Some of these toys are 2,500 years old
A Greek vase painted around 440 BC shows a boy playing with a YOYO. Terracotta discs of the right size and shape have been dug up to match it, and clay versions were left in temples by children who had outgrown them.
The rest of that corner of the toy box is just as ancient. MARBLES of stone and clay have come out of Egyptian tombs, a spinning TOP is found in almost every culture that has ever had string, and a BALL of some description turns up wherever archaeologists dig. Four toys in this grid would have been recognised by a child three thousand years ago.
Two classics were mistakes
In 1943 a naval engineer called Richard James was working on springs meant to steady instruments on rough seas. One fell off a shelf, and instead of clattering to the floor it stepped end over end down a stack of books. He spent two years working out the exact steel and tension, and the Slinky went on sale in 1945.
Play-Doh had an even stranger career. It was sold in the 1930s as a putty for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper, and the business was dying as homes switched to gas and electric heating. A teacher in the family mentioned that her class already used the stuff for modelling, the recipe was sweetened and coloured, and a failing cleaning product became a toy.
The man who invented kindergarten started with blocks
Friedrich Fröbel opened the first kindergarten in Germany in 1837, and the word is his — a garden of children. At the centre of it he put a set of wooden objects he called gifts: a ball, a sphere and a cylinder, then cubes, then cubes that divided into smaller BLOCKS and BRICKS.
The sequence was deliberate. Children were to handle a whole shape before taking it apart, so that building was always also an argument about how the parts made the whole. Frank Lloyd Wright played with a set as a small boy and said decades later that the feel of those maple blocks never left his fingers.
A stick is in the Toy Hall of Fame
The National Toy Hall of Fame in New York inducts a handful of toys each year alongside the famous brands. It has admitted the cardboard box, the stick, a length of string and a simple BALL.
This is not a joke at the toy industry's expense. Watch children with a toy that does one thing and the play tends to be short and repetitive; give them something with no instructions and the same twenty minutes produces a boat, a sword, a telescope and an argument. The most expensive item in the room is frequently outplayed by its packaging.
What is in the box
Soft things first: the TEDDY, the BEAR, the DOLL and a baby's RATTLE. Then the builders, BLOCKS and BRICKS, and everything with wheels or motion — a TRAIN, a CAR, a ROBOT, a BIKE, a TOP, a YOYO, a KITE and MARBLES. The garden supplies the SLIDE and the SWING, and indoors there is a PUZZLE, a DRUM and a board GAME.
Most of them get outgrown on a fairly predictable schedule. The BALL does not. It is the first toy a baby can track with their eyes, it is still in use at eighty, and nothing else in the box manages that.