“Never work at anything that isn’t fun.”

I’d call that wise enough to justify a little investigation into the fella who said it, which is just what I did for Google Earth. This stemmed from my earlier ramble about how I survived being the owner of Gilbert’s nuclear toys for kids.

Physician, magician, Olympic gold medallist, radio pioneer, discoverer of Paradise, the man who saved Christmas, breeder of champion German shepherds, the guy who gave the world an Erector (and built an electric dildo for the ladies!), the perpetual boy – AC Gilbert, 1884-1962, has been called “one of the most multi-talented inventors of all time”, and as well as millions of kids still playing with his toys, there are tributes to this little-remembered man all around the United States.

From Erector Square in New Haven, Connecticut, to Discovery Village in Salem, Oregon, the spirit of Alfred Carlton Gilbert lives on in the Erector set and the millions who fondly recall playing with it as children, not least the generations of scientists, engineers and architects who can trace their careers back to that wooden box of nuts, bolts and girders.

There was a 2002 TV movie about Gilbert, “The Man Who Saved Christmas”, but short and rotund Jason Alexander portraying the tall and athletic Gilbert was only one way it stretched the imagination. The truth is far more interesting.

Gilbert put enormous toil into everything he did, and at the end of his life held 150 patents, but as wealthy as he became, he wasn’t a money-oriented man. He had a motto of sorts: “Never work at anything that isn’t fun.”

Childhod home

Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born on February 13 (some say the 15th), 1884.
His first childhood home was in Salem at 700 Marion Street. The Salem First Congregational Church has occupied the site since 1941. The home of his uncle, Andrew T Gilbert, now holds pride of place at the AC Gilbert Discovery Village on the riverfront.

Levitation in Lewiston
When Alfred was eight, his family moved to Lewiston, Idaho, and by that time he was already a skilled illusionist and a fledgling athlete. He once upstaged a vaudeville magician onstage, accepting a dare that he couldn’t dulicate a trick. In later life Gilbert invented many magician’s routines that became common, including, one source says, the lady being sawn in half.

At 14 Gilbert was organising track meets sponsored by Lewiston stores, and in high school he excelled in wrestling and track and field. Pole-vaulting was a favourite sport, and he came up with the idea of digging a small hole where the end of the pole would rest while he vaulted. This was unheard of – poles had a spike at the end to keep them in place. In his teens, he worked summers on his uncle’s farm and as a flagman for the Northern Pacific Railroad.

Truly higher learning
Prep school for Alfred was Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove, Oregon, now Pacific University. AC, who arrived here in 1900, remains its most famous alumnus. He captained the football and track teams, wrestled and did gymnastics. His gymnastics squad competed at the Chautauqua Institute in New York state, and there “Gillie” met coaches who encouraged him to sign up at Yale University. This he did in 1904, in pursuit of a medical degree that he felt would make him a better coach.

He was a brilliant academic student, but in 1900 he also held the world record for consecutive chin-ups (39), and later set a world record for height in the pole vault (12 feet, three inches), which duly caught the attention of the US Olympic team.

Olympic gold
The BBC’s radio and TV broadcasting facilities sit on the former site of White City Stadium, scene of the 1908 Olympics.

The United States won 13 of the 24 track and field events at the IV Olympiad, led by jumper Ray Ewry, who took home 10 gold medals.

AC Gilbert was the only pole-vaulter to clear 12 feet in the finals, but because he didn’t beat the 12-foot-two-inch height reached by Cornell’s Edward Cooke in an earlier heat, the result was officially listed as a tie. Cooke, however, let Gilbert have the gold medal. Another version has Gilbert embroiled in the US-versus-UK bickering that did indeed mar the Games, suggesting track officials refused to let him dig a hole in the turf and use his spikeless pole. If so, the officials’ objections soon became moot.

Among his 150-odd inventions, Gilbert devised the “vaulter’s box”, the metal receptacle set in the ground into which pole-vaulters to this day anchor their pole before getting airborne.

The 1908 Games were where the modern standard distance for the marathon was established, quite by happenstance. The distance at the first seven Olympics from 1896 to 1920 hovered around 25 miles, but the starting point in London was at Windsor Castle, to give the royal family a better view, creating a distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, to the finishing line at White City Stadium. That’s been the standard ever since.

