SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Etch A Sketch!

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:58stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name. Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward.

1:31Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hey everyone, it's time for our episode on Etch-A-Sketch, the little tablet that you could draw on using two dials for some reason. And then when you made a masterpiece, you would shake it up and start over again. Or if you're a real jerk, you could shake up someone else's masterpiece when they weren't ready to shake it up yet. This is a good one. I guess all of our toy episodes were good ones, so it goes without saying, but it is a good one.

2:11Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

2:21hey and welcome to the podcast i'm josh clark there's charles w chucky bryant and there's jerry uh the delicious dish roland and this is stuff you should know the vintage nostalgia edition that went off to china and then got sold to a different company edition So do you want to, I have a rough list of classic toys we've covered. You want to hear it? Oh, lay it on me, Charles. I'm sure I've missed something. But it did help me think of some more that we should do. Slinky? We did Slinky? Oh, yeah, we did Slinky. Okay, yeah. Lego? Oh, yeah, of course. Barbie? Sure. Her boyfriend, G.I. Joe? Yeah, that was a good one.

3:06Sorry, Ken. Wait a minute. Wait a minute, I'm sorry. Did we specifically do a G.I. Joe one or an action figures one? I think both. We definitely did action figures. Although, maybe not. Okay. Go ahead. I'll cross-check that. Hot Wheels. So this is a made-up list is what you're saying. Hot Wheels. Yeah, I'm glad you didn't call it Hot Wheels. Easy Bake Oven. Play-Doh. Silly Putty. Do you count boomerangs? Sure Do you count Monopoly? Yeah Yo-yos Of course Hula hoops I knew hula hoops was after yo-yos I just knew it Teddy Ruxpin We covered him in our Christmas show this year Oh yeah that's a deep cut right there And then that's all I have But I could have sworn we did it on Frisbees But I cannot find it Yeah I feel like we did Frisbees too because I think we talked about like Frolf or something at some point.

4:09Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's out there and I just didn't, or maybe it's under Flying Disc or something. Oh, that's possible. Because, yeah, we made that joke about calling it a novelty Flying Disc because Frisbee like used to sue everybody who called anything else a Frisbee. Maybe. I'll have to look. But there's probably more out there, but that's a solid, you know, 12 or 13. That's pretty good. Which leads us to Etch-a-Sketch. Yes. One of the top 100 toys of the century, according to, I want to say, not the Toy Hall of Fame. It's just in the Toy Hall of Fame. I think according to some snot-nosed kid who makes lists online.

4:50Right. This is the 100 best toys of the century. This is the 100 best guitar solos of the 70s. Oh, man. I'd love to do a show on that. That would be pretty cool. I can't remember who made that list, but it's a high honor. It's a high accolade, even if we can't remember who came up with it. Like the Etch-A-Sketch, it's a ubiquitous toy. Everybody knows what an Etch-A-Sketch is, unless you go to France, and then they'll say, oh, you mean Le Croix Magique. Right. And you might say, well, why would they have anything to say about the Etch-A-Sketch in France? It turns out, buddy, the Etch-A-Sketch is actually French in origin.

5:29Did you know that before this? I did not. I didn't either. Because it seems like super American. You know, it looks like a TV and just feels like pure Americana. So when I realized it had some French stank on it, my dreams were dashed. You're like, it smells like champagne and cheese, which is kind of pleasant. No, I didn't really care. I thought it was great. Sketch, erase, and sketch again. the log line that will forever be tied to this really interesting little toy. And I can't remember who it is in this article, but they were interviewing different folks. I think it was someone from the company commented.

6:11And I totally agree that it's amazing that today in the digital world and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and video gaming as it is, that this little lo-fi toy that doesn't even have batteries in it, much less hook up to the internet, is still like super popular and still has a little bit of mystique. And I agree with them. And I think the reason why one of them is like you look at it and you're still kind of like, how does this thing work? Right. Well, we're going to ruin that mystique for everybody because we're going to explain how it works actually in this episode. That's right. But hopefully it won't affect Etch-a-Sketch sales because we love Etch-a-Sketch, you know?

6:52All right. Should we go to France? We will go to France. Sometime, it's apparently not clear whether it was 1955 or 1956, but in a little town called Vitry-sur-Seine, which means Vitry on the Seine River, there was a company called, what was the name of the company, Chuck? Lincrusta Company. Right. Terrible name. It is a terrible name, but the reason they call themselves that is because Lin Crusta is a type of wall covering that was really popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. You know, like, have you ever been into an old, creepy, abandoned house and, like, the walls are covered in what looks like dimpled tin with, like, some weird patterns to it or whatever?

