A short history of all the must-have toys for Christmas

'Play,’ Albert Einstein once said, ‘is the highest form of research.’ The frazzle-haired physicist had a point — our childhood psyches are profoundly shaped by the toys with which we grew up. Not simply objects to idle away a day, they offered imaginative windows into faraway worlds, a means to learn the ethics of competition, were conduits for education and, in the form of plush animals, heartfelt companions (some, as with Evelyn Waugh’s doomed Sebastian Flyte and his bear Aloysius, became firm friends for life).

Many of our most popular toys also possess fascinating creation stories and reflect the historical and cultural milieus into which they were born. Here, we present 14 of the most influential, intriguing and inexplicable playthings from the past century or so.

Toy soldiers (1893)

Miniature military men have existed for millennia — examples in clay date back to ancient Egypt — but were revolutionised by British toy manufacturer W. Britain in 1893, with the invention of the cheap technique of ‘hollow casting’ figures in lead. This was quickly emulated by other companies, including John Hill & Co and Hanks Bros, and the UK’s soldier-making method became the industry standard. The fantastically detailed, table-top armies of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k may have usurped the traditional soldier, but W. Britain still creates meticulous, multi-era American Civil War, Revolutionary and Anglo-Zulu models (to name but a few) from its new base in Ohio, USA. The rules of toy-soldier warfare would be standardised by none other than science-fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, in his 1913 book Little Wars.

Steiff Teddy Bear (1897)

No cuddly companion spans the generations quite like the teddy bear — of which Steiff’s is the Ursidae urtext. The company was founded by seamstress Margarete Steiff in the German city of Giengen in 1880 and began selling a variety of animal-themed toys internationally at London’s Harrods in 1895. The famous mohair bear with movable limbs — snappily dubbed ‘55 PB’ — was created by her nephew, Richard, in 1897, based on drawings he made at a zoo. Another Steiff family member, Franz, would add the trademark ear button in 1904, although the bear wouldn’t develop its fearsome, gurgling growl for another four years. The world was rapt and, in 1907, the company made nearly one million bears, the craze galvanised earlier in the decade by a cartoon of President ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt with a bear cub in The Washington Post (hence the name).

Monopoly (1935)

Monopoly was originally invented, in 1903, by anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie as The Landlord’s Game — a means of explaining American political economist Henry George’s single-tax theory, it was intended to teach the player about the pitfalls of economic inequality (jolly evening in, eh?). The idea was later pilfered and tweaked into the gleefully avaricious boardgame we know today by Charles Darrow, who sold the copyright to Parker Brothers. First released in 1935, Monopoly was redesigned by Waddingtons and a British version appeared a year later.

Rather thrillingly, during the Second World War, the British Secret Intelligence Service commissioned a special edition. Replete with hidden compasses, maps, real money and other items, it was distributed by fake charity organisations to British prisoners-of-war in Nazi Germany to aid attempted escapes.

Slinky (1943)

It takes serious gumption to market a minimalist metal coil, working to the principles of Hooke’s empirical law of spring physics, as a gleefully entertaining and space-age timekiller to children — but such was the initiative of American naval engineer Richard T. James. He created his helical spring in 1943 (his wife, Betty, came up with the unimprovable name), demonstrating its abilities at a Philadelphia department store two years later and selling 400 models in 90 minutes to a public entranced by its freakish ability to travel down stairs and bounce, seemingly at odds with the laws of gravity. By the time of Betty’s death in 2008, and bolstered by the release of the Slinky Dog in 1952, the smashing spring had shifted 300 million pieces worldwide.

Mr Potato Head (1952)

Created by George Lerner, in 1949, as the rather more prosaic Funny Face Man, Mr Potato Head — rebranded by Hasbro in 1952 — can boast not only being the first toy advertised on television, but also starring in the first advertisement to be aimed squarely at children. Until 1964, the characterful spud comprised merely a set of plastic parts to be stuck into a real potato (not supplied); the russet plastic body was included only after parental complaints about rotting vegetables. This starchy señor was an immediate hit, selling one million units in its first year — possibly aided by a polio outbreak keeping children indoors and the fact that early television sales were booming.

Matchbox Cars (1953)

The definitive die-cast toy-car brand was introduced by Britain’s Lesney Products in 1953 and inaugurated with a model of Elizabeth II’s coronation coach. Its second fun-size facsimile, a green and red Aveling Barford Diesel Road Roller, was designed to sit inside a matchbox, as creator Jack Odell’s daughter was only allowed to take a toy to school that would fit within one. The roller was the first in the company’s I-75 range; umpteen cars and vehicles of all makes and stripes — from hum-drum hatchbacks and Transit vans through slick sportscars, hovercraft, snow ploughs and novelty banana cars — have appeared since.

