Tin Toys
Maker: Various
Materials: Tin, Felt
Labels/Tags: See Description
Age: 1950's-1970's
Description: Crayon Box by Chein, marked on bottom within a shield 'J. CHEIN/& Co./Made In/U.S.A.', with riveted lid; wind-up 'Hot Dog Eater' made by TN, marked 'Made in Japan/Trade Mark TN'. When wound, his mouth puckers open and his left arm brings the simulated hotdog to his mouth and then his right hand brings the napkin to his lips. The Seal balancing a ball on his nose is a friction toy by Lehmann, W. Germany, marked 'Lehmann AHA910/D. Patent/Made in Western Germany'. The ball turns as the toy is moved forward. Tamborine, marked 'T. Cohn Inc. Brooklyn, N.Y.', depicts images of clowns on the top and sides of the piece and is unmarked.
Size: Largest 7.5"H & 8.75" Dia
Provenance: NJ Estate
Weight: 2.5 lbs total
Condition: All four pieces worked at cataloging time. The crayon box opens and closes smoothly and has overall scratches and rust spots, especially on the interior. Hot Dog Eater toy looks new., with very little wear. The Seal w/Ball shows very little wear, just light scratching; colors bright. The Tamborine
History: Maker of Crayon Box:J. Chein & Company was an American toy manufacturer in business from 1903 through the 1980s. It is best remembered today for its mechanical toys made from stamped and lithographed tin produced from the 1930s through the 1950s.Founded by Julius Chein in a loft in New York City, Chein's earliest toy production was a line of premiums for the Cracker Jacks snack line. The American Can Company provided the lithographic printing for Chein's early output until 1907 when Chein opened their own full production plant in Harrison, New Jersey. With their new facilities, they were able to produce piggy banks, noisemakers and model horse-drawn carriages. They also manufactured a number of toys under license from such companies as King Features Syndicate and Walt Disney Productions, producing Popeye, Felix the Cat and various Disney character toys.In the 1920s and early-1930s, Chein produced a popular line of toy trucks under the "Hercules" name, rather than their own name. They heavily exploited the toy vehicle market with a wide range of toy boats and wheeled vehicles. They also produced many noisemakers such as tambourines and rattles. Walking, crawling or jumping figural wind-up toys became a mainstay; their coin banks were also consistently popular.In 1926, Julius Chein was killed in a horse-riding accident in Central Park. Control of the company passed to Chein's widow who then turned the management of it over to her brother, Samuel Hoffman, who was already the founder and CEO of the rival Mohawk Toy Company. Under Hoffman's direction, J. Chein & Company expanded and prospered, producing many increasingly complicated mechanical toys. They had particular success with circus and amusement park-themed toys such as roller coasters, Ferris wheels and carousels. These toys command high interest from collectors today and are considered prime examples from the "golden age of toys".During World War II, J. Chein & Company suspended toy production, instead producing nosecones and tail units for bombs and casings for incendiary devices. After the War, Chein returned to toy production with considerable success. However, as the 1940s drew to a close, they encountered increasing competition from Japanese manufacturers who produced mechanical tin toys for lower prices.To become more competitive, Chein moved to a 75,000-square-foot (7,000 m2) factory in Burlington, New Jersey, where they employed a staff of as many as 600 workers. Their primary retailer was F. W. Woolworth Company. While this provided Chein with a steady demand and often healthy cashflow, it also meant that Woolworth's changing fortunes heavily affected them. In the late-1950s and early-1960s, as Woolworth's began to offer more inexpensive plastic toys, Chein was faced with the dilemma of competing with plastic toys that could not only be produced more cheaply, but could more easily incorporate electronics.In the mid-1960s, Hoffman retired. Soon thereafter, the United States Government began to regulate the toy industry, in particular, the dangers posed by the sharp edges of metal toys. Stamped metal toy manufacturers were required to comply with federal regulations. Consequently, most U.S. tin toy manufacturers abandoned the material in favor of more easily compliant plastic and soft materials. Chein's management did not believe that plastic toys were as durable as metal toys, and the cost of retooling their tin toys to meet federal regulations was cost-prohibitive, so they phased out their tin toy manufacturing and diversified into other markets. Chein acquired the Learning Aids Group and its lines of educational materials, as well as its Renwal Plastics division. Renwal produced the successful series of anatomical kits that included "The Visible Man", "Visible Woman", "Visible Head" and "Visible Dog" models, as