Tinkertoy

The Tinkertoy Construction Set is a toy construction set for children. It was created in 1914—six years after the Frank Hornby's Meccano sets—by Charles H. Pajeau in Evanston, Illinois. Pajeau, a stonemason, designed the toy after seeing children play with sticks and empty spools of thread. Pajeu partnered with Robert Pettit and Gordon Tinker to market a toy that would allow and inspire children to use their imaginations. After an initially slow start, over a million were sold.

The cornerstone of the set is a wooden spool roughly two inches (5 cm) in diameter with holes drilled every 45 degrees around the perimeter and one through the center. Unlike the center, the perimeter holes do not go all the way through. With the differing-length sticks, the set was intended to be based on the Pythagorean progressive right triangle.

The sets were introduced to the public through displays in and around Chicago which included model Ferris wheels. Tinkertoys have been used to create complex machines, including Danny Hillis's tic-tac-toe-playing computer (now in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California) and a robot at Cornell University in 1998.

One of Tinker Toy’s most distinctive features is the toy’s packaging. Initially, the mailing tube design was chosen to reduce shipping costs. Early versions of the packaging included an address label on the tube with space for postage. To assist consumers in differentiating between the various offerings, sets were placed in mail tube packages of different sizes and also delineated with a number (ex: 116, 136) and a name (ex: major, prep, big boy, junior, grad). A colorful “how-to” instruction guide accompanied each set. In the 1950s, color was added and the wooden sticks appeared in red, green, blue, and yellow.

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