On this day in engineering history, Mattel Inc. introduced
one of the best-selling toys of all time, the Barbie doll. Made of heavy vinyl
with bits of copper tube in her feet, Barbie the Teenage Fashion Model debuted
at the New York Toy Fair on March 9, 1959. Fifty years later, Mattel has sold
more than 1 billion Barbie dolls worldwide, including 100 million in 2008
alone. Today, over 100 designers work on each new version of a plastic toy that
has become a cultural icon.
Bild Lilli
Ruth Handler, a co-founder of Mattel, created the Barbie
doll after watching her daughter Barbara play with a toy named Bild Lilli during a trip to Germany in
1956. Unlike the paper dolls and infant or baby dolls that were popular
playthings in America,
Bild Lilli had an adult figure (and a
bawdy reputation). After her return to the United States, Ruth Handler asked a
Yale-educated electrical engineer named Jack Ryan to rework the German doll's appearance.
Ryan, who had once designed Hawk and Sparrow missiles for Raytheon, now served
as head of Mattel's department of research and development.
Years of Prudish Resistance
Initially, Ruth Handler faced stern opposition from both her
own husband and Mattel's board of directors. Although she tried to position the
adult-bodied doll as a toy that could fill a void in the marketplace, the "male
executives at Mattel" offered what the New
York Times called "years of prudish resistance". Eventually, however, Ruth Handler
prevailed. The youngest of 10 children and the daughter of a Polish-born
blacksmith, Ruth Mosko had left Denver at the
age of 19 to move to Hollywood,
California, home of the American
film industry. Now she prepared to debut a famous doll, Barbie, which was named
after her own daughter.
Vinyl Nostalgia
Although Ruth Handler would later describe herself as "a
marketing genius", there were no guarantees that the toy company she and her
husband had co-founded in 1945 had a best-selling item on its hands. At first,
only about 350,000 Barbie dolls were produced. The toys sold for $3.00 and featured
a hollow vinyl body, metal cylinders in the legs, and symmetrical holes in the
feet bottoms to fit a black pedestal stand. Today, Barbie dolls are made mainly
of acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(designer)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E5DB1F3EF93AA15757C0A9649C8B63&pagewanted=2
http://www.dollreference.com/barbie1.html
http://www.mattel.com/our_toys/ot_barb.asp
http://www.blurtit.com/q946948.html
http://www.barbiemedia.com/?subcat=23
The Y Files
Steve Melito
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