A.C. Gilbert and the Man Who Saved Christmas
Near New Haven, Connecticut
Alfred Carlton Gilbert won a gold medal in the pole vault at the nineteen oh eight Olympic Games in London, tying for first with another American. He was still an athlete when he founded a magic supply company in New Haven in nineteen oh nine, in the Westville neighborhood, selling tricks and novelties. He was also, at the same time, attending Yale Medical School. He graduated with his medical degree and never practiced medicine.
The Erector Set came from a train ride. Sometime around nineteen eleven, Gilbert was riding the commuter line between New Haven and New York and noticed the steel girder structures going up along the railroad right-of-way. He thought children should be able to build things like that. He went home and worked with his wife Mary on cardboard prototypes, testing girder sizes and the angle of the holes, until they had something that could be mass-produced. The set launched at the New York toy fair in nineteen thirteen under the name the Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder. It sold.
In nineteen eighteen, at the height of the First World War, the Council of National Defense proposed banning the production of toys to redirect materials toward the war effort. Gilbert traveled to Washington and argued the case against the ban. He brought toys with him and demonstrated them to officials who had not played with anything in years. The press covered it. Newspapers called him the man who saved Christmas.
His company eventually moved American Flyer toy trains from Chicago to New Haven in nineteen thirty-eight. He died in nineteen sixty-one. The company went out of business in nineteen sixty-seven. The Erector Set is still made today, under different ownership.