Pure magic

On his return from the London Olympics, Gilbert got to meet his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, made a profit selling the bamboo vaulting poles he’d bought in France, and married his fiancee Mary Thompson, whom he’d met at Tualatin. They settled in Westville, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven.

In 1909, while still at Yale Medical School – and doing magic shows to help pay his tuition – Gilbert founded the Mysto Manufacturing Company in Westville, where several of Yale’s athletic facilities are still located.

Although Gilbert received his medical degree from Yale, he opted to be a manufacturer instead. With a $5,000 loan from his disappointed father he and two partners got the Mysto company up and running, and it did pretty well, but it was another two years before the idea of a toy construction set for boys set him on the road to fame and fortune.

The original Mysto factory, shown here in the inset of a photo of the later New Haven plant, is today evidenced only by a bronze plaque installed by the AC Gilbert Heritage Society.

Bolting boys together

In 1911, on the commuter train to Manhattan to put on one of his magic shows at the Mysto store there, Gilbert was struck by the sight of workmen riveting steel beams to an electrical powerline tower. The British toy company Meccano already had a children’s construction kit on the market, but he saw a way to recreate the experience in miniature in a more realistic way.

Gilbert and his wife spent a few evenings cutting out cardboard prototype pieces, which Gilbert took to a machinist to have rendered in steel. The first set of girders didn’t hold together properly, so he added a thin lip to the edges that let the girders overlap securely. He showed them to his partners at Mysto, but they baulked, so he bought them out and, leasing an old carriage factory here on Fox Street, started making the components.

He spent a year tinkering, even adding motors so everything could move, and in 1913 the Erector Set made its debut at the New York and Chicago toy fairs. He came home with more orders than he could fill, but a bank loan enabled him to expand his operation and meet that year’s Christmas rush.

Erecting a fortune

With business booming – profits jumped 1,800% in two years – a larger plant was needed, so in 1916, the renamed AC Gilbert Company moved into the former Maxim Munitions Works at Blatchley and Peck Streets in Fair Haven.

Erector Sets were numbered 0 to 8 depending on the number of pieces included. The No 0 set cost 50 cents, No 1 a dollar. No 8 cost $25 and came in a three-layer walnut case with its own lock and key.

Gilbert held contests for the most original models built with Erector parts. He started a magazine, Erector Tips, which was not only about the sets but shared his boyhood tales. Readers could learn “How To Save $5″ or “How To Be A Wrestler”. In 1915 the company received more 60,000 entries to one design contest, six times what similar Meccano efforts were drawing, but then first prize was a real car.

The Blatchley factory employed thousands of Fair Haveners, many of whom worked at home doing piecework, like assembling set screws on Erector gears and pulleys. During World War II the plant helped the military by producing parachutes, flares and small motors for fighter planes, as well as 90 per cent of all the firing devices used by the Allies in land mines, anti-personnel devices and sabotage explosives.
The Blatchley Avenue plant closed in 1967.

Erector Square
New Haven’s five-acre Erector Square today offers 400,000 square feet of commercial space and is a prime renter of studio space to commercial artists, but it was originally home to another of Gilbert’s factory, at 315 Peck Street.

The Erector set was backed by America’s first major advertising campaign for a toy. Gilbert went on radio to call out, “Hello, Boys! Now for fun!”, and appeared in many a newspaper ad. Youngsters deluged him with fan mail, some of them signing off with, “Your Loving Son”. It wasn’t long before youngsters were begging Santa Claus for first the kit and then the upgrades, the ultimate being the “No 12 1/2″ deluxe kit that came with blueprints for the “Mysterious Walking Giant” robot.

Ultimately 30 million sets of “the most popular educational toy in history” were sold during Gilbert’s lifetime.

In 1916, with sales already topping $1 million a year, the company started making non-toy items to ensure sales year-round rather than relying on Christmas. Its Polar Cub portable electric fans were made using an enamelled wire Gilbert patented. General Electric had insisted that enamelled wiring would be unsafe. AC bolted it to the motors in his Polar Cub fans and sold millions of them – safely.

