Toys

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Toys

Although the first toys, dolls, and playthings were made at home, created and adapted by children and their parents, toys may have been produced for sale from as early as the sixteenth century. In the succeeding centuries, with Nürnberg at the center of toy production, dolls and toys were created throughout much of what is now southern Germany and the surrounding region. Paris, known for centuries for dressed fashion dolls, also exported dolls to adults and children in Europe and eventually America.

In addition to the toy trade in Europe, toys were used as barter goods with non-Western peoples from an early date. Dolls, or "babies," were among the items recorded by Thomas Harriot and John White as traded with the Native Americans in Virginia in the late sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century mechanical toys were sometimes among the trade items offered by European traders in the African slave trade. The word toy could refer to a wide range of small goods, as opposed to simply children's toys.

The Industrial Revolution and advances in printing and production processes allowed toys to be created more quickly and cheaply. Late-eighteenth-century toy catalogs, such as Georg Hieronimus Bestelmeier's extensive volumes, allowed toys to be advertised, ordered, and shipped over great distances, changing forever the ways in which toys were marketed, sold, and created. The earliest toy catalogs were geared to faraway shop owners who would use catalogs and samples to order toys for their shops. In the nineteenth century rubber, tinned sheet iron, and cast iron were some of the materials newly used in toys once primarily made of wood, fabric, clay, wax, and other materials. By the end of the century technological advances led to mechanized toys such as crawling dolls and steam-powered toy trains. Much of modern life was reflected in new types of children's toys. By the turn of the century, and especially during World War I, toys were increasingly produced in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain, rather than imported from Germany.

In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s developments in plastics and other synthetics led to the use of these materials in children's toys. By the 1950s and 1960s these materials gradually supplanted other materials as the main components of children's toys. Continuing what had started with children's periodicals, radio and movies, this period also saw the introduction of television commercials aimed at children, allowing toy companies to market their products directly to young consumers in highly successful ways. By the 1970s government safety regulations for toys further altered the toy industry, forcing more of a focus on safety as well as profits.

By the end of the twentieth century China and other East Asian countries led the world in toy exports. By 2001 China produced more than 60 percent of the world's toys. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, computerized toys and video games compete with and sometimes complement traditional dolls and toys. Computerized toys and video games are a huge industry drawing both children and adult players, with many games aimed specifically at teenage and adult audiences. Fueled by both nostalgia and novelty, collectible figurines, dolls, games, and other toys, often associated with the purchaser's own childhood or popular trends, increasingly and self-consciously have been aimed toward adults. Today the toy industry, an international, multibillion-dollar business, serves the needs of kids of all ages.

SEE ALSO Africa; Germany; Industrialization;Slavery and the African Slave Trade.