Etch A Sketch (1959)

The fiddly tool of many aspiring aesthetes, the Etch A Sketch (not to be confused with the similarly monochromatic Magna Doodle) is a canny muddling of mechanics and art, invented in the late 1950s by Frenchman André Cassagnes and launched by the Ohio Toy Company in 1960. The name is a misnomer, as there’s no etching here whatsoever: the toy is a kind of plotter wherein two styluses displace aluminium powder stuck to a screen with electromagnetics, creating lineographic images of varying artistic worth.

Rubik’s Cube (1974)

The timeless combination puzzle, invented in 1974 by Hungarian architectural professor Ern Rubik, had sold 500 million units world-wide as of 2024. The multi-coloured cube (actually 26 separate ‘cubelets’ around a 3D ‘cross’ at the centre) is a work of infuriating simplicity — it’s 54 separate tiles capable of being scrambled into any one of 43 quintillion combinations. Solving this blighter at all is rather flummoxing, let alone in the head-spinning 3.05 seconds it took current cube-conquering record holder Xuanyi Geng this April — and, even more improbably, in the 5.66 seconds Dhruva Sai Meruva took to do the same, one-handed, last autumn.

Sylvanian Families (1985)

This peaceable kingdom of anthropomorphic animals, made of soft-textured, flocked plastic, was created by Japanese company Epoch in 1985. Initially given the snappy moniker of Pleasant Friends of the Forest Epoch System Collection Animal Toy Sylvanian Families, the characters and their homes were designed to immerse children growing up in urban high-rises in more bucolic, sun-dappled environs. Arriving in Britain two years later, the brand was a phenomenon, with woodland creatures including owls, rabbits, hedgehogs and foxes dressed in 1950s domestic garb dominating many a childhood. A shop selling nothing but Sylvanian figurines opened in Highbury, north London, in 1992 and remained in business for 30 years.

Nintendo Game Boy (1989)

Nintendo’s definitive handheld console — a green-screened, dowdy-grey brick of a thing — upended the world of computer games when it launched in 1989. Created by Gunpei Yokoi and the Nintendo Research & Development No 1 Department, it’s a truly totemic piece of design that has sold (together with its colour sibling) more than 120 million units and facilitated classic games as addictive as Tetris, Super Mario Land, Pokémon, Kirby’s Dream Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

Pogs (1991)

A Technicolour take on the Hawaiian pastime of milk caps, Pogs was a minimalist and heated game that saw players attempt to flip over stacks of illustrated cardboard discs by throwing, from an angle and at great speed, a plastic ‘kini’ disc at them (schoolyard rules demanded crucial clarification on whether the flipped discs would be taken by the victor for ‘keeps’). Revived in 1991 by an O’ahu schoolteacher called Blossom Galbiso, the name harks back to a Hawaiian juice drink (POG or ‘passionfruit, orange and guava’), the lids of which were originally used to play the game; the hairy, surfboarding troglodyte that became the World Pog Federation’s de facto mascot was the juice carton’s logo.

Tamagotchi (1996)

A pocket-sized, ovoid digi-pet, introduced by Bandai in 1996 and still around today, Tamagotchi is a portmanteau of tamago (meaning ‘egg’) and uotchi (‘watch’). The concept is simple: the ‘player’ (or parent) attempts to raise a tiny, pixelated blob creature through several developmental life stages by feeding, cleaning and playing with it, tending to its particular needs as it communicates its demands with a series of beeps (an especially irritating design quirk at 4am). The inevitable cycles of neglect and death were an oddly profound life lesson, although the Tamagotchi could thrive into old age if cared for attentively enough — one apocryphally lived to the ripe old age of 89 days.

Furby (1998)

A semi-sentient robotic pet taken to the eerie nth-degree, the Furby — a kind of mish-mash owl-hamster thing — was created by Tiger Electronics in 1998. Blessed with rudimentary movement (the eyes and mouth opened and closed, it could raise its ears and rise slightly on its haunches), the uncanny little critter could also speak 42 words in a language called Furbish and developed a basic grasp of English as it ‘aged’. When gathered in a group, the toys happily jabbered away to each other via infrared ports on their foreheads like something from a Stephen King novella. An immediate Christmas smash hit, 40 million of the furry automatons were sold in the first three years alone.

Jellycats (1999)

A 21st-century successor, of sorts, to Steiff, Jellycat — founded by Thomas Gatacre in London in 1999 — is now the world’s foremost menagerie of cuddly animals, foodstuffs and sundry inanimate objects. From the sweetly furious Timmy Turtle (also available in a frankly unedifying garden-gnome outfit) and rather more jovial Fuddlewuddle Monkey to the wearied Persimmon dragon, a smiley monstera plant and a variety of Gallic pâtisserie (the mille-feuille is particularly crackers), they’re as sweetly inspired as they are maniacally popular, infuriating parents the world over by selling out in the blink of an eye.