How many of these can you relate to? Which ones did you have? What was your favorite, even if it’s not listed here? The View Master was one of my personal favorites, it was first introduced in 1939, although the image above is a later model from around the 60’s.
Did you ever wonder where Matchbox cars got their name? It’s because they originally came in small boxes that resembles matchboxes in 1953.
The Slinky was invented by Richard James in the early 1940’s. It was inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame in 2000, and the U.S. Postal Service issued a Slinky stamp in 1999.
I don’t remember ever seeing this next one, and can only imagine what kind of outcry it would get these days, but it was a metal cigarette candy machine (bank) made by Marx in the 1950s.
The Easy- Bake Oven, released by Hasbro in 1963. It came with packaged mixes that usually only needed water added and then slid through the machine. It used a regular household light bulb for heating. I got one for Christmas in second grade.
The Vac-u-form machine is another toy from the 60’s that I don’t remember but was apparently popular because it’s highly sought after today. It was made by Mattel, and used steam to ‘soften’ small sheets of styrene so that they would form to the mold. Pretty sure these would be considered dangerous today by modern standards.
We did find this demonstration on youtube: