Major cotton exporters are not exporting their cotton. Rural cotton farmers are stockpiling in hopes of getting a better price. Weather conditions have affected cotton output. Acrylic fabric prices have risen right along with cotton, as demand for alternatives to cotton soars. The price of plush toy stuffing material has risen dramatically as well. (Sheeshkabibble! As my mother used to say, whatever that means I have no idea.) 

        

The Renminbi, the official currency of mainland China, and its primary unit, the Yuan, are rising in value as well, further compounding cost increases. Costs are going up for the long term and we have the opportunity now to prepare for this, both in business and personally. How does one best prepare for coming inflation? 

 

           

In fact, the mechanism was so versatile, and could do so many things that it was used in three different toys that each had a different set of actions; a smaller version of TMX Elmo, a TMX friends Ernie, and a TMX friends Cookie Monster. 

 

While they were not particularly good sellers, they were nominated for a TOTY award. I believe they represent some of our finest work to date. 

          

This end result could not have been predicted nor arrived at through computer modeling and simulation. The solutions employed, whether relating to geometry, weight distribution, speed, timing or any of other variables could not have been derived through virtual model building. It was only through the hands on, experimental tinkering process, and the close obervation of real models moving in the real world that such a 'mechanical mystery' could have been created.  

 

That is the art and craft of what we do, and from it we derive immense satisfaction. 

 

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I just read the fascinating (to me) story of Mr. Phillips who invented and licensed the phillips head screw after being rejected by almost all the screw makers of the time who said it couldn’t be made. It was a better solution for many reasons, and someone finally figured out how to make it reality. 

 

 

            

It's kind of like Colonel Sanders and his secret fried chicken recipe that he spent years of his life trying to sell, traveling across the country, living in his car, relentlessly pitching, until he finally sold it. He did one thing and he did it right. Heck, we tried to sell our TMX Elmo mechanism to many a company before finding it a home with Fisher Price. 

            

I find myself wondering, “Who are those guys?” that invented cams, lobes and followers, worm gears, and worms. Did the Scots invent the scotch yoke? Was the Geneva mechanism invented in Geneva? Who created square gears, worm gears, helical and spiral gears, etc, etc, etc, and et cetera?

 

I salute their imagination, creative ability, and the hard physical work required of these inventors as they searched for solution to long-ago mechanical problems. Innovators have been solving millions of problems ever since and will continue to do so until we no longer need real products doing real things, and we live entirely in a virtual universe.  

            

Until then, we will just keep making real things that really do something cool to entertain, delight, and inspire you and yours.

 

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I would like to know who invented the cogwheel, the predecessor of the gear, and featured in Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketches and models. “Who are those guys?” Who invented all that cool stuff?

 

 

            

“Who cares?” you might think. I don’t blame you one bit. This blog just may not be your cup of tea. This is one of my own idiosyncratic interests, and it is very likely not yours. We live in a world of mechanisms and I marvel at the magic of magnets, the beauty of gleaming hydraulic cylinders, at the solutions of those who came before us, as well as of our contemporaries. These bits and pieces, put together in different ways, and hidden inside the cabinet, shroud, or sheet metal, that make everything that you and I know work. 

            

If you were to watch videos and animations of oddball mechanisms such as square, oval, and spiral gears, Geneva mechanisms, Mangle wheels, and so-called mutilated gear mechanisms, you just might be entranced as well. You might wonder, as I do, whoever came up with this? Who first built this and watched it work to solve some ticklish problem that needed solving?

            

“Who are those guys?”

            

Which is one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite all time movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (sidebar: Before special effects there were movies that were just great stories beautifully told, with great characters you fell in love with.)

 

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Plastic and fur, gears, pinions, worms and cam lobes, springs, belts and pullies, maybe cables, phillips screws and other connectors, microprocessors, motors, digitally stored memory. That is what toys, for girls and for boys, are made of. 

