggested play “deeds,” “hotels,” and “homes” that could be won—and lost—with the whimsy of a dice toss. One day in 1933, the elements of easy money and ephemeral ownership congealed as Darrow recalled a vacation, taken during better times, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The resort’s streets, north to Baltic and south to Pacific avenues, became game board squares, as did prime real estate along the Boardwalk, on Park Place, and in Marvin Gardens.

  Darrow’s friends and family so enjoyed playing the homemade entertainment that in 1934 they persuaded him to approach the Massachusetts game firm of Parker Brothers. Company executives test-played Monopoly, then unanimously rejected it on the grounds that the concept was dull, the action slow-paced, and the rules hopelessly complex.

  Darrow persevered. And at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, he found an executive who not only enjoyed playing the game but offered to stock it in the store. With loans from family and friends, Darrow had five thousand Monopoly games manufactured and delivered to Wanamaker’s. When Parker Brothers discovered that Monopoly sets were selling swiftly, they replayed the game and found that it was imaginative, fast-paced, and surprisingly easy to master. The game was copyrighted in 1935, and soon the company’s plant was turning out twenty thousand Monopoly sets a week.

  However, top company executives still harbored reservations. They believed the game was strictly for the adult market and merely a fad, which would not last more than three years. In December 1936, convinced that the game’s popularity had run its course, George Parker, the company president, ordered the manufacturing plant to “cease absolutely to make any more boards or utensil boxes. We will stop making Monopoly against the possibility of a very early slump.”

  The slump, of course, never came. And the unemployed Charles Darrow became a millionaire from royalties as his game gained popularity in twenty-eight countries and nineteen languages. There was evidence that the capitalist board game was even played in the Soviet Union: Six Monopoly sets displayed at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 all mysteriously disappeared. Today Monopoly is one of the two longest-and best-selling board games of this century, the other being Scrabble.

  Scrabble: 1931, New England

  Like Monopoly’s inventor, Charles Darrow, the man who conceived Scrabble, Alfred Butts, was left unemployed by the Depression. Unlike Darrow, who translated poverty into a game of fantasy fortune, Butts amused himself at home with pure escapism, translating the national mania for crossword puzzles into a challenging board game that, not surprisingly, he named Criss Cross.

  As conceived in 1931, Criss Cross consisted of a hundred wooden tiles, each painted with a letter of the alphabet. But the game’s final rules, and each letter’s point value, based on its frequency of use, took Butts almost a decade to refine.

  Alfred Butts was in no hurry. For Criss Cross was strictly a home entertainment for his family and friends. It was one friend, James Brunot, from Newton, Connecticut, who in 1948 convinced Butts of the game’s commercial potential and persuaded him to copyright it as Scrabble.

  Scrabble, in a test playing, interested the game-manufacturing firm of Selchow & Righter, who had already scored a best-seller with Parcheesi. Echoing Parker Brothers’ belief that Monopoly would be a short-lived fad, Selchow & Righter were convinced that Scrabble, a faddish spin-off of crossword puzzles, would sell for no more than two years. Instead, it became the second all-time top-selling board game in America (between Monopoly and Parcheesi), was translated into more than half a dozen languages and issued in a Braille version for the blind, and continues to sell strongly today.

  Silly Putty: 1940s, Connecticut

  In the early 1940s, the U.S. War Production Board sought an inexpensive substitute for synthetic rubber. It would be used in the mass production of jeep and airplane tires, gas masks, and a wide variety of military gear. The board approached General Electric, and a company engineer, James Wright, was assigned to investigate the possibility of chemically synthesizing a cheaper, all-purpose rubber.

  Working with boric acid and silicone oil, Wright succeeded in creating a rubber-like compound with highly unusual properties. The pliant goo stretched farther than rubber, rebounded 25 percent more than the best rubber ball, was impervious to molds and decay, and withstood a wide range of temperatures without decomposing. And it possessed the novel property, when flattened across newspaper print or a comic book image, of lifting the ink onto itself.

  Unfortunately, Wright’s substanc
e had no real industrial advantages over synthetic rubber, and it became an in-house curiosity at General Electric’s laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut. Dubbed “nutty putty,” it was demonstrated to visitors, and in 1945 the company mailed samples to several of the world’s leading engineers, challenging them to devise a practical use for the strange-behaving substance.

  No scientist succeeded. Rather, it took a former advertising copywriter, Paul Hodgson, operating a New Haven toy store, to realize that the putty had a future not as an industrial marvel but as a marvelous toy.

  Hodgson, who had recently moved from Montreal, had the good fortune to be at a New Haven party where a wad of nutty putty was demonstrated; it kept a group of adults amused for hours. Entering into an agreement with General Electric, Hodgson bought a large mass of the stuff for $147 and hired a Yale student to separate it into one-ounce balls, to be marketed inside colored plastic eggs. That year, 1949, Silly Putty outsold every other item in Hodgson’s toy store. And once mass-produced, it became an overnight novelty sensation, racking up sales during the ’50s and ’60s of over six million dollars a year.

  Americans wrote to the manufacturer of their own uses for the substance: it collected cat fur and lint, cleaned ink and ribbon fiber from typewriter keys, lifted dirt from car seats, and placed under a leg, stabilized teetering furniture. Though the list was endless, no one then or now discovered a really practical application for the unsuccessful rubber substitute.