7:40No, but keep going. Okay. So if you could rub your hand over it, it's very much, it's like heavily embossed. Okay. Sometimes it's painted. And just imagine that as like wainscoting in the house. That is Lincrusta. And so that is one of the two things that this company made in the 50s. Lincrusta wall coverings and artificial leather. That is really neither here nor there. But I was with you. I was like, what kind of a name is that for a company? I looked it up and they just, it'd basically be like, if you and I called our podcast podcast, because that's what we did was make podcasts. Or called it Podcrust.

8:20Podcrusta. Just the name Crust, anyway. I think I know what you're talking about, because I have, we have a PiSafe that has that metal tin stuff, but it's, I've never seen it on a wall, but I bet it's about the same thing. Virtually the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's Link Crusta, and that's where this guy worked. His name was André Casagnes. Casagnes. What are you going with? Well, if it's French, wouldn't it be Casson? Is that G pronounced? Yeah, I think you just nailed it, actually. André Cason. Well, that's what we're going to call him. And we have gone back in time. You didn't know 55 or 56.

9:02I say we go to 54 just to play it safe, set up shop in France, and maybe get some emails done. All right. For a couple of years? Sure. Why not? We could use a break. Okay. Because, you know, podcaster burnout's a real thing. It really is. As we've talked about. We're dropping like flies. All right. So he's working in this factory. It's north of Paris. And they are making these wall coverings like you're talking about. And he, this is a little confusing how this actually happens, if you ask me. Yes, it is. Or at least the way the first article put it, it's confusing. oh you're leaving it to me I noticed by your by your pause after that well I mean no let's I'll start it but I just still don't quite get it he marked up with pencil on a see-through decal so like he was putting on an electrical plate like a light switch and on that plate like many things has like a little see-through plastic that you peel off so he was writing on that he peeled it off But then that's where it loses me as to exactly what magic took place.

10:12So, okay, remember this is Linkrusta, and they make metal wall coverings, which means there's metal dust in the air, metal shavings everywhere. Yeah, and he's just breathing that stuff in. Right, all of them are. What's crazy is this guy made it to the ripe old age of 86 after breathing that for years. But so there's metal dust everywhere, including on this electrical switch plate that he's installing. and I guess the decal against the plate. And I think what happened was when he marked on the decal and pulled the decal off, he'd seen that he had disturbed the metal shavings that were stuck to the underside of the decal.

10:53Do you see what I mean? Yeah. So like he had disturbed the shavings. So there was like the whole decal is coated in a metal dust. He marks on it with a pencil And the impression that he makes, like, gouges out lines on the backside of the decal. I know, it's really tough. It was magic. Basically, this man witnessed a feat of magic that still cannot be explained to this day. And that's where he got his idea for the Etch-A-Sketch. Amazing. So, a big, big moment. he has that literal light bulb that goes off of his, or not literal, of course, light bulb above his head. Although you never know. There may have been a light bulb in that factory right above his head.

11:40Why not? And he said, all right, this can be something. He, however, did not have a lot of money to sink into this weird idea. And so he had to partner with somebody with money, A man named Paul Chaze, C-H-A-Z-E, or maybe Chaz if he's French. Oh, that's good. And this guy had some dough because he owned a plastic injection molding company. This is like early on. I wonder if we could count that as a toy, the little plastic machines that spit out little plastic guitars in Chicago and at zoos. Oh, yes, yes, Moldorama. Does that count? That would definitely count. Yeah, that goes on the list, yeah.

12:23So he didn't – it wasn't Moldorama, but it was plastic injection molding that this guy made his money from. And this is where things get a little confusing historically because the man who – his accountant, his name was Arthur Grangin. You are nailing the French today. Try to run, French people. You can't. Chuck is pronouncing your words just beautifully. So his accountant is actually given credit a lot of times because he filed the patent under his name, which I'm curious about how that works legally. uh he so he was do you remember the first time we did south by southwest and on the sign it had like somebody i can't remember whose name it was but whoever had like filed the application to get us into south by southwest it said that like that's who was performing in the room that day i don't remember that at all i think this is the same basically the same thing where as like the u.s government bureaucracy, the patent and trademark office, basically said whoever's name is on there, that is who is the patent holder.

13:34And since Grandjean, who was the accountant of Shays, who was the partner of Cassayenne, since he was the one who actually filled out the application and paid for the application for the patent, as far as the government was concerned, he was the person who patented the Etch-a-Sketch in the United States. Even though Grandjean made no claim on it whatsoever, immediately transferred the title over to Shays, for decades everybody thought Arthur Grandjean was the guy who invented the Etch-a-Sketch. Interesting. All right, so that was July 23, 1959, was when this patent was granted. And I guess we should just look at the little guy itself, The little TV-looking, that iconic red frame with the two dials, which it didn't have initially.

