We long admired the pioneers for their hard work and ingenuity as they turned the trees of the new world’s forest into simple and sturdy log cabins. The inventor of Lincoln Logs, John Lloyd Wright (son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright), designed the toy to resemble the log cabin because he knew how effectively it captured the American mood. The image of the dwelling had served as the logo for successful Presidential campaigns—Abraham Lincoln’s most famously. Amidst the gathering political storm that led to Civil War, the icon helped voters imagine that the homespun orator would bring back simpler, steadier, more resourceful, more self-reliant, and virtuous times.

Over the years the symbol has continued to attract parents, the buyers. But no toy can stay fresh for so long on the strength of marketing alone; it is the technology that makes Lincoln Logs fun. These rounded, notched mini-logs are easily assembled into sturdy miniature cabins that can support the weight of a child. They support the stories children spin, too. The packaging—round to fit round logs—also pictures frontier forts, the essential American outposts. And I even remember how the rage for Davy Crockett—his coonskin cap, and other manly equipment—fueled our imaginations in the 1950s and supported a new enthusiasm for Lincoln Logs.

Curiously, however, the inspiration for the toy was not entirely American. As a teenager, John Lloyd Wright had observed Japanese carpenters notching beams for an “earthquake proof” hotel that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed in Tokyo. During a temblor the resilient structure would sway but not fail.

One more curve brings the story full circle; the son had another and deeper personal reason to choose this name for this toy. Frank Lloyd Wright’s real, given middle name was Lincoln.

You can accelerate the rotation and prolong the spin of a top by attaching a string and rolling it out with a flick of the wrist. Contain the spinning top in a frame, and you’ve created a gyroscope. The gyroscopic effect fights your efforts to change the gyroscope’s position. This seems magical too. Scaled up, the toy stabilizes oceangoing ships and steadies space-faring satellites.

If you join two cone-shaped tops together with the points at the middle, you’ve made a toy known in America as the Diabolo. Juggle this conjoined top on a string, and you can work up its speed until it whirrs. Then toss this devilishly delightful toy up, catch it, and let it roll along like a wheeled tightrope walker. Toss it again. Now reverse the tops, imagining them as wheels. Attach them in the middle with an axle between. Fix one end of a string to the axle, the other to your finger, and let it spin out of your hand. When the spinning toy runs out of string at the bottom it will catch and then start reeling itself up to return to your hand. At last! You’ve made a yo-yo.

Then, second, there is the practical and scientific approach. Some people say footballs are shaped the way they are because they’re more aerodynamic and can be more accurately thrown when spiraled downfield by a quarterback with a strong right arm. This might sound good to someone who hasn’t thrown a football. However, a baseball, which, of course, is round, is easier to throw. For that matter, even a softball, though bigger than a regulation baseball, is easier to throw than a football. But then again, one might argue that with those handles on either end, isn’t a football easier to catch? OK, there might be something to that, but then history invades again; American football developed as a running game before passing came along, and hence before catching was a strategic factor. Finally, nobody would dispute that footballs are harder to kick than soccer balls, and this is a funny thing for a game called football. History comes to a partial rescue here, because the origin of the name football most likely came from games that in medieval times were played on foot—rather than on horseback that is. But this doesn’t help us to answer the original question. Why are footballs shaped like—let’s give the shape a name—prolate spheroids?

I lean toward a third approach: surprises make a game less predictable and more interesting and the shape helps randomize and equalize the game. We don’t play games because they’re easy or predictable. When punted, footballs may land flat and plop. But more often than not, they bounce end over end for ten or twenty yards and wobble to the right or left. They may even bounce backward, giving the punting team a great gift and the fans a thrill. A loose ball is hard to pin down, and a fumbled football is as slippery as a, as a . . . as a greased pig bladder!

The toy’s endorsers include such luminaries as Dr. Benjamin Spock and Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Spock, the world’s most famous baby doctor, reminded parents that with a little imagination, a cardboard box could become a farm, a town, or a doll’s house. As a young girl, the future American Secretary of State decorated a cardboard box and made it the centerpiece of a fantasy kingdom that she built—mirrors stood in for lakes, twigs became trees. For her, as for millions of others, this toy is pure improv.

First you think outside the box and then you play in it. Kids have staged a zillion plays from cardboard boxes. They learn more from this scrap than they do from most other toys. And when the cardboard box is dog-eared and trampled, it will slide like a sled down dry grass on a steep slope. Who cares when it’s used up? You rescued the toy from the recycler in the first place. This disposable toy will be with us forever.

But Wells was also a dreamer who had a hopeful streak and imagined shining outcomes. He thought science could save us if coupled with our best instincts, and so Wells liked the engineering of a near-perfect machine. “When I see an adult on a bicycle,” he once wrote, “I do not despair for the future of the human race.”

Today, I admire the efficiency of the mechanism like he did, especially the way it saves energy. (There is no greener vehicle.) And I love using it to make better time than cars in heavy traffic. (Sometimes there’s no faster vehicle.) But these grownup virtues are beside the point. I don’t bike for transportation, I bike for fun. I ride every day that the weather cooperates, and sometimes when it doesn’t. For me, bikes are about play: balancing on two wheels, rolling down hill, passing huffing joggers, splashing through a puddle, bunny-hopping over a bump.

If Wells could see the millions who take to the roads and paths on two wheels now, he would be smiling.