The fans were followed by electric pencil sharpeners, mixers, vacuum cleaners, hair dryers and the Gilbert Vibrator, patented in 1928 as a massager for backs and limbs, though a document in Gilbert’s files makes it clear that it was intended as a marital aid.

In 1920 Gilbert opened the country’s fifth licensed radio station, WCJ, broadcasting from a transmitter on top of his Erector Square plant. He personally pioneered radio sports wrap-ups and interviewed prominent athletes of the day. AC also began touring the Northeast and Midwest to promote his toys, riding a special train car and doing magic shows.

New Haven also honours another Yale-educated inventor, Eli Whitney, whose nearby hometown of Hamden has a renowned museum that goes far beyond the cotton gin and reserves a place of honour for AC Gilbert.

Toys for every kid

The Toy Industry Association, headquartered at 1115 Broadway in New York, was originally the Toy Manufacturers of America, founded by Gilbert in 1916. When the US entered World War I the following year, Gilbert was among the “Four Minute Men” flogging government bonds with short speeches in cinemas. His factories made parts for gas masks and guns, but he also kept turning out toys, since the lack of imported German toys was a golden opportunity.

As inaugural president of the Toy Manufacturers of America, Gilbert “saved Christmas for the children”, in the Boston Post’s words, by dissuade the Council of National Defence from halting toymaking as a non-essential industry. He showed how toys and munitions could be made side by side.

In 1941 the Gilbert company opened the Hall of Science on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and soon after there were branches in Washington and Chicago. The one in New York had a massive train layout on the ground floor that the public could admire, and on the second floor another one reserved for salesmen, buyers and invited guests. The Science Halls were the culmination of Gilbert’s vision – not merely stores but interactive playgrounds of learning and the imagination.

Arms and amusements

Another of the toy factories was on Gilbert Lane in the one-time Dutch trading port of Branford, Connecticut. AC Gilbert was by 1941 the world’s largest toy-manufacturing company. The following year, though, it began making M26 bombing flares for the Army and Mark 5 and 6 flares for the Navy, as well as booby traps that incorporated a little of the old Gilbert magic. The motors that controlled the trim tabs on the first American fighter planes were made here – and became the prototype for the motor that powered a million and a half toy train engines under the firm’s American Flyer brand.

Built from actual railroad blueprints, with a new scale and a new gauge, engines that were true to scale, details down to the last rivet, the American Flyer grabbed a third of the toy-train market.

Gilbert also manufactured various chemistry sets, including one specifically for girls, and an “Atomic Energy Lab” complete with real radioactive particles and a working Geiger counter. Gilbert Magnetic Fun and Facts, Gilbert Electrical Set, Gilbert Glass Blowing, Gilbert Soldering Outfit and many more came with manuals written by university scientists and experts from General Electric.

It made microscopes that came equipped with all kinds of creepy specimens on slides, among them a fly snagged in the same dairy barn that supplied the milk for the Gilbert company’s lunchroom.

The Gilbert company overall grew to some 2,500 workers by the early 1950s, and AC fended off the unions by treating his employees to generous benefits and getting to know almost all of them by name, even visiting the night shift once a week to show he cared.

Home and family

Thanks to Dorseyland visitor Jerry, I was able to locate AC Gilbert’s home in North Haven, Connecticut, on Google Earth, and the Paradise nature reserve in nearby Hamden as well.

This was Gilbert’s home, known as Maraldene. Here he raised his family. His company’s target buyers were always boys, but in the fact his own first two children were girls. In the 1920s he introduced the LaVelle line with which girls could “play house”, though it didn’t last long.

In 1946, Gilbert’s third child and only son Albert Junior joined the firm after starting out, on his father’s recommendation, at General Electric.

Here too AC raised Jersey cattle and German shepherd dogs. In 1922 he’d tried to start a toy factory in Vienna, reasoning that war-devastated Europe would welcome the industry. He failed, but brought home from the trip a German shepherd. The fairly new breed wasn’t known in America until returning soldiers introduced it and a puppy from Paris called Rin Tin Tin became a major movie star, with his own limousine and cook.

Gilbert’s Vigo was snubbed in the Westminster Kennel Club Show, so he went back to Europe the following year and paid $2,500 for the reigning English champion, Alf von Tollensetal, and another shepherd named Asta von Kaltenweidefor $6,500, and hired a pair of German trainers.

