Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (71 page)

Frisbee originated on an American college campus in the 1940s, but it had a historical antecedent
.

Rattles: 1360
B.C
., Egypt

Dried gourds and clay balls stuffed with pebbles were people’s earliest rattles, which were used not for play but to frighten off evil spirits. Rattling was invoked by tribal priests at the time of a birth, sickness, or death, transitions in which early peoples believed they were especially susceptible to evil intrusions. Societies that bordered the sea constructed religious rattles from bivalve shells filled with pebbles.

The first rattles designed for children’s amusement appeared in Egypt near the beginning of the New Kingdom, around 1360
B.C
., and several are displayed in that country’s Horniman Museum. Many were discovered in children’s tombs; all bear indications that they were intended to be shaken by children: Shaped like birds, pigs, and bears, the clay rattles are protectively
covered in silk, and they have no sharp protuberances. A pig’s ears, for instance, were always close to the head, while birds never had feet, legs, or pointed beaks. Many rattles are painted or glazed sky blue, a color that held magical significance for the Egyptians.

Today, in tribal Africa, rattles are still made from dried seed pods. And their multiple uses are ancient: making music, frightening demons, and amusing children.

Teddy Bear: 1902, United States

Despite the popularity today of toy bears with names such as Bear Mitzvah, Lauren Bearcall, and Humphrey Beargart, the classic bear is still the one named Teddy, who derived his moniker from America’s twenty-sixth President.

In 1902, an issue of the
Washington Star
carried a cartoon of President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, drawn by Clifford Berryman, stood rifle in hand, with his back turned to a cowering bear cub; the caption read: “Drawing the line in Mississippi.” The reference was to a trip Roosevelt had recently taken to the South in the hope of resolving a border dispute between Louisiana and Mississippi.

For recreation during that trip, Roosevelt had engaged in a hunting expedition sponsored by his Southern hosts. Wishing the President to return home with a trophy, they trapped a bear cub for him to kill, but Roosevelt refused to fire. Berryman’s cartoon capturing the incident received nationwide publicity, and it inspired a thirty-two-year-old Russian-immigrant toy salesman from Brooklyn, Morris Michtom, to make a stuffed bear cub. Michtom placed the cub and the cartoon in his toy-store window. Intended as an attention-getting display, the stuffed bear brought in customers eager to purchase their own “Teddy’s Bear.” Michtom began manufacturing stuffed bears with button eyes under the name Teddy’s Bear, and in 1903 he formed the Ideal Toy Company.

The American claim to the creation of the Teddy Bear is well documented. But German toy manufacturer Margaret Steiff also began producing stuffed bear cubs, shortly after Morris Michtom. Steiff, who at the time already headed a prosperous toy company, claimed throughout her life to have originated the Teddy Bear.

Margaret Steiff, who would become a respected name in the stuffed-toy industry, was a polio victim, confined to a wheelchair. In the 1880s in her native Germany, she began hand-sewing felt animals. As German toy manufacturers tell it, shortly after the Clifford Berryman cartoon appeared, an American visitor to the Steiff factory showed Margaret Steiff the illustration and suggested she create a plush toy bear. She did. And when the bears made their debut at the 1904 Leipzig Fair, her firm was overwhelmed with orders. It seems that the Teddy Bear was an independent American and
German creation, with the American cub arriving on the toy scene about a year earlier.

President Theodore Roosevelt inspired the teddy bear, which became the most popular children’s toy of the 1910s
.

The stuffed bear became the most popular toy of the day. During the first decade of this century, European and American manufacturers produced a variety of toy bears, which ranged in price from ninety-eight cents to twelve dollars, and factories supplied them with sweaters, jackets, and overcoats. For a while, it appeared that dolls were about to become obsolete.

Crossword Puzzle: 1913, New York

The concept of the crossword puzzle is so straightforwardly simple that it is hard to believe the puzzles were not invented prior to this century, and that “crossword” did not enter American dictionaries as a legitimate word until 1930.

The crossword puzzle was the brainchild of an English-born American journalist. In 1913, Arthur Wynne worked on the entertainment supplement,
Fun
, of the Sunday edition of the
New York World
. One day in early December, pressured to devise a new game feature, he recalled a Victorian-era word puzzle, Magic Square, which his grandfather had taught him.

Magic Square was a child’s game, frequently printed in nineteenth-century British puzzle books and American penny periodicals. It consisted of a group of given words that had to be arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally. It exhibited none of the intricate word criss-crossings and blackened squares that Wynne built into his game. And where Magic Square gave a player the words to work with, Wynne created a list
of Down and Across “clues,” challenging the player to deduce the appropriate words.

In the December 21 edition of the
World
, American readers were confronted with the world’s first crossword puzzle. The Sunday feature was not billed as a new invention, but was only one of a varied group of the supplement’s “mental exercises.” And compared to the taxing standards of today’s crossword puzzles, Wynne’s was trivially simple, containing only well-known words suggested by straightforward clues. Nonetheless, the game struck the public’s fancy.

Within months, Wynne’s “mental exercise” was appearing in other newspapers, and by the early 1920s, every major U.S. paper featured its own crossword puzzle. The publishing firm of Simon & Schuster released the first book of crossword puzzles, and in 1924, crossword books held the top four positions on the national best-seller list. Booksellers nationwide experienced an unexpected bonus: dictionaries were selling at a faster rate than at any previous time in history.

