Toy
a plaything for children. Over two hundred establishments in the United States are employed in the manufacture of toys and games. Dolls, doll houses, doll furniture, building blocks, kitchen furniture, hobbyhorses, toy gardening implements, drums, tin soldiers, warships, carts, locomotives, fire engines, trumpets, and other American toys are manufactured annually to the amount of $4,000,000. The toy-making industry is confined chiefly to the New England States and New York City. American merchants also import $3,000,000 worth of toys a year from Germany. American buyers go to Europe annually to make purchases before the holiday season. The chief centers of German toy making are Nuremberg and Sonneberg.
Nuremberg is the oldest European toy center known. It was a city of toy makers during the Middle Ages. It still leads the world in the manufacture of tin soldiers and other playthings made of metal. There are five large factories in Nuremberg. It is said that by combining their efforts, they would be able in a day's time to turn out an army of half a million fully equipped troops--horse, foot, and artillery--with ammunition and supply trains complete. The material used is a mixture of lead and tin.
Sonneberg is headquarters for wooden toys. Sonneberg proper is a city of about 20,000 inhabitants. It is surrounded by a score or more of villages and hamlets. Fir wood is obtained from the forest of Thuringia. Each village has its specialty. One makes hobbyhorses; another makes black bears and other animals in fur and feathers; another makes wooden guns. In another village rattles, wagons, and trumpets are made. Toy ships, cows, goats, and sheep are other specialities. Families have been in the toy-making business for centuries. All but children in the cradle work at toy making. Each cottage is a factory. It is said that the elephant, hippopotamus, pig, and rhinoceros now made in Sonneberg are precisely like the animals turned out in the day of Frederick the Great. The toy makers are satisfied with small earnings. Wooden dolls carved by hand are sold by the peasants to the dealer at less than half a cent apiece. A Noah's Ark with a dozen assorted animals brings the peasant toy maker about a cent and a half. Something like 75,000,000 papier-mach'e dolls are made yearly at Sonneberg.
Consul George Nicolas Ifft, of Nuremberg, in his annual report for 1908, furnishes a description of the manufacture of toys in his district:
For many years Nuremberg has been the center of the toy trade of the world, the principal products being metal toys of infinite variety, tin soldiers, toy engines, railways, boats, cinematographs, magic lanterns, musical toys, swords, rattles, etc., and to some extent also wooden and pasteboard toys, blocks, puzzles, etc. About 12,000 people are employed in this industry in the twin cities of Nuremberg and Fuerth, about one-half of the number being women and girls. There are about half a dozen factories, employing several hundred workmen each, the largest of which gives employment to an average of 1,500 persons, and besides these there are hundreds of concerns employing from half a dozen to 100 people. It is not unusual to find a factory in which, besides the proprietor and his wife and children, only two or three extra men are employed.
Tin toys are mostly cut out by machinery, which is often ingenious but simple in operation, and most of the operatives, even in the larger factories, are women or girls. The workshops, with their so-called trade secrets, are generally very strictly guarded, and it is a difficult matter to gain admission to a local toy factory. The wages of female employees are about 5 1/4 cents per hour, much lower than those of the male workmen, who earn about 10 1/4 cents per hour. In normal times the toy-factory employees work 9 1/2 hours per day, with 1 hour less on Saturdays.
The total value of the toy output of this district for 1908 is estimated at about $4,000,000, which was perhaps 25 per cent under that of 1907. The toys were exported to every land on the globe, but considerably more than one-third of the entire product went to the United States. The exports of toys from the Nuremberg district to the United States, as declared at this consulate, for the past five years were as follows: 1904, $938,477; 1905, $1,137,157; 1906, $1,478,060; 1907, $2,309,805; and 1908, $1,566,845.
The German toy output for 1907 is estimated at $25,000,000, of which $19,000,000 was exported, and of that total the United States and Great Britain took more than half.
With the exception of the three largest factories here none of the Nuremberg toy makers exports directly to the United States or to any other country. The entire export business in this line is in the hands of commission merchants, of whom there are a number here and in Fuerth. These firms buy for their customers, pay for the goods, attend to packing and shipping, and assume all risks of collection. For such services they charge a commission of 5 to 8 per cent upon the factory price of the goods.
In addition to the total exports of toys to the United States for 1908 must be added marbles, celluloid toys, and rubber balls, the value of which was $40,649. It will perhaps surprise most people to know that $21,160 worth of marbles for the amusement of the American boy were bought in Nuremberg last year. This was slightly more than the year before, but the purchases of rubber balls dropped from $22,637 in 1907 to $7,627 last year. More than three and one-half times as many celluloid toys were, however, bought here for the United States in 1908 as in 1907, the figures for the respective years being $3,103 and $11,862.
See Doll; Kaleidoscope