 

 

            

I love that stuff. We have drawers and bins of all the ingredients needed to cook up batches of brand new, straight-out-of-the-oven toys each day. Yumm . . . I love the smell of new technologies and magical new toys coming out of our ‘kitchen’ each day. We have rooms filled to the brim with all manner of wee bits and pieces, intact gear boxes, and even some toys that haven’t yet been taken apart and destroyed - sacrificed on the alter of new toy creation. 

 

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I still recall getting my very special Ideal rocket launcher for Christmas one year, and after playing with it a few times my heart sunk. This toy I had wanted for so long was such a disappointment. This was my big Christmas gift! It launched a spring-loaded rocket. That was it. I had been duped.  

 

 

      

You, me, all of us suffer when such products fill the store shelves, are promoted on TV, and ruin a child’s special day.  It makes people think all toys are junk. And we know that is not true. Our industry creates great products, and too few people know that.

      

The toy industry can do better than this. We should take a pledge to do better than this. Every toy company, every ad agency, every inventor and toy designer should make a pledge, just like physicians' Hippocratic oath “to do no harm.” 

      

Put up your right hand and repeat after me: “I will make no bad toys. I will endeavor to create products with great value to the consumer and user. I will devote my efforts to developing toys and childrens products that excite, delight, and entertain. So help me Santa!” 

 

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I was reading some toy reviews today and was shocked at what some consumers had to say. I was also shocked that a company we know and work with would deliver such drek to the toy store shelves. 

 

 

            

An excerpt: “There are lots of little pieces you have to wash, and it can only make 2 (thing-a-ma-jigs) at a time. The (whateveryoucallits) looked and tasted DISGUSTING and we just threw them out. This is a huge waste of money.”

      

And another: “Oh, my . . . this was the most disgusting toy we have ever experienced. The mix SMELLS horrible, it reminded us of urine, no joke. It was so bad, we could not possibly let our children consume the finished product. Not to mention, the whole process . . . is difficult for adults, forget about the kids being able to master it . . . we paid over $20 for the 'privilege' of making 6 smelly (whose-a-ma-whatzits). What a rip off, I would not recommend this product to anyone, please pass this one up! What a disappointment.”  

 

End quote. Whew. Sure glad I had no involvement with that product. 

 

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Our goal, and my personal mission, is to create great products that inspire and entertain. We strive for products that deliver great value to the consumer for the hard-earned money spent. 

            

When I hear people complain about toys and the toy industry I wince. There are many great toys on the market now and many great new toys introduced each year. No other industry delivers so much innovation so quickly and at such value for the money spent as the toy industry. 

 

 

            

But we as an industry are sometimes guilty of foisting crap on the marketplace as well. We all suffer when bad toys are TV promoted and flooding the toy store shelves. I am not talking about cheaply made Hong Kong junk toys, but rather toys made and promoted by US-born-and-bred toy companies. 

            

It oughta’ be against the law. 

 

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For over 30 years I have made a living as an inventor, a prototype builder, a small business owner, an intellectual property licensor, and a team leader and manager. I have a depth of knowledge and experience that I would love to be able to pass along to some young colleagues who might benefit from my hard-won knowledge. While I have given entree to and trained many designers who work today throughout the industry, I was only able to impart a wee bit to them at the time that related directly to the work they were doing.  

 

 

            

So, I wish I had some means to pass on what I have learned to others. 

            

Long ago I served in an apprenticeship as a leatherworker in the shop of a most remarkably creative craftsman and artist. He was one of, if not the most, creative person I have ever known. For years afterward I made a living as a leather craftsman, and now find it to be a greatly satisfying hobby. I get a deep satisfaction from creating tangible, useful, and aesthetically pleasing objects from a material as precious as leather.

            

Many of you may have seen or even received a gift that was the product of my own hands. When I had my leather shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and later in Texas, I did have several apprentices to whom I passed on what I knew at the time.  

