Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (70 page)

Armed with an editorial staff of twenty-two, and a suitcase full of newspapers clips to serve as basic source material, Martyn published the first issue of
News-Week
on February 17, 1933, for ten cents a copy. The magazine’s multi-image cover, containing pictures of seven important news events, one for each day of the week, thoroughly confused newsstand customers. Even when Martyn switched to a single cover photograph for each issue, sales did not significantly increase.

Surviving four years of severe financial hardships, in 1937 the magazine modified its name to
Newsweek
. And abandoning the digest-like format, the editors announced a “three-dimensional editorial formula” consisting of the breaking news itself, a background perspective on the news story, and an interpretation of its significance.

To accomplish this comprehensive approach to news, the magazine established its own information-gathering network of correspondents and bureaus. And that same year,
Newsweek
began the tradition (later followed by
Time
) of clearly separating fact from opinion by having writers sign columns of commentary so they would not be confused with neutral reporting. The new approach paid off, and by 1968, though
Newsweek
had certainly not “run Henry Luce out of business,” it had topped its major rival,
Time
, in advertising pages, establishing a trend that would continue into the 1980s.

Chapter 15

At Play

Marbles: 3000
B.C
., Egypt

In
his 1560 masterpiece
Children’s Games
, Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicts children of his era at play: spinning hoops, patting mud pies, tossing jacks, dressing dolls, teetering on stilts, and shooting marbles—some eighty activities in all. It is clearly displayed that many games played today were enjoyed by children five hundred years ago. And several of those games, one being marbles, were part of the daily play of Egyptian children 4,500 years earlier.

With marbles, as with many ancient games, it is important to differentiate between adults’ divination and children’s diversion. For many toys, as we’ll see, originated to augur the fortunes of kings and tribes, and only through disuse were bequeathed to youngsters.

Marbles, in the form of the knucklebones of dogs and sheep, existed in the Near East as auguries more than a thousand years before they became toys. Archaeologists have deduced the transformation from religious article to toy based in part on where ancient marbles were unearthed: among the ruins of a temple or in a child’s tomb. Thus, the oldest game marbles are taken to be a set of rounded semiprecious stones buried with an Egyptian child around 3000
B.C
. in a gravesite at Nagada.

On the Greek island of Crete, Minoan youths played with highly polished marbles of jasper and agate as early as 1435
B.C
. And it is the Greeks, from their term for a polished white agate,
marmaros
, who gave us the word “marble.”

In the ancient world, a marble’s composition often reflected the economic and technologic state of a culture. For the advanced and cultured Minoans,
marbles of semiprecious stone were standard, whereas ordinary stone and pellets of clay formed the marbles of the austere-living inhabitants of the British Isles (even among the ruling class); even more primitive peoples used olives, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and rounded galls from the oak tree. Rustic as many Celtic, Saxon, and African tribes were, their children did not want when it came to marbles. The game developed independently in virtually every ancient culture.

Marbles: A children’s game and an adult augury that existed in every culture
.

Marbles was a popular game among Roman children. The first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, would descend from his litter in order to join street children shooting marble pebbles and galls. Even clear glass marbles, fused from silica and ash, were manufactured in ancient Rome. Despite the numerous marble artifacts obtained from ruins and the many references to the sport in extant texts, rules on how the game was played do not exist.

Tops: 3000
B.C
., Babylonia

It would take modern minds schooled in the kinematics of rotation to understand the complex forces that combine to keep a top spinning upright. But it did not require a probing mind, or a knowledge of mechanics, to discover that a conical object, given a twist, executed a fascinating blur of
motion. Clay tops, their sides etched with animal and human forms, were spun by Babylonian children as early as 3000
B.C
. The unearthed artifacts appear to have been toys, since they were discovered in children’s gravesites alongside sets of marbles.

Medieval German top; the top as a mechanical motor
.

A decorated top is more interesting to watch as its rotation slows and its images become discernible, and the earliest known toy tops were all scored or painted with designs. The ancient Japanese painted tops intricately, and they were the first to create holes around the circumference of the clay toys to produce tops that hummed and whistled.

Hula Hoop: 1000
B.C
., Near East

In 1958, a hula hoop craze swept the United States. Hoops of brightly colored plastic, placed round the waist, were fiercely rotated by wriggling the hips. Stores sold out stock as quickly as it arrived. Within six months, Americans bought twenty million hula hoops, at $1.98 apiece. And doctors treated young and old alike for back and neck injuries and warned of greater dangers.

The hula hoop game, though, was not new; nor were the medical warnings. Both originated centuries ago.

Children in ancient Egypt, and later in Greece and Rome, made hoops from dried and stripped grapevines. The circular toys were rolled on end, propelled along by a rod, tossed into the air and caught around the body, and swung round the waist. In an ancient British game, “kill the hoop,” the center of the rolling toy became the target for hurled darts. South American cultures devised play hoops from the sugarcane plant.

