A. C. Gilbert Company

The A. C. Gilbert Company was an American toy company, once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It is best known for introducing the Erector Set (a construction toy similar to Meccano in the rest of the world) to the marketplace.

First known as the Mysto Manufacturing Company, the company was founded in 1909 in Westville, Connecticut, by Alfred Carlton Gilbert, a magician, and his friend John Petrie. The company was originally established to provide supplies for magic shows. Their magician's sets, known as "Mysto Magic", were marketed from the teens until the fifties. They contained a variety of objects including interlocking rings, playing cards, and a magic wand.

In 1911, Gilbert invented the Erector concept, inspired by railroad girders used by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in its mainline electrification project. Gilbert and his wife Mary developed cardboard prototypes to get the right sizes, openings, and angles to create a robust buildable girder pattern. The construction toy was introduced in 1911, as the Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder, at the New York City Toy Fair.

In 1916, the name of the company was changed from the Mysto Manufacturing Company to the A. C. Gilbert Company.

In 1920 the company began selling regenerative vacuum tube radio receivers designed by the C. D. Tuska Company, and the following year, in order to increase interest in radio, began operating station WCJ, which was the first broadcasting station licensed in the state of Connecticut. However, the receiver sales were ended after the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company threatened legal action, on the grounds that Tuska's patent rights didn't extend to other companies, and WCJ was shut down in late 1922.

Beginning in 1922, A. C. Gilbert made chemistry sets in various sizes as well as similar sets for the budding scientist, adding investigations into radioactivity in the 1950s with a kit featuring a Geiger counter. In 1929, Gilbert bought the US company producing Meccano, which had been set up in 1913 by the British parent, and continued production as "American Meccano" until 1938. A. C. Gilbert began making microscope kits in 1934.

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