            

The skills and knowledge that I have as a leather craftsman would allow some young person to pursue making a living as a craftsman, a maker of beautiful and useful objects from leather. It was a very good living years ago, and there is job security in being self-employed. Similarly, today in this industry all I need is someone who wants to learn, someone to whom I could pass along what I know before it is lost. 

 

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I know of no other such proscribed body of knowledge, nor a training system like that of London's cab drivers. Perhaps the apprenticeships for the building trades have some such body of knowledge. One would hope so. 

 

 

            

I have knowledge that I wish I could impart to others, to their benefit, and to carry on the traditions of learning that I have benefited from. Sadly (to me, anyway) I have no one who wishes to take what I have to give nor to learn what I would teach. 

            

Similarly, I did not realize what I might have learned from my father when I was a child and consequently missed the chance to learn electronics at an early age, along with a number of other subjects he could have taught me. 

            

Instead I, like most of us, have learned on my own, forged my own way, and made my own mistakes, oblivious to the fonts of knowledge around me from which I might have partaken. 

 

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In London I was always fascinated to see the taxi-drivers-in-training riding through the city on bicycles or scooters, in all weather, acquiring The KNOWLEDGE. It is a hard-won body of learning that they have to acquire over years of independent effort in order to pass the required test to become a London cab driver.   Somewhat different, I dare say, from New York. 

 

 

            

They rode the streets of London by whatever means available to them to learn how best to get from here to there, on any day, at any time, in a city whose street system evolved over centuries from foot paths and carriage roads to the streets of a major metropolitan system. London’s layout is a rabbit's warren of twisting, winding streets of every size. 

          

All working cabbies in London have already acquired The KNOWLEDGE on their own or they would not have been able to pass the test and get the job. They are consummate professionals who can recite the optimal route from here to there, on any day, and at any time, by rote.

 

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Everyone is standing around scratching their heads wondering "What do I do?" "How do I survive and thrive?"  "What do I make, how do I sell it, and to whom?" I certainly am and I hear the same from many others as well. 

            

Whatever do we do?

            

Toys are more expensive. The costs of everything involved in their creation continues to go up and up and up. At the rate Orient costs are going up we will be manufacturing toys here in the US of A again soon. 

            

As toys get more expensive what will happen? How will the toy manufacturers respond? Will they try to sell more expensive toys or try to sell toys that have less cost, less feature, and possibly less magic in them? I fear we will begin to see just that. 

            

How will the consumer respond? Will you just pay the higher prices? Will you spend the same amount on toys, but only buy fewer? Or will you buy more non-toy products instead?  Will they be satisfied with toys at the price points of the recent past that have less magic, mechanism, and features, and thus less play value? 

            

I don’t know. Wish I did.

 

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It is impossible to grasp the effect of Thomas Edison and his team on our modern world. He was an inventor, entrepreneur, and a force of nature that we may never see the likes of again. What were they drinking?

 

 

Photo © Hulton Archives/Gettyimages.com 

            

Henry Ford was a friend and great admirer of Edison. Ford was such an admirer, in fact, that he moved Edison’s Menlo Park, NJ laboratory (and the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop) to Greenfield Village, near Detroit, where he created a ‘shrine’ to invention, imagination, innovation, discovery, and courage. He even moved the soil the buildings stood on! Today you can go to Michigan and walk on the very same dirt on which these great men trod. 

 

 

            

It makes my legs weak to think of it. The world was changed by both Edison's and the Wright Brothers' intellectual curiousity, by their imaginations. The world was molded anew by the work of their hands. All of our lives have been touched by their efforts. The world was never again the same after they came and made their contributions. 

            

Yes, I am a big, big fan. 

 

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Thomas Edison fascinates me above all. So much is known about him, his laboratories are open today for you to visit. Even his desk is cluttered with all manner of papers, etc, exactly as he left it. He and his team created so many of the modern technologies we take for granted that the mind boggles (mine does, anyway). 

