Tin Toys

Next time you are walking by a toy store, take a minute to poke your head inside. You may see something you haven't seen in years - tinplate toys. Tin toys were a favorite of children from the turn of the century though the late sixties. Whether it was a car, a roller coaster or something as silly as a duck riding a bike, boys and girls alike loved playing with these toys. Demand for the toys waned during the seventies as safer toys made of plastic came into fashion, but now both antique and replica tin toys are making a nostalgic comeback.


Tinplate toys were first produced in Germany in the late 1800s as a cheap and durable substitute for wooden toys. They were called tinplate because they were made of thin sheets of steel covered with tin. Many of the tin toys were mechanical - they could be wound for movement or pulled to make sounds. Older toys were hand painted until the offset color lithography process was discovered. By the early 1900s, both the US and Japan had joined in on the production. Today's tin toys are made primarily in China.


You might remember names like J. Chein, Schuco, Marusan and Louis Marx. These companies were among the more prolific manufacturers of tin toys in their heyday. Tin toys not only provided hours of fun, but were made with such detail that they opened up a whole new world of imagination and play for the children. There were practical tin toys; ovens, irons and sewing machines for the future homemakers; telephones, adding machines and typewriters for the budding young entrepreneurs. There were tin cars that would speed across the wooden floor of the house, trains that looked lifelike and robots that offered the promise of a high tech future. There were tin toys of cartoon favorites like Popeye and Mickey Mouse and real life cowboy Roy Rogers. Then there were the tins that were just for fun; a monkey playing drums, an egg-laying hen, even an elephant on a bike.