In 1925, Britain succumbed to crossword mania, with one publication observing that “the puzzle fad becomes a well-entrenched habit.” Soon the puzzles began to appear in almost every language except those, like Chinese, that do not lend themselves to a letter-by-letter vertical and horizontal word construction. Crossword puzzles were such an international phenomenon by the early ’30s that women’s dresses, shoes, handbags, and jewelry were patterned with crossword motifs. While other games have come and gone, crossword puzzles have continued to become more and more challenging. Regularly enjoyed by more than fifty million Americans today, the crossword puzzle is rated as the most popular indoor game in the country.

Board Games: 3000
B.C
., Mesopotamia

In 1920, British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley discovered among the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur a gaming board considered to be the oldest in the world. Each player had seven marked pieces, and moves were controlled by the toss of six pyramidal dice, two of the four corners tipped with inlay. Three dice were white, three lapis lazuli. Though the game’s rules are unknown, the board is on display at the British Museum and its markings suggest it was played like backgammon.

Vying for the record as oldest board game is
senet
, the most popular game in Egypt some 4,300 years ago. Played by peasants, artisans, and pharaohs, the game consisted of a race across a papyrus playing board, with each player moving five ivory or stone pieces. The game was such a popular pastime that it was placed in the tombs of pharaohs; Tutankhamen’s game of
senet
was discovered when his tomb was opened in the 1920s.

Board games began as a form of divination, with a scored board and its marked pieces the equipment of sages and soothsayers. The historical crossover point from religion to recreation is unknown for many games.
But as late as 1895, when the French army attacked the capital of Madagascar, the island’s queen and her advisers turned for a prophetic glimpse of the battle’s outcome to the ancient board game of
fanorona
, a relative of checkers. The advances, retreats, and captures of the game’s white and black pieces represented divine strategy, which was followed even in the face of imminent defeat.

Chess
. One of the oldest board games to survive to the present day, chess was thought to have been devised by a Hindu living in northwest India in the late fifth century
A.D
. Or by the ancient Persians, since they played a similar game at that time, and since the expression “checkmate” derives from the Arabic phrase
al shah mat
, meaning “the king is dead.”

Recently, however, the discovery in the Soviet Union of two ivory chessmen dating to the second century
A.D
. preempts the Indian and Persian claims.

In the eleventh century, Spain became the first European country introduced to chess, and through the travels of the Crusaders the game became a favorite of the cultured classes throughout Europe.

Checkers
. The game of checkers began in Egypt as a form of wartime prognostication about 2000
B.C
. and was known as
alquerque
. There were “enemy” pieces, “hostile” moves, and “captures.” Examples of the game have been found in Egyptian tombs, and they, along with wall paintings, reveal that
alquerque
was a two-player game, with each player moving as many as a dozen pieces across a checkered matrix. Adopted and modified slightly by the Greeks and the Romans, checkers became a game for aristocrats.

Parcheesi: 1570s, India

The third all-time top-selling board game in America, Parcheesi originated in sixteenth-century India as the royal game—a male chauvinist’s delight.

The game’s original “board” was the royal courtyard of Mogul emperor Akbar the Great, who ruled India from 1556 to 1605. The game’s pawns, moving in accordance with a roll of the emperor’s dice, were India’s most beautiful young women, who stepped from one marked locale to another among the garden’s lush flowering shrubs.

The dice were cowries, brightly colored, glossy mollusk shells, which once served as currency. A shell landing with its opening upward counted as one step for a pawn. The country’s most exquisite women vied for the honor of being pieces in the emperor’s amusement of
pacisi
, Hindu for “twenty-five,” the number of cowrie shells tossed in a roll.

During the Victorian era, the India entertainment was converted into a British board game, Pachisi. Its scallop-shaped path, traversed by ivory pawns, was a replica of the footpaths in Akbar’s garden. In America, as
Parcheesi, the game became a favorite of such figures as Calvin Coolidge, Thomas Edison, and Clara Bow, and it was trademarked in 1894 by the firm of Selchow & Righter, which would later manufacture Scrabble. The board’s center, marked “Home,” a pawn’s ultimate goal, originally was Akbar’s ornate garden throne. One of the Indian
pacisi
gardens survives today at the palace in Agra.

Monopoly: 1933, Pennsylvania

Two of the most enduring modem board games—one known technically as a “career” game, the other as a “word” game—are, respectively, Monopoly and Scrabble. Both entertainments were conceived in the Depression years of the early 1930s, not as a means of making a fortune but merely to occupy their creators’ days of unemployment and discontent.

In reaction to the poverty of the Great Depression, Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed engineer from Germantown, Pennsylvania, created the high-stakes, buying-and-selling real estate game of Monopoly.

Financially strapped and emotionally depressed, Darrow spent hours at home devising gaming board amusements to occupy himself. The real-life scarcity of cash made easy money a key feature of his pastimes, and the business bankruptcies and property foreclosures carried daily in newspapers suggested play “deeds,” “hotels,” and “homes” that could be won—and lost—with the whimsy of a dice toss. One day in 1933, the elements of easy money and ephemeral ownership congealed as Darrow recalled a vacation, taken during better times, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The resort’s streets, north to Baltic and south to Pacific avenues, became game board squares, as did prime real estate along the Boardwalk, on Park Place, and in Marvin Gardens.