well as scale model vehicle kits.One of the final original Chein toy products, and one of its most complicated, was the electromechanical "Piano Lodeon", a child-sized player piano. It utilized a combination of plastic and tin, and a mechanism that used spooled rolls of punched paper with well-known songs programmed onto them. A total of approximately 50 tunes were available. The piano's keyboard was actuated by a vacuum produced by an electric fan, with a rubber tube connecting each key with a corresponding hole in the front of the piano's housing. When a hole punched in the paper passed over one of these holes, it caused the correct key to strike tuned tines inside the case, producing the desired tune. The keyboard could also be played manually. The device was never financially successful for Chein due to its complexity, high price and the rise to dominance of purely electronic musical instruments.In the late-1960s, Chein entered into a licensing agreement to produce "Peanuts" characters, which continued through the early-1970s. In the mid-1970s, Chein sold its Renwal division and focused upon manufacturing lithographed sheet steel housewares such as kitchen canister sets and wastebaskets, under the brand Cheinco. They also produced licensed metal containers for food brands such as Heinz, Sunkist and Maxwell House. In 1979, toy manufacturing was phased out entirely. In the late-1980s, Cheinco was sold to the Atlantic Can Company, who then changed its name to Atlantic Cheinco Corporation. The company was beset with manufacturing problems resulting from environmental issues which in 1992 resulted in them filing for bankruptcy protection. Atlantic Cheinco's assets were then purchased by Ellisco of Pennsylvania, which was a division of CSS Industries. In 1994, CSS then sold Ellisco to the Baltimore-based U.S. Can Company, who continue to produce stamped metal products.----------------------------------------Maker of Hotdog Eater - If there were no World War II, there would have been no anime series called Space Battleship Yamato. But it should also be pointed out that if not for very specific shifts in global commerce after World War II, the first line of Yamato toys would not have been made by a company called Nomura. And that takes some explaining.Prior to the war, tin was the material of choice for most of the world’s toys. Cheap and malleable, it was easy to bend and form into whimsical shapes that would paradoxically be durable enough to take the usual punishment a kid would dish out. And if you had a tin toy back then, the raw materials probably came from Nuremberg, Germany: the global nerve center of the tinplate trade. After the war, Germany lost its grip on this trade (along with much else) and it floated around the globe to land on the one other nation that could most benefit from it: Japan.Under the American occupation from 1945 to ’52, a host of new companies with names like Marusan and Bandai eagerly sprung up to become the new suppliers of tin toys to the rest of the world. (Ironically, many of these toys would romanticize the very military machinery that had brought Japan to heel, but that’s another story entirely.) “Made in Japan” would become a famous catchphrase during these years, first in the pejorative sense and then slowly, grudgingly, a sign of quality as things improved. And on some of the best toys, that phrase was accompanied by the initials T.N: the callsign for Toys Nomura.Nomura was an early player in the tin game, opening its doors in the late 1940s and quickly dominating the marketplace with colorful, original tin toy vehicles that embodied the new paradigm of wakon-yosai, Japanese spirit combined with Western learning. Nomura had long been at the top of their game when Astro Boy and Tetsujin (Iron Man) 28 arrived to herald the age of homegrown SF robots, and tin was the perfect material to render them in three dimensions. Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet flew in from the US to create a perfect storm, and Nomura was right there at the epicenter.But as the 60s progressed, other production materials came into the fray and newer, nimbler companies such as Popy were quick to take advantage of them. Popy’s weapon of choice was diecast metal, which brought unprecedented mass and weight to a robot toy, lending it a new sort of realism that made tin seem…well, cheap and malleable. Plastic, too, could be made to perform in ways that tin could not. By the early 1970s the writing was on the wall for Nomura: evolve or die.Investing in costly new production methods meant the company had to secure more income, and that meant more licensing deals with popular properties. Looking around in 1977, it was very easy to identify the hottest property around: a feature film called Space Battleship Yamato. Popy had already taken a stab at Yamato in 1975, but their lackluster efforts hadn’t gotten them very far. Yamato’s intricate mechanical designs were revolutionary, and only a toy that accurately captured them was going to pass muster with the fans. When a Yamato sequel was announced by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki in November 1977, Toys Nomura (now known as Nomura Toy) decided to get involved. By the time pre-production for Yamato 2 began in May 1978, Nomura had signed on as a key sponsor, gambling on the notion that they could deliver what the fans would expect. Fortunately for all concerned, they were right.