Inducted Toys

Sand

Inducted Year: 2021 Sand may be the most universal toy in the world. From a geologist’s perspective, sand is a dry, gritty material consisting of small, loose pieces of rock, soil, minerals, and gemstones. But children recognize sand as a creative vehicle for play suitable for pouring, scooping, sieving, raking, and measuring. Wet sand is even better, ready to construct, shape, and sculpt. Historians have every reason to believe that the earliest people played in sand. As early as the 1800s, newspapers […]

Risk

Inducted Year: 2021 The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed a board game with simple rules but complex interactions, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in 1957. Purchasing the rights, Parker Brothers published it with a few small changes as Risk in 1959. It became the first popular game involving strategy, diplomacy, conflict, and conquest.  Risk players control armies of tokens on a world map board in attempts to capture adjoining territories from other players, battling by rolls of the […]

American Girl Dolls

Inducted Year: 2021 Following a visit to historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and a Christmas shopping trip for her nieces, educator and newscaster Pleasant Rowland developed and launched a line of 18-inch dolls representing an era of America’s past. Each doll was paired with rich historical narratives and accurate reproductions of clothing and accessories. Rowland decided to sell the dolls—Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly—by direct mail. Between September and December of 1986, American Girl dolls sold $1.7 million worth of product. Rowland’s formula for combining […]

Rubber Duck

  Inducted Year: 2013 Rubber toys first appeared in the late 1800s, when manufacturers made use of Charles Goodyear’s process for rendering rubber into malleable material. The first rubber ducks didn’t even float: they were cast solid and intended as chew toys. By the 1940s, rubber ducks developed into the iconic floating yellow figure with bright orange bill we recognize today. For many decades, most duck figures have been made of vinyl, but we still call them rubber ducks. Rubber ducks naturally inspire […]

Chess

Inducted Year: 2013 Chess is one of the world’s oldest games. Its roots lie in an ancient Indian war game called chaturanga, in which pawns represent different types of fighting men that spread through Asia and eventually migrated to Europe. In 625, an Indian literary reference to chaturanga stated that “only from the astapada (gaming board) can one learn how to draw up a chaturanga (army).” The version of chess we play today is almost identical to the game as it […]

Teddy Bear

  Inducted Year: 1998 In 1902, on an unsuccessful hunting trip, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that expedition trackers had caught and tied to a tree. The incident struck a chord with the American sense of fair play. Political cartoonist Clifford Berryman immortalized the incident in “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” Tugging at American heartstrings, Berryman drew the old, injured female bear as a helpless cub. With Roosevelt’s permission, Morris Mictom, a Russian immigrant and Brooklyn toy-shop owner, sewed […]

Scrabble

  Inducted Year: 2004 During the Great Depression, architect Alfred M. Butts had time on his hands and play on his mind. He devised a game of 100 lettered tiles used to form words on a square grid that looked like a crossword puzzle. Each letter carried a numerical value, and players scored points by tallying up the values of the letters in the words they laid down. Butts was a better game creator than marketer. He called his game Lexiko, then Criss […]

Dollhouse

  Inducted Year: 2011 The first dollhouses developed to display the miniature possessions of very wealthy Europeans in the late 1500s. These diminutive “baby houses,” as they were known, consisted of cabinets divided into compartments to display miniature furniture and household accessories. Exclusively the playthings of adults, baby houses not only showcased finely made furnishings of exotic woods, metals, fabrics, and other materials, they also served as symbols of a lady’s wealth and refined tastes. Miniatures, however, fascinate children as much as adults, […]

Dominoes

  Inducted Year: 2012 Dominoes, cousins of playing cards, originated in China in the 1300s and represent one of the oldest tools for game play. From professional domino game competition to setting them up and then knocking them over, dominoes allow for a variety of games, as well as tests of skill and patience. The markings on dominoes, known as pips, originally represented the results of throwing two six-sided dice. The European dominoes we recognize today differed from the Chinese versions by […]