A.C. Gilbert knew what boys wanted, all right. An all-American boy himself, Gilbert had grown up in the 1890s Old West, playing cowboys and Indians, doing magic tricks, starting his own athletic club in his father’s barn. So even though he grew up to become a world-champion pole vaulter with an M.D. from Yale, he chose to make a career out of boyhood. Boys would never be the same.
Gilbert is best-known as the inventor of the Erector Set. In their heyday, thirty million of the build-it-yourself toys were sold, creating generations of engineers, tinkerers, and backyard builders. But Gilbert was as skilled at marketing as he was at magic. To promote the Erector Set and his other toys, he created an entire world for boys. Contests, magazines, the Erector Institute of Engineering, and the A.C. Gilbert Hall of Science in Manhattan were just some of his innovations. By the time he died in 1961, millions of “Gilbert boys” had built America.
The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made is not a biography. Nor is it pure nostalgia. In telling Gilbert’s story, Bruce Watson interweaves magic, fun, and fascinating stories. We learn how, during World War I, Gilbert “saved Christmas” from the clutches of government bureaucrats. We watch him win set world records in the pole vault only to become the “hatchet man” of the Olympics. We see his Erector Set mushroom into the amazing 1920s models weighing 70 pounds and building boy-sized replicas of zeppelins and airplanes. And we watch Watson try to improve upon his ham-handed childhood by building Erector toys to entice his seven-year-old son.
Along the way, Watson asks serious questions about how boys play these days. Can computer games convey an understanding of a 3-D world? Does anyone build anything anymore? What about girls? Can’t they understand engineering as well as boys? And are kids growing up too fast these days?
Not just for Erector aficionados, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made is a delightful romp through a forgotten time when toys mattered, when one big boy made magic and when one man made boys into builders.