----------------------------------------Maker of the Seal w/Ball:Founded in 1881 in Brandenburg, Germany by Ernst Paul Lehmann, the Lehmann Company is renowned for its detailed and brightly lithographed mechanical tin toys. Lehmann began to see great success in the early 20th century when its sophisticated, lightweight tin toys were recognized as innovations next to the blocky iron toys of most other makers. One of Lehmann’s advances was the patenting of the locking mechanism for clockwork motors.Lehmann’s breakthrough with tin toys had a threefold advantage: • The toys’ lightness made them easier to handle and play with than heavy iron toys• The detailed and brightly coloured lithographing of the tin toys wasn’t possible with iron toys• The tin toys were cheaper than iron toysLehmann made many tin toy sets with human or animal figures. The human figures included skiers, car drivers, chair carries with passenger, and tap dancers. Amongst the animal figures were donkeys, mules, ostriches, and zebras. The company gave all of its toys individual names, which were often embossed on the product itself. The toys were also embossed with Lehmann’s trademark, ‘EPL’ or simply ‘e’.In 1921, Lehmann’s cousin Johannes Richter joined the firm and helped to continue the Lehmann tradition of innovation with the Skirolf Skier and various cleverly devised toys. Other famous Lehmann tin toys included the Ikarus airplane and the Tut Tut car, complete with honking horn.During the 1920s the firm manufactured more than 100 different toy models and employed over 800 workers. The toys were exported around the world with German-English instructions. The process of lithographing the tinplate was replaced with spray painting, then baking at 120 degrees to create an even enamelled surface.With the passing of Ernst Lehmann in 1934, Richter continued to run the company on his own. Though Lehmann struggled with metal shortages during World War II, they continued to function at reduced capacity. Remarkably, Lehmann not only escaped giving over its production to the war effort, but successfully opposed requests to manufacture politically endorsed military-themed toys.After the war, the country was split into the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany (East and West Germany, respectively). Since Brandenburg was in East Germany, it fell under control of the Soviet occupation, and the Lehmann Company with it. In 1948, Richter was denounced as a war criminal and racketeer and was removed from Lehmann’s by the Soviets with no recompense or recourse.The occupiers nationalized Lehmann’s and placed it under the name of VEB Mechanischne Speilwaren, and it was considered East Germany’s foremost tin toy maker. After the 1948 seizure, Richter escaped to Nuremberg in West Germany. The Richter family established a new toy company in a modest back garden workshop in 1950 until his death in 1956.The family built a new factory under the Lehmann name in 1959 outside Nuremberg. As the popularity of tin toys decreased, the new company focused on plastic toys, while they resumed some of their most favoured tin lines into the 1970s. In 1968, Richter’s sons introduced the LGB brand--Lehmann Gross Bahn or Big Railway—G scale model trains and railroads. LGB’s weather-resistant sets created a resurgence in garden railway modelling.In the 1980s, LGB began to expand into the US with a California based warranty and repair facility. The company introduced its LGB Multi-Train System in the 1990s, a digital program that coordinated several trains to run on one track simultaneously. In this decade, LGB also established a distribution center in New Jersey.As the 2000s dawned, LGB developed a digital decoding system for its locomotives, enabling them to operate on either analogue or digital sets without conversions.LGB celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2006 by issuing more than 200 products including an Amtrak line, variously themed rolling stock, and nickel-plated track. In the same year, American LGB spun off into a separate company, while LGB in Germany declared bankruptcy. Märklin bought the firm in 2007, and continued the LGB brand. In 2009, despite Märklin entering receivership, they began to distribute LGB products in the US through the Walthers Company.----------------------------------------Tamborine maker: T. Cohn, Inc.; 845-65 St., Brooklyn 20, New York (1920´s).Also: 119 Avenue D.Manufacturer of toy phonographs & tin toys.