A construction set built around thread spools.

Tinkertoy began in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. The local news site Evanston Now, in a history of the toy published on 15 December 2024, says the set was the idea of Charles H. Pajeau, an Evanston man who got the idea after watching children build things out of old thread spools and sticks. English Wikipedia also credits Pajeau, describing him as a stonemason, and dates the design to 1914.

Evanston Now says Pajeau partnered with Robert Pettit, a grain broker, to make and market the toy, and that around 1914 the two began manufacturing it in a small shop behind the old Evanston post office, operating as Toy Tinkers, Inc. Wikipedia gives the company’s name as the Toy Tinker Company and adds a third partner, Gordon Tinker. Basic Fun!, which makes the toy today, uses a slightly different date on its own Tinkertoy page, describing the set as a favourite of young builders since 1913.

The toy was not an easy sell at first. According to Evanston Now, the partners caught the attention of national toy buyers after persuading New York shop owners to set up moving window displays of Tinker creations. Wikipedia says the sets were also introduced through displays in and around Chicago, including model Ferris wheels.

The system itself is simple. Wikipedia describes the cornerstone of the set as a wooden spool with holes drilled every 45 degrees around its edge and one through the centre, the edge holes stopping short of going all the way through. Sticks of different lengths, slotted at each end, push into those holes. The encyclopedia says each longer stick is roughly the next shorter size multiplied by the square root of two, so that two sticks of one length, one of the next length up and three spools form a right-angled triangle — a geometry it ties to the set’s original design.

A mailing tube, numbered sets and coloured sticks.

Packaging has been part of Tinkertoy’s identity from early on. Wikipedia says the mailing-tube design was chosen to reduce shipping costs, and that early tubes carried an address label with space for postage. To help buyers tell the offerings apart, the tubes came in different sizes and carried both a number and a name, such as 116 or 136, Junior or Grad, and each set came with a colourful how-to instruction guide. Evanston Now opens its 2024 history with the image of finding a cylindrical container full of wooden sticks and round pieces.

Colour arrived later. Wikipedia, citing the toy historian Todd Coopee’s Toy Tales, says colour was added in the 1950s, with the wooden sticks appearing in red, green, blue and peach; the earlier sets had natural wood sticks. In its description of 1960s-era sets, the encyclopedia lists the sticks from shortest to longest as orange, peach, blue, red, green and violet, so that the colour of a stick also signalled its length. Caps and couplings that were first made of wood were later made in plastic, along with small flags often described as fan blades.

The company’s home grew with the business. Evanston Now says Toy Tinkers built a large headquarters at 2012 Ridge Avenue, and that the Evanston News-Index reported in 1929 that the building had a roof garden, a tennis court and an experimental shop where workers developed new Tinker lines. Wikipedia describes the same site as a four-storey plant and the main place of manufacture. Evanston Now says the Great Depression forced the company to lease the building to a cosmetics firm and move to smaller premises nearby, later settling in low-rise buildings on Greenwood Street.

The set has also been used for serious engineering. Wikipedia notes that Danny Hillis built a tic-tac-toe-playing computer from Tinkertoys, which is now in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are classic toy names: drawing boards, building sets, craft kits and construction toys that many families have known across more than one generation. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names still run by the company that started them to labels that have passed through several owners, and to marks that are licensed out to other manufacturers for years at a time.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a name, a logo, a box and a handful of colours, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or licensed the mark to someone else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, who makes the toy today and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners and licensees over time, where its toys are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Evanston to a licence held by Basic Fun!.

Ownership of the brand has changed several times. Evanston Now says Pajeau sold the business in 1952 to the sporting-goods company Spalding, that manufacturing stayed in Evanston until 1973, when it moved to New York, and that Hasbro eventually acquired the business. The site says Hasbro later leased the rights to Basic Fun! to make and market the toy, and that both plastic sets and the original wooden version are sold today. Wikipedia likewise says Hasbro bought the brand and produced both Tinkertoy Plastic and Tinkertoy Classic wooden sets.

Basic Fun! entered the picture through another construction toy. The Wall Street Journal reported on 12 February 2018 that Basic Fun! had acquired K’NEX, and Wikipedia ties Basic Fun!’s Tinkertoy rights to that year. Basic Fun! lists Tinkertoy among its brands alongside K’NEX and Lincoln Logs, and its Tinkertoy page names the set’s rods, spools and flags as its building pieces.

The original Ridge Avenue building outlived the company’s time there. Evanston Now says it was later owned by American Hospital Supply and is now office space for Northwestern University.

For a design guide, Tinkertoy shows how a system can become a brand: a single drilled spool, sticks whose colours code their lengths, a numbered and named range, and a cardboard tube that doubled as shipping packaging. Compare the rod-and-connector system that shares its maker in our K’NEX brand guidelines and a metal construction set from the same era in our Meccano brand guidelines. For this guide we use stick red, blue and green on a pale maple ground with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tinkertoy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.