What Happened to the Erector Set? | The Toy That Taught Every Boy in America to Build
From the YouTube page:
For generations, the Erector Set wasn’t just a toy — it was a hands-on introduction to engineering, creativity, and real-world building.
Long before modern STEM kits and digital learning tools, children across America learned how to think, design, and construct using metal beams, bolts, and gears. Created by A. C. Gilbert in the early 1900s, the Erector Set became a symbol of innovation and imagination, inspiring future engineers and inventors.
In this video, we explore the complete story of the Erector Set — from its invention and rise during the golden age of American toys, to its cultural impact and eventual decline in a rapidly changing world of plastic toys and digital entertainment.
Discover how it competed with brands like LEGO, why its popularity began to fade, and what ultimately happened to one of the most educational toys ever created.
From steel structures to childhood dreams, this is the story of the toy that taught a generation how to build.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the legendary Erector Set… this nostalgic deep dive reveals it all.
Erector set Power Users...
ReplyDelete- Claude Shannon - Juggling machine
- Jack Kevorkian! - "Rube Goldberg suicide device."!
- Seymour Papert - gears
The "Rube Goldberg suicide device." hit home as on Friday, our grandma has refused treatment and wants a "Rube Goldberg suicide device.". The medical system is letting her die of her own conditions, - slowly starving and choking to death - as one of the two doctors needed to sign off for Assisted Dying said " who knows", ignoring her wish to go quickly and quietly.
Erector Set users...
- "In the 1970s, information theory pioneer Claude Shannon constructed a bounce-juggling machine from an Erector set.[2]
- "In the late 1980s, with an Erector Set, various old toys, and bits of jewelry, Jack Kevorkian jerry-rigged a machine he called the Thanatron (later renamed to the Mercitron). Three bottles were suspended from a rickety beam, one filled with a saline solution to open a patient's veins, another with barbiturates for sedation, and a third with potassium chloride to stop the heart. After Kevorkian connected the patient to an IV, he or she would pull a chain on the device to start the lethal medications flowing. He called it his "Rube Goldberg suicide device."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_Set
"Gears and fears – A reflection on Seymour Papert’s essay ‘The Gears of my Childhood’
Posted March 31, 2021 by Greg Houghton
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‘A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children.’
Seymour Papert – The Gears of My Childhood
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"Nostalgia plays a pivotal part in Papert’s story, without his experience of automobiles and with gears and the ‘Erector Set’ Papert may never have discovered his ‘comfortable friend’. We may never find our own ‘comfortable friend’. I hope that as an educator one day I can help someone to find their own ‘comfortable friend’ and not be constrained by the vision that our modern patriarchy imposes."
https://fellows.fablearn.org/gears-and-fears-a-reflection-on-seymour-paperts-essay-the-gears-of-my-childhood/
"Meccano Magazine: boys’ toys and the popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain"
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2018
"We shall see that the ideology promoted was both gender-biased and imperialist."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjhs-themes/article/meccano-magazine-boys-toys-and-the-popularization-of-science-in-early-twentiethcentury-britain/2A15FBD05B6FB697BFC1C12456B10FB9
Early digital erector sets... Logo & the Turtle.
"The Early History Of Smalltalk
Alan C. Kay
Apple Computer
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"in part, because we were actually trying for a qualitative shift in belief structures—a new Kuhnian paradigm in the same spirit as the invention of the printing press—and thus took highly extreme positions which almost forced these new styles to be invented.
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https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/?source=post_page---------------------------
"Turtle graphics are often associated with the Logo programming language.[4] Seymour Papert added support for turtle graphics to Logo in the late 1960s to support his version of the turtle robot, a simple robot controlled from the user's workstation that is designed to carry out the drawing functions assigned to it using a small retractable pen set into or attached to the robot's body.
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"Today, the Python programming language's standard library includes a Turtle graphics module.[2]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics
Lincoln Logs emulated the past by roughin' it! Erector sets for the future!
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