14:24We'll get to that. But the underside of this screen here has what's known in the patent as a pole-vurulent material, such as aluminum powder. Is that French as well? I don't know. And then to keep that from clumping up, there are little tiny plastic beads. and then the two knobs control, again, from the patent, a movable tracing stylus. Although initially it was a joystick, isn't that right? Yeah, yeah, basically like an Atari. But it served the same purpose and it was held together the same way through an intricate system of pulleys and gears that moved the stylus either upward or downward. And then if you combine the upward and downward together, you could make diagonals and circles and stuff like that.

15:12But it's really tough to describe what's going on in an Etch-a-Sketch, but there's a HowStuffWorks article from years back called Inside an Etch-a-Sketch where the people at HowStuffWorks took one apart and photographed it and explained it step by step, and it really becomes much simpler and ruins any bit of magic there is to it when you see Inside an Etch-a-Sketch. But it's still kind of wondrous. You know, like the engineer in you is like, wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it's sort of like, I mean, it's not a negative image, I don't think, but what's going on when you're moving those knobs, there's a stylus that's actually removing, like the screen is coated with this powder.

15:51So it's actually removing powder, not adding something to the screen. Yes, exactly. And of course, if you want to get that away and start a new picture, you just shake that thing up and that recoats the screen once again with that powder. Yeah. So, like, you know how your TV screen always has tons of dust on it, no matter how often you dust it? Sure. So that's because, like, that dust is attracted electrostatically through an electrical charge to the glass. They take advantage of that same thing with the underside of the Etch-A-Sketch and that aluminum dust, which sticks to everything. Like, it wants to stick to the glass because I think it's missing some electrons or something.

16:33and then when you move the stylus through it, you're just removing that dust like you said. It's not a negative. It's the removal of dust. And that's an Etch-A-Sketch at its core. And what's interesting, Chuck, is that is how an Etch-A-Sketch today works. That's how an Etch-A-Sketch worked in 1962. Like the two meaning like also. Sure. But that dude, Andre Cassagne, said this is how this is going to work and it's basically the same thing. That's pretty awesome. Let's take a break. Yes. We're going to come back and talk about coming stateside right after this.

17:18Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that. We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health.

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19:53All right, so Chuck, so how did we agree on his last name? I think I'm butchering it still. And I even took years of French in high school. I think he said casserole. All right. Andre Casserole. That seems wrong. Yeah, I'm still going to go with cassone. Okay, there you go. Andre Casson. He knew he was onto something. Like this guy was an electrician. He was like, this is a great idea. This is a prototype I made. This is worth something. So he and Cruz, I guess, funded a trip to the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1959. And it was there that Casson was walking around saying, check this thing out. It is yours for a mere$100 ,000, which at the time was a lot of money.

20:49I think it was$870 ,000 today. And that's what this guy wanted for the right to produce this. And every toymaker at the place said no, including a little toymaker called Ohio Art. Everybody turned it down, and Kassan went home from the toy fair empty-handed. But he didn't give up. He still persisted. But that was a big strikeout for him right out of the gate. Yeah, so Ohio Art eventually settles on a number of$25 ,000 for the rights to make this thing. In the United States, it is still called Le Grand Magique in France because they had a different licensing deal over there from the get-go. And Ohio Art Company is pretty interesting.

21:35It started – did you see that thing? Yeah, I did. Yeah, they started out in 1908, founded by a man named, a dentist named Dr. Henry S. Winsler in Archibald, Ohio. He gets out of dentistry because he's like, hey, man, toys is the future. Toys is the future. There's no future in teeth. In a decade, no one in America is going to have teeth. It's just a losing trade to be in is dentistry. Yeah, so he saw the way forward. He rented a musical, hired 15 women, and they were making metal picture frames at first to great, great success. Yeah. So they use something called metal lithography, which is a type of printing.

22:25And I think the metal refers to like the medium that you're using to print with. like you carve a picture out of metal and you put ink on it and then you print on whatever you want. But they were printing onto metal. Like they had like these picture frames and pictures that were like a huge cellar of a Cupid. It was a pair of like oval plates basically, but they were metal printed pictures on them of like a Cupid hanging out and then the same Cupid sleeping. And it's just kind of like whatever. Like these days it seems kind of, it's got a tinge of old timey creepiness. But in the first half of the 20th century, there were 50 million sets of those things sold in the United States, which is an astounding amount.