He built Maraldene Kennels on his estate, and by 1926 Asta was the American grand champion and the Von Stephanitz international champion. Not long after, though, Gilbert abandoned his show-dog hobby, deciding it was petty, and donated his favourite dogs to the Peabody Museum’s important canine collection. Yet it’s been noted that the chapter about his dogs in his autobiography contains his most expressive writing, offering more about his shepherds’ feelings than he shared about his children or his wife.

In Paradise

And this was Paradise.

The Laurel View Golf Course now occupies much of the 32-acre property in Hamden, Connecticut, where Gilbert established a nature preserve he called “Paradise”. It was ultimately donated to the state. Dorseyland visitors have recalled going to the hunting lodge here as late as the 1960s and seeing an enormous stuffed Kodiak bear on display.

Gilbert kept up his involvement with sports, coaching the national pole-vaulting team and even accompanying Douglas MacArthur, then head of the American Olympic Committee, to the 1928 Amsterdam Games. He managed the US team at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and found time as well for big-game hunting in the Canadian Rockies.

Discovery Village

Discovery Village in Salem’s Riverfront Park, is a private, non-profit children’s museum founded in 1989 with the intention of stimulating children’s inventiveness. It aims “to provoke curiosity, inspire awe, foster enjoyment, encourage learning and enable understanding” through fun and challenging exhibits, summer camps, birthday parties and outreach programs in the sciences, arts and humanities.

The Gilbert House, the main attraction here, is the Victorian “gingerbread” home built in 1887 for Alfred’s uncle, Andrew T Gilbert. The City of Salem bought it in 1985 and moved it here. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

Several other buildings from the late 19th century have been moved here and restored to create “AC’s Backyard”, complete with the world’s largest Erector Set tower. The 1860-vintage Parrish House hosts a display of Gilbert’s toys and inventions and an exhibit chronicling his life.

AC retired in 1954, receiving a gold-plated Erector set from the firm, and turned the operation over to his son, Al Junior.

Unfortunately for the younger Gilbert, times had changed. Television was stealing youth’s attention; the atom bomb and science-fiction movies made science scary, or at least nerdy; the space age made trains seem prehistoric. Then there were Tinker Toys and Legos – Gilbert went eight years without a new product and neglected to modernise the ones that made it famous, even letting the quality slip, much to AC’s horror. Gilbert Junior remained as president until he died of a brain tumour in 1964.

Hopelessly out of step with the modern, profit-driven age, Erector sets declined in popularity to the point that Gilbert Co was sold in 1967, to Los Angeles businessman Jack Wrather, then to Gabriel, which continued to use the brand name on its Erector sets and microscopes, as did subsequent owners. Today’s sets have this inscription on the packaging: “The construction toy from AC Gilbert”, and Lionel, which bought the American Flyer brand, still uses the old Gilbert catchphrase, “Developed at the Gilbert Hall of Science”. Erector name is now owned by Meccano SN of France.

By the time his second heart attack killed him on January 24, 1961, Gilbert was credited with 150 patents for the inventions that went into his products. He wasn’t just a proponent of “good, clean fun”, as he put it; he truly wanted his products to better the minds of the children that enjoyed them so much.

They did that and more: As just two examples of how his little girders were put to good use by grown-ups who’d learned early how to use them, Donald Bailey of Britain’s Royal Engineers used an Erector set to design the portable bridge used in World War II, and in 1949, Dr William Sewell used one in developing the first artificial heart for testing on dogs.

FURTHER READING:

The AC Gilbert Heritage Society requires registration but can be useful for collectors. AC Gilbert’s Discovery Village in Salem is the highlight at ACGilbert.org.
Tributes to Gilbert can be found at the American Flyer and ErectorSet.net websites.
Wikipedia has a solid write-up, but Everything2.com has perhaps the best online biography of all. RFG, which makes parts for American Flyer trains, has loads of images and a history of company at its website.
Two books worth hunting down are Bruce Watson’s “The Man Who Changed How Toys and Boys Were Made” from 2002 and AC Gilbert’s 1954 autobiography, “The Man Who Lives in Paradise”.