A version of this blog first appeared in Ed and Woody Sobey, The Way Toys Work (2008).

1) Even as the competition creeps up, she’s the essential doll. Nearly all American girls own one and the average girl will own between eight and ten before she ages out of doll play. (I know we had a house full.)

2) Barbie is an ageless favorite. She debuted in 1959, after Mattel executive Ruth Handler vacationed in Germany and brought back a naughty tobacco-shop gag doll called Bild Lilli. Handler’s skeptical colleagues dissed the idea of a glamour doll, but she convinced them to produce a version for American girls. Mattel didn’t change the tall and top-heavy Teutonic figure much for the American market, guessing that, in addition to pretending to be mommies by playing with baby dolls, little girls would want a doll that would help them pretend to be bigger girls. They guessed right. About a billion Barbies have sold over the past five decades.

3) Barbie mirrors culture. Initially a sultry siren in a zebra swimsuit, she was little more than an ornament. But since then she has appeared as a fighter-jet pilot, a paleontologist, a pediatrician, a presidential candidate, a dentist, a diplomat, an astronaut, an Olympic athlete, a Rockette, a Starfleet Officer, and many other incarnations.

Like fifty year-old women in the real world, Barbie is an inspiration, and she’s still a knockout.

Here’s one about the origin of the Frisbee that has a ring of truth, or to use Merriam-Webster’s 2006 word of the year, “truthiness.” This legend began in 1827 when students gathered to protest Yale’s compulsory religious services. One of these truants, so the story goes, was the notable Elihu Frisbie, and when he defiantly sailed a collection plate a prodigious two hundred feet across the green, the Frisbee was born.

It’s easy to believe this tale because

1. Our New England roots are set deep in religious dissent;
2. students then and now have a leaning toward “tumult;” and
3. “Elihu Frisbie” is a name that sounds like it might well belong to the seventh son of the seventh son of the original Puritan colonist.

Spun this way, the tale—about a flying object tossed at a great moment—carries the essential elements of the Frisbee’s story: invention, a whiff of mischief, and spontaneous play. It’s like the Washington fable or one of the many tall, thin tales you hear about Abe Lincoln. You’d like to believe them. Alas, this one is too good to be true. No such hero as Elihu Frisbie ever attended Yale. Instead, we can trace this myth to a students’ prank letter to the New York Times, exactly 130 years later, in 1957. You can read more truthy and true stories about the Frisbee in Classic Toys of the National Toy Hall of Fame.

This year the third of three nominees, the Ball, caught the eye of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. The host, the very funny guy Jon Stewart, opened with, “I’ve just been handed some breaking news….” And then he began winding himself up the way fulminating sportscasters do. “The Ball is just now getting into the Hall of Fame? Are you kidding me?” he sputtered. “Ten years to induct the Ball into the National Toy Hall of Fame? The Stick got into the Hall of Fame ahead of the Ball?” Stewart couldn’t believe it. “Get your heads out of your garbage plates,” he fumed, referring to one of Rochester’s signature junk meals. When he started threatening to ride Geoffrey the Giraffe from Toys “R” Us up to Rochester to beat us museum types with the Stick, my wife fell on the floor laughing. But Stewart had a point. “The Ball is the universal toy,” he argued. “If you want to play all you need is a noun followed by ball and you have a game: baseball, football, stickball, beer … ”

So if you roll the ball, the game is bowling. If you kick it, it’s soccer. If you strike it with a cue, you’re at the pool table. If you belt it with a club, the contest is field hockey. If you belt it with a club while cussing, then it’s probably golf. If you bounce it and shoot it, the game is basketball. If you pitch it, bat it, and catch it, then it is baseball. If you kick it, pass it, and run with it, then you’re playing football or rugby. If you track it and whack it with a racquet, you’re on the tennis court. Yeah, the ball is as basic as play equipment comes, and ten years is a long time to wait. But if Bubble Wrap beats the Rubik’s Cube into the National Toy Hall of Fame next year, and this sets you off again, Stewart, well hey, bring it on!

The strict parochial grade school I attended in the 1960s banned the yo-yo. It marked its owner as an idler who’d been lured astray. The Duncan slogan, a mantra almost, may have sounded like a rival liturgy too: “if it isn’t a Duncan, it isn’t a yo-yo, if it isn’t a Duncan, it isn’t a yo-yo….” Naturally, playing with the yo-yo at school took on the flavor of an outlawed pleasure.

During the baby boom, playgrounds were parking lots, and during recess in those years, the crowded asphalt, like kids’ play itself, became mostly kids’ territory. But still, the authorities could invade and confiscate a yo-yo if they discovered one. Once seized, the toy would be whirled and flung onto the school’s flat roof, ritually sacrificed. In my memory, this smooth move has merged with martial-arts movie choreography; it’s no longer  possible to retrieve the moving image of the swirling black-and-white habit of the Dominican nun without also thinking of the kung-fu robes of the Shaolin priest.

Did this really happen? Now, I can’t say for certain. But I am sure we students imagined that a shining surface festooned with gleaming transparent Imperials waited above. The roof would be ankle deep in multi-colored Mardi Gras yo-yos, sleek black Tournaments too, and wooden spaceship-shaped Satellites that whistled. It was a field of dreams.

A version of this blog first appeared in Ed and Woody Sobey, The Way Toys Work (2008).