23:11That's basically every house in America had a pair of this. And that really kind of made Ohio art like a very viable business. But they eventually got into things like sand pails and little trucks and that kind of thing. Anything that was printed with metal before the time that plastic toys came along, they were into. So it wasn't a huge leap into the Etch-a-Sketch, but the Etch-a-Sketch was definitely different than anything that they'd ever kind of messed around with before. Did you know I've done metal lithography? No. Yeah, it was one of our, in industrial arts, it was, you know, at least at my school, each quarter you did a different medium or whatever.

23:51And lithography was something we did one quarter. Do you remember what you printed? uh i'm trying to remember what i printed it's funny i can remember that because we also one quarter was uh screen printing and i remember the t-shirts i did monkeys t-shirts with like the see no evil hear no evil monkeys no the band the monkeys they're they're their uh logo with the guitar spelled out as monkeys like wow did you draw it yourself no no no of course not um but we did metal sheet lithography. I don't remember all of the process, but what I do remember was it essentially was like burning, chemically burning images onto metal plates.

24:38And then that metal plate was used to print. Okay. So, so the metal and metal lithography does, it talks about the metal press that you're using to print with. Like at the end of, there may be different processes, but in my class we would do this thing and apply this like image with like this gel onto a metal sheet and use this combination of chemicals that would burn that into like make it part of the metal. And then all of a sudden you would have a metal sheet with a thing on it, like a negative image, and then you would use that in the printing process to print a positive image. Right. Right, and you could use that to print onto anything, including other metal, right?

25:22Well, hey, man, that's where my knowledge—and again, this was ninth grade me, so I've forgotten a lot of things over that time period. Right. And I'm sure I just butchered that, but that's my one little dance with metal lithography. Well, I'll tell you who would be able to tell us exactly how metal lithography works. It's anybody who works at Ohio Art, because not only was that their bread and butter before the Etch-a-Sketch, it still is today, actually. So, so Ohio Art, like, I guess, gets in touch with Andre Casson and either he got in touch with them again or they got in touch with him. I think it was the latter of the two and said, hey, we heard you're selling this for 100 grand.

26:02It's way too rich for our blood. How about either 15 ,000 or 25 ,000, depending on who you ask in the future? And Casson is like, what are you talking about? They're like, just take the money. And so they either got it for 15 ,000 or 25 ,000, which is still substantial. I mean, it was like around 100K or 200K, something like that, depending on which one it was. And Kassan was quite a happy man. There was a story where the guy who was running the show at Ohio Art and his wife went over to meet Andre Kassan and just kind of have like an initial meeting and like shake his hand and all that and buy the license from him.

26:40And Kassan was like, welcome. And had like this huge spread of baguettes and champagne and everything at his house, which is pretty cute. because he was just like this humble guy who came up with a really great idea for a toy and was finally like selling it for a wad of cash. Interesting. A little on the nose. What, the baguettes and champagne? Yeah, but you know, what are you going to do? When in France, right? So he is, once he's on board with Ohio Art, he gets together with their chief engineer, Jerry Berger, and says, and Berger's like, listen here, Frenchie. You need to drop the joystick.

27:17It's all knobs these days. And he said, what is a knob? And he was like, well, let me show you. And he introduced the idea of the same system like you were talking about, but knobs instead of a joystick to move that little line, horizontal or vertical. Or as you pointed out, if you're really talented and you can master both at once, you can actually do, well, if you're really good, you can do very nice curved lines. Yeah, beyond rudimentary. No, neither am I. I can make a line go up and a line go to the left or right. Yeah, we'll get to the— I can't even make it go down. We'll get to the art of it, maybe at the end, because there are some serious artists out there doing some cool stuff.

28:04But at any rate, Etch-A-Sketch, it was rebranded as Etch-A-Sketch in the United States. Ohio Arts producing them for the 1960 holiday season, and they sold about 600 ,000 of these that year, which is a lot. Yeah, and they sold it for a lot of money too. They went for sale at$2.99 a piece, which is$25.64 in today's money. But I mean, if you go buy an Estrasketch today, it's between 10 and 15 bucks. So that was a lot of money, especially to sell 600 ,000 of these things, Especially if you were selling like creepy, you know, metal wastebaskets with an unsettling clown painted on it or printed on it like right before this.

28:50This is a huge, it was a good move by the people at Ohio Art to buy the license to this thing, in other words. And they say, Chuck, that it coincided really perfectly with television. So much so that they believe like that is one of the reasons why Jerry Berger was like, you need knobs. This thing needs to look like a TV set because that's what's all the rage with the kids right now. Yeah, and he, it was one of the first toys to actually do a TV commercial. And so if it's 1960 and you're a child watching, first of all, your mind is blown because you're watching a television to begin with. It's just like, I can't believe this.