“The Man Who Saved Christmas”
A great movie about this event... :)
My father drove me to the A.C. Gilbert Company after it shut down in New Haven, CT. Erector Sets were big in Connecticut. We made them there.
Working class kids generally had toys their fathers made or they made themselves. Air rifles were not inexpensive, so the boy's first gun was more likely one of dad's or grandpa's .22s for hunting dinner.
A.C. Gilbert didn't "save Christmas"; he kept his own company in business.
It’s worth a moment of pondering how many boys got interested if not fascinated by mechanical stuff, leading to engineering and fabrication as a result of having erector sets as kids. And maybe, probably that had an impact on the number of boys who entered engineering schools pre-WW2 and were into making airplanes and ships, etc; . And yes, there were girls who owned E-sets, but metals engineering was 98% a boy thing. I loved mine, which I inherited from my older brothers in a kind of depleted state and craved all the higher-end doodads you could buy for the basic set I had. And equally, I learned at least something about how kind of crappy some of the attachments were.
I was given an erector set for Christmas back in the mid 1930s. I played with it for years.
I liked the trains, the chemistry sets and the erector sets.
“When World War I broke out in 1914, President Wilson decided that the U.S. would not at that time join the Allies but would instead remain on the sidelines.”
So very many things wrong with that statement.