 

 

      

I look forward to visiting Edison's labs one day soon, to stand on the floors where he stood, perchance to channel some small piece of his inquisitive, persistent genius. 

Not only did Edison invent the phonograph and motion pictures, he manufactured and sold all of the first phonographs under the Edison Phonograph Company and sold a vast collection of recordings under the Edison recording label. Other companies he owned produced movie cameras, film and projection equipment, and filmed all of the first movies in the famous Black Maria tar paper covered, rotating film studio. Whew!

            

A recent Wall Street Journal article summarized it nicely: “Indeed, Edison effectively invented the modern entertainment industry.”

 

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Whether it is the story of the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees who invented “Liquid Paper” or an impoverished Mr. Goodyear who accidentally discovered the vulcanization of rubber, the stories of inventors' lives and the origins of world-changing inventions always fascinate me. Each story is a window into the workings of a bright, shining mind. 

            

While many fascinating volumes have been written on this subject, I especially recommend The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field by Jacques Hadamard, full of surprisingly fascinating tales of important scientific and mathematical discoveries. 

 

 

 

Nikola Tesla was a mysterious and prolific genius who created artificial lighting bolts and championed the Alternating Current, or AC electricity that is the world standard today. (Thomas Edison's generators and light bulbs operated on DC or direct current electricity.) Tragically, most everything Tesla did was destroyed in a fire. It is reported that one of his mysterious devices caused New York City to tremble literally, but was powered only by batteries. Impossible!

            

Tesla and Edison were two of the greatest minds and the most incredible creators of new technologies to ever walk this planet. 

 

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Everything in our world was invented, discovered, and developed by someone. Post-it notes, televisions, light bulbs, electric motors, batteries, every toy ever played with, every game ever sold, and every product we touch in our day-to-day lives. All were the product of invention and of inventors. I salute them and their efforts. 

            

We all have our idiosyncratic interests, of course. Some people collect thimbles, others collect animal skulls and bugs (that would be me). Some people favor romance novels, others biographies or Russian literature (me again).

            

I am fascinated by the stories of other inventors (not surprising as I myself am an inventor heart and soul). Some well known inventors, others more obscure. Some ancient, others contemporary. Some prolific, others may have only invented one known product. All of their stories fascinate me.       

 

 

Famous inventors: Eli Whitney (cotton gin), Robert Fulton (steam boat), Thomas Edison, Cyrus McCormick, Richard Hoe (automatic printing press).

(c) Wisconsin Historical Society.

 

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"It won’t work." I hear that all the time. I think it all the time. Everyone is a critic - who doesn’t love to shoot down someone else’s idea? Gosh, that’s fun. The problem is, critics don’t do things, creators and innovators do things. They change the world around them, critics don’t.

            

“Just try it” is our mantra. In the business of toy invention we try a lot of things. We create many concepts, and most of them we don’t sell. Some of our attempts just flat out don’t work, and that is okay. It is a part of the process of creation, growth, evolution, and learning. 

            

The products we don’t license are not failures. Often, years later we finally do find them a good home with a company for whom they are just right. From each product that we create, we learn something that prepares us to be better and more successful in creating the next product.

            

In trying things that we doubt will work, we accomplish things that seem at times impossible or magical. We didn’t think we could get a plush animal to do a cartwheel, but we did: Tumbletime Tigger. We didn’t think we could get him to do a cartwheel in the package, but we did, and the result was a breakthrough in on-the-shelf package demonstration. 

 

 

 

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We may have been the last people in the toy industry to get a fax machine. I couldn’t see what the use of it would be, but was told that once I had one I would never be able to live without it again. (Thank you, Steve.) That was the first time we adopted a new technology and our eyes were opened a little.

