Toy reins, such as you see with tinkling sleigh-bells on them, may be woven elsewhere in New England, but it is fairly certain that the bells at least were made in Connecticut, where the industry is a very old one, and where most of the sleigh-bells in the country have been made, as well as cow-bells and the tiny tinkler on the tea-table. And, naturally, the state in which are so many clock factories produces those toys which are made to go by a winding key.
Hundreds of thousands of tin trumpets, and other toy musical instruments which used to be made in France and Germany, are now made in this country, mainly in Pennsylvania and New York. It is fascinating to watch the making of them by machinery. Pull a handle here! Click! down comes a frame and a long sheet of metal is cut into pieces of the exact shape wanted. See! the frame on which the metal rested is a moving belt bringing a fresh sheet of metal under the stamps and at the same time carrying the cut pieces forward over a row of steel cones where a set of clamps like steel jaws catches each separate bit. The clamps close once, nip! open, and each cone pushes forward with a jerk into another which with one motion adds a mouthpiece. What passes on now is a bent tube which needs only a touch of solder to keep it closed, a few rings of paint to make it gay, and perhaps a curved handle, to be a very presentable toy trumpet.
Drums are almost all made in Massachusetts; marbles, the best of them, come from Saxony; the old-fashioned kinds of music-boxes, some of them very elaborate and beautiful, still come from Switzerland. Glass ornaments for Christmas trees are made in Germany; many of the tinsel and cut-paper ornaments also come from Nüremburg and other German cities which are the great toy markets of the world. In one French village near Paris almost all the bone dominoes have been made for years; another section of France turns out nearly all the bone chessmen—such figures as Alice found in the Looking-Glass country; and a quantity of the furry rabbits, silky-haired dogs, and woolly lambs on green-painted bellows which bleat ba-a-a, have been made by one Parisian family for many years. The old proprietor, his sons and daughters and even grandchildren, have lived and worked together at the very top of an old house in one of the side streets of the city, from a time beyond the memory of all but few.
As for dolls—the making of a Christmas doll—that is another story.
The Making of a Christmas Doll
Does it seem to you that it would be a delightful business to make hundreds of thousands of dolls every year? H’m! Does this huge kettle of bad-smelling mush make you think of the dainty, smiling dolls in the toy-shop window? Dolly is made, though you would never guess it, of chopped up bits of old kid gloves and pieces of cardboard boiled to a pulp in a gum made from the horns of goats. And here is a man shovelling sawdust into a kettle half full of boiling water. Now he is turning the mass into a big mixing trough, adding one shovelful after another of the gluey mush. The machinery creaks and turns and cuts and slaps as this mixture is kneaded into a composition pulp. Now he is carrying some of it in a hod, for all the world like sticky mortar, to a weighing table! Sweep! it is spread out in an even thickness. Clip! down come the knives which part it into the right quantities, and it is swiftly pressed and moulded to the shape of a body, an arm, or a leg. In one factory alone the parts of as many as forty thousand dolls are thus made in one day, and the ugly, greenish shapes set aside to harden. Another day they pass quickly under the brushes in the painters’ hands after which they have the more familiar rosy pink color, and dolly can now be put together except for the head.
Copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
DOLL-MAKING
Of these dolls the heads are to be of porcelain. Once for all, long ago, some artist made the model of which many duplicate moulds stand ready. Into these moulds liquid porcelain clay is poured; before it hardens the openings for the eyes are cut and tiny holes made by which it can be joined to a body. After the moulds are opened, as the rows and rows of little heads stand in metal trays, a painter comes by, covers them with a glaze-wash, tints the cheeks and outlines the brows and lashes. Now into the oven goes the tray for hours of slow baking. But even with the head sewed on we have but a sad-looking dolly, both blind and bald.