Krazy Ikes (toy)

(1964 – ??)

Toymakers in the 50s and 60s loved plastic.  And why not?  It’s a cheap material, colorful, and can be used in many ways.  Building toys, especially.  When I was growing up, the main ones were Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs (both made of wood) and Erector Sets (made of steel).  But both were limited.  Lincoln Logs just allowed you to build log cabins, Tinkertoys were totally freeform, and Erector Sets were held together by nuts and bolts that were a pain to set up and take down.  When my parents took a trip to Copenhagen, they brought back a Danish toy that I had never seen in the US:  Legos.  The other toys were lost in their wake.

Not that people tried.  Whitman, Inc. had been making a toy since the 30s, and changed it to plastic.  Instead of making houses, you made people and animals.  They called it “Krazy Ikes.”

It was a clever design.  There were several bodies, with little round stubs – a sphere on a short connector – for the legs, arms, and heads.  There were also heads, but the key were the arm/legs.  These snapped onto the stubs and could be moved in any position (think ball-and-socket joint).  This made the results fully artculatable and posable in any postion.  You could mix and match to make anything you wanted.

It was a brilliant idea.  Not only could you make whatever you wanted, but you could also play with them, interchange parts, and generally have fun.

Alas, the toy had a very short life.  By the 70s, it was gone.  Too bad.  I enjoyed it almost as much as Lego – and mostly because you could use your imagination.

The Tonette (Music)

(1938-??)
Wikipedia Entry

Music may be the food of love, and most kids love music from very early on.  And one of the big thrills is being able to make your own.  If you were growing up in the 50s, if you learned music in elementary school, you probably learned by playing the tonette.*

The tonette was invented in 1938 by Zienger Swanson of the Chicago Musical Instrument Company** in 1938 and quickly caught on in schools and in other places where a simple musical instrument was in demand.

The tonette was a plastic flute.  You blew in one end, which had a mouthpiece like a whistle. There were seven holes on the top (for your fingers***) and one on the bottom (for your thumb), so you could play a bit more than an octave.  Fingering was simple: the scale was played by lifting one finger at a time to get to the next note.  Thus Middle C require you cover all the holes, D would be all but the lowest, E would have the two lowest holes open, and so forth. 

The music was simple, but most kids loved being able to play “Three Blind Mice.” It has occasionally shown up in professional contexts; it can be heard in the background in Cream’s “Pressed Rat and Warthog,” played by Felix Pappalardi.

The instrument faded in popularity in the 60s.  Supposedly, it’s still being used now, but I can’t find any indication online that anyone is selling them, other than an occasional one on eBay.

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*Or the Flutophone.  Our school switched at some point: I used the Tonette, but my brothers used the Flutophone.  Tonettes were black; Flutophones white with red trim, and tonettes didn’t have a bell (though they eventually added one; in both cases, the bell was for show and had nothing to do with the sound).

**Manufacturer of Gibson guitars for many years.

***The left pinky was placed in a ridged circle to hole the instrument.  The right thumb had the same sort of arrangement.

Digi-Comp

(1963)
Friends of Digi-Comp Yahoo Group.
A nice overview.

I was interested in computers at a very early age. They were so science fictional (I loved science fiction) and the idea of one of those big electronic devices (with vacuum tubes and blinking lights, or course) was pretty exciting to a kid.

So, one year, my parents gave me one as a gift:  Digi-Comp

Digi-Comp was a mechanical computer.  No power source.  It was made out of plastic, some metal, and rubber bands.  You programmed it by putting a series of one-inch long plastic tubes* on pegs.  The location of the tubes determined the programming, and you could do arithmetic operations by moving a lever back and forth.  The numbers were in binary, of course, and there were three digits, so you could only get up to seven before overloading the computer.

Here's a nice little Youtube clip.  If you look closely, you can see the white numbers on the left side increase each time the computer is cycled.

 

Digi-Comp was clearly not designed for any serious computing, but it did display the principles nicely.  I took it into school to show how computers worked.

I did grow tired of it, mostly because moving the tubes around was always difficult and slow, and debugging involved making sure they were all in the right place.

But it was a great toy while it lasted.

*Just like the Internet!