Historians of children’s games record a “hula” hoop craze that swept England during the fourteenth-century Edwardian era. Children and adults twirled hoops made of wood or metal round their waists, and physicians treated the accompanying aches, pains, and dislocated backs. As with the modem craze, many adult deaths by heart failure were attributed to excessive hoop twirling, and the British medical profession warned that “hoops kill,” a macabre reversal of “kill the hoop.”

The name “hula” did not become associated with the game until the 1700s. Then hula was a sensuous, mimetic Hawaiian dance, performed sitting or standing, with undulating hip gestures. Originally a religious dance, performed to promote fecundity, honor Hawaiian gods, and praise the tribal chief, the hula, with its explicit sensuality—accented by bare-breasted female dancers in short
pa’us
skirts and men in briefer
malos
loincloths—shocked missionaries from Britain and New England. They discouraged men from dancing the hula and compelled native women to replace the skimpy
pa’us
with the long grass
holokus
. The dance’s hip gyrations so perfectly matched the motions required to rotate a toy hoop that “hula” became the name of the game.

Yo-Yo: 1000
B.C
., China

In the sixteenth century, hunters in the Philippines devised a killer
yo-yo
of large wood disks and sturdy twine. The weapon was hurled, and its twine ensnared an animal by the legs and tripped it to the ground for an easy kill. The
yo-yo
was a hunter’s aid, similar to the Australian boomerang, in that both devices were intended to incapacitate prey at a distance, and its name was a word from Tagalog, an Indonesian language and the chief native tongue of the Philippine people. The
yo-yo
was no toy.

In the 1920s, an enterprising American named Donald Duncan witnessed the Philippine
yo-yo
in action. Scaling down the size of the weapon, he transformed it into a child’s toy, retaining the Tagalog name. But Duncan’s yo-yo was not the first double-disk-and-twine game.

Yo-yo-like toys originated in China about 1000
B.C
. The Oriental version consisted of two disks sculpted from ivory, with a silk cord wound around their connecting central peg. The Chinese toys eventually spread to Europe, where in England the plaything was known as a “quiz,” while in France it was a “bandalore.” These European yo-yos were richly decorated with jewels and painted geometrical patterns that while bobbing created mesmerizing blurs.

Kite: 1200
B.C
., China

Kites originated in China as military signaling devices. Around 1200
B.C
., a Chinese kite’s color, its painted pattern, and particularly the air movements it was forced to execute communicated coded messages between camps.
The ancient Chinese became so proficient in constructing huge, lightweight kites that they attempted, with marginal success, to employ them as one-man aircraft. The flier, spread-eagled upon the upper surface of a bamboo-and-paper construction, held hand grips and hoped for a strong and steady wind.

Ancient Chinese silk prints and woodcuts show children flying small kites of ingenious design, whose variety of weighted tails indicates that the aerodynamic importance of tails was appreciated early in kite construction. From China, kites traveled to India, then to Europe, and in each new land their initial application was in military communications, where they complemented older signaling devices such as hillside beacon fires and coded bursts of smoke.

By the twelfth century, European children were flying “singing” kites, which whistled by means of small holes in the kite’s body and the use of multiple vibrating cords. Kites carrying atmospheric measuring equipment played a vital role in the science of meteorology, and knowledge gleaned from centuries of kite construction helped establish the field of aerodynamics. Today the kite survives in all cultures as a toy.

Frisbee: Pre-1957, Connecticut

It was the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose name—and lightweight pie tins—gave birth to the modern Frisbee.

In the 1870s, New England confectioner William Russell Frisbie opened a bakery that carried a line of homemade pies in circular tin pans embossed with the family surname. Bridgeport historians do not know if children in Frisbie’s day tossed empty tins for amusement, but sailing the pans did become a popular diversion among students at Yale University in the mid-1940s. The school’s New Haven campus was not far from the Bridgeport pie factory, which served stores throughout the region. The campus fad might have died out had it not been for a Californian, Walter Frederick Morrison, with an interest in flying saucers.

The son of the inventor of the sealed-beam automobile headlight, Morrison was intrigued with the possibility of alien visits from outer space, a topic that in the ’50s captured the minds of Hollywood film makers and the American public. Hoping to capitalize on America’s UFO mania, Morrison devised a lightweight metal toy disk (which he’d later construct of plastic) that in shape and airborne movements mimicked the flying saucers on movie screens across the country. He teamed up with the Wham-O Company of San Gabriel, California, and on January 13, 1957, the first toy “Flyin’ Saucers” debuted in selected West Coast stores.

Within a year, UFOs in plastic were already something of a hazard on California beaches. But the items remained largely a Southern California phenomenon.

To increase sales, Wham-O’s president, Richard Knerr, undertook a promotional
tour of Eastern college campuses, distributing free plastic UFOs. To his astonishment, he discovered students at two Ivy League schools, Yale and Harvard, playing a lawn game that involved tossing metal pie tins. They called the disks “Frisbies” and the relaxation “Frisbie-ing.” The name appealed to Knerr, and unaware of the existence of the Frisbie Pie Company, he trademarked the word “Frisbee” in 1959. And from the original pie tin in the sky, a national craze was launched.