A magician, a train window and a patent.

The Erector Set began with Alfred Carlton Gilbert, a Yale-trained doctor who never practised medicine. The Olympic reference site Olympedia records that Gilbert earned an M.D. at Yale. He was also a stage magician, and his business started by selling tricks: English Wikipedia’s article on the A. C. Gilbert Company says he founded the Mysto Manufacturing Company in 1909 in Westville, Connecticut, with his friend John Petrie to supply magic shows, while the encyclopedia’s biography of Gilbert dates the founding to 1907.

The idea for a construction toy came from a train window. The Strong National Museum of Play, on its National Toy Hall of Fame page for the toy (published 20 August 2021), says Gilbert conceived the Erector Set in 1911 while watching steel girders being put up to carry power lines; Wikipedia places that on the line between New Haven and New York City, then being electrified by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Wikipedia’s company article adds that Gilbert and his wife, Mary, worked out the sizes, holes and angles with cardboard prototypes.

The patent came next. Google Patents records US 1,066,809, “Toy construction-blocks”, filed by Alfred C. Gilbert on 20 January 1913, assigned to the Mysto Manufacturing Company and granted on 8 July 1913. Wikipedia says its key feature, promoted for years, was a strong but light hollow girder built from four long flat pieces of stamped sheet steel held together with nuts and bolts. The Strong describes the result as sturdy one-inch square girders fixed with just two bolts.

The toy was shown to the trade at the 1913 New York Toy Fair, at the Broadway Central Hotel, according to Wikipedia. The Strong says a national advertising campaign in the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics launched it that year, with advertisements that called out “Hello, Boys! Make Lots of Toys!”

New names, new boxes and the A. C. Gilbert Company.

The product changed its name several times in its early years, and each name was printed on the box. Wikipedia says the 1913 sets were called “The Erector / Structural Steel and Electro-Mechanical Builder”; in 1914 the name became “The Mysto Erector, The Toy That Resembles Structural Steel”; and in 1916, when the company was reorganised as the A. C. Gilbert Company, the sets were renamed “Gilbert Erector, The Toy Like Structural Steel”. The trademark itself has been styled in capitals, ERECTOR.

In 1924 the whole system was overhauled with new parts and sold as “The New Erector”, Wikipedia says. The Strong dates the same redesign to 1924 and says specialised kits with electric motors let children build trains, steam shovels, Ferris wheels and Zeppelins. During the 1940s, the museum adds, wartime metal shortages led the company to introduce wooden sets.

The boxes changed with the materials. Wikipedia says Erector was sold in wooden boxes through 1932 and in painted steel boxes from 1933 to 1962; early steel boxes were red, green or blue, and by the 1950s every set box was painted red. As the business grew, the area around the Gilbert factory in New Haven became known as Erector Square.

Gilbert built a wider toy company around the kit. Wikipedia says the firm made chemistry sets from 1922 and in 1938 bought the American Flyer toy-train line from W. O. Coleman, moving its production from Chicago to New Haven and competing with Lionel. In 1941, the encyclopedia says, Gilbert opened the Gilbert Hall of Science in New York City, a science and technology showroom that also sold his products.

Gilbert also became a public figure for the trade. Wikipedia says that in 1918, with the Council of National Defense considering a wartime ban on toy production, he argued successfully against it and the press called him “the man who saved Christmas”; a television film of that name, with Jason Alexander as Gilbert, debuted on 15 December 2002.

Design and documentation.

A toy or game is usually met first as a box, and the lid does much of the work that a label does on a bottle or a can. It carries the name in large lettering, a picture of the thing inside or of children using it, and often a line of copy that the brand repeats for years. Because toy and game names change hands between companies, the same name can appear over the decades on lids printed by several different owners, each redrawing the lettering and the artwork in the style of its own time.

That makes the box worth reading as a record. The name on the lid, the company credited in the small print, the country of manufacture and the copyright line together show who made and sold a product at a given moment, and those details can differ from one edition to the next.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its boxes, logos and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Gilbert to Gabriel, Ideal, Tyco and Meccano.

The Gilbert era ended in the 1960s. Wikipedia says Gilbert retired in 1954 and handed the company to his son, that the family later sold its remaining shares to Jack Wrather, and that the A. C. Gilbert Company went out of business in 1967, although the Erector trademark continued to be used.

The name then passed through several owners. The Strong says the Gabriel company bought the toy in the 1960s and that the manufacturer discontinued the line in 1980. Wikipedia says Gabriel, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, marketed a redesigned system with many plastic parts, which by the mid-1970s had largely been removed or replaced with laminated fibreboard panels, and that in the 1980s the trademark went to Ideal Toys and then to Tyco Toys.

In 1990, according to Wikipedia’s Erector Set article, Meccano bought the Erector brand and folded its worldwide marketing into its own, selling sets in the United States as Erector by Meccano with the same parts as Meccano. To announce the move, the encyclopedia says, the French company Meccano S.A. built a large model Ferris wheel in France, based on the 1893 Chicago original, and shipped it to New York for display; it was later bought by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for its museum in St. Augustine, Florida. The Canadian toy company Spin Master has owned Meccano since 2013, Wikipedia says.

The Strong inducted the Erector Set into its National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, and its citation places the toy alongside Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys, which appeared around the same time. A collection of A. C. Gilbert Company toys is held by the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Connecticut, Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, the Erector Set shows how a long product name, a coloured steel box and a single engineering idea — the bolted hollow girder — could carry a brand from a New Haven magic-trick firm to a French construction-toy maker and a Canadian owner. Compare it with Meccano, the British system that now carries it, and Tinkertoy, another American construction toy of the same decade. For this guide we use box red, girder blue and bolt brass with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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