The oldest European toy manufacturing center is Nuremberg, Germany. This town is especially noted for its metal playthings, like the lead soldiers, which were the delight of our childhood. Sonneberg, in Germany, is the greatest European center for the manufacture of wooden toys.
Winchendon, Mass., is the greatest toy manufacturing center in the United States, nearly every enterprise in that town being toy-making.
In spite of the early origin of toys the progress of manufacturing playthings has been so slow that, even as late as one hundred years ago, the types of toys were few in number, simple in construction and extremely expensive, especially in the United States.
There was no systematic manufacture of such articles, and, as the cost of importation was very high, comparatively few persons could afford such means of amusement for their children.
The children of those days accepted more primitive things, dolls that were often merely pieces of cloth folded and pinned in such a manner as to suggest the outline that was not there.
A few other toys such as hoops, jumping-jacks, tenpins, marbles, battledore-and-shuttlecock and alphabet blocks, represented the limit of the toy-makers' stock.
In America the toy-making industry is of quite recent origin. Before 1875 more than ninety per cent of the toys sold in this country were of foreign manufacture, and those that were made here were never exported to other countries. Today, however, about five per cent of the toys sold here are made abroad and the rest are manufactured here in our own country. Up to 1875 there was not a doll factory in the United States.
Today, while we import some dainty toys from France, Germany and Switzerland, nearly all the newest, unique and mechanical productions are made in America.
Simple toys are mostly made of wood and metal, and the same principles employed by mechanical engineers, in duplicating parts of machinery, are used in making duplicate parts of toys.
When a design has been decided on, it is reduced to its most simple element. Jigs are then made so that each piece will be an exact duplicate of every similar piece, and the construction is pushed through on the American factory system.