          

 

 

Slowly, like a glacier, we began to create toys with some electronics, arguably more sophisticated than before. The change had begun. For years we knew about servos (a.k.a. servo motors which may be precisely controlled in speed and degree of movement using a microprocessor) but didn’t know how or why we should use them. Instead, we gutted a hundred Billy the Bass to scavenge their terrific motor mechanisms.

 

 

          

On the advice of another industry friend, we took the plunge and started to use servos and the basic stamp prototyping electronics system. With the ability to create such precise programming, were were suddenly able to make more sophisticated mechanisms that did remarkable things that would have been impossible before. Our work was transformed by the new tools we had learned to use. Others learned from us to do the same. We became widely known as the "Masters of Mechanisms."

          

Other technologies over the years have had significant effects on our capabilities and efficiency, enabling us to do more, faster, better, cheaper. Now we are always looking for the next technology that we might adopt that could transform our business, amplify our capabilities, allow us to come up with better ideas, build better prototypes, create more sophisticated products, or run our business better.

          

Onward and upward, the best is yet to come. Embrace change, embrace new technologies. Look for ways that you might transform what you do and how you do it. To survive and thrive in a fast paced world of business, we have no choice but constant, relentless, and at times monumental change.

 

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Our tools give us capabilities and limitations.

          

Years ago we acquired several technologies that revolutionized our business and what we were capable of creating. As a cavemen at heart, a troglodyte really, in the early days we (metaphorically speaking) carved everything we made out of plastic with an exacto knife. Not literally of course, but we made primitive concepts with primitive tools. We used existing motorized gearboxes torn from existing toys and we used existing electronics scavenged from whatever we could find (Yak Baks mostly).

 

 

I spent countless hours in thrift shops hunting for old toys for reference and to be ‘parted out’ to make new toys. Then one day we decided to hire an electronics 'expert' so that we could begin to create products with electronic features of our own design, rather than be limited to using parts designed by others. I can’t say we were always early technology adopters, but hey, we’re getting better every day - or trying to.

 

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I am recently back from a two-week vacation. Two weeks IN A ROW! I Can’t remember when I last did that. Perhaps only one other time in the last 26 years or so of business. I think that is crazy, never taking the time off that I am entitled to and hardly ever taking even two weeks off in a row. How many weeks a year do you get off and how many do you actually take? How many weeks in a row do you take off? How many emails or other work-related tasks do you do each day when you are on vacation?

            

As someone explained to me once, a two-week vacation is not just twice as much, but more like four times as much restful time than one week alone. During a vacation it takes me several days to fully wind down from work mode and at a few days at the end to gear up for work again. If you take a week off, that leaves only a couple true, deep relaxation days in the middle where you are 100% on vacation, at best. 

            

 

 

But if you take two weeks, that is an entire seven more days of real R & R. That is 350% more ‘real’ vacation time than one would experience taking only one week at a time. Go ahead, do the math. 

            

I am convinced that taking vacation time enriches one's work and one's life. If one’s life is healthy, one’s work prospers. Take the time to smell the freakin’ flowers, eh?  

 

Go out and Play. Just like kids do. And enjoy.

 

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Live to work, or work to live? Which is it? Ever get confused on that score? I know I have done so. I often used to subscribe to the former, that is, I lived to work. I derived great joy and satisfaction and meaning in my life through work.

            

Then one day a good industry friend explained that he didn’t live to work. Instead, he worked so that he could afford his life. I thought he had his priorities wrong. That was just a corporate drone’s approach to life and work. Now I am not so sure. Maybe I just worked too much and devoted too little time to the other dimensions of life. If I have done so, I don’t intend to continue doing so.

 

 

            

With that said, I do still like to work. There are Ants and Grasshoppers, according to Aesop, and I am an Ant. I love inventing. I get a rush from creating new toys and discovering new technologies that delight and amaze. I enjoy the challenge of what we do, and I love the team that I have the pleasure to work with each day. I am constantly amazed at what they do. 

 

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