12/4/2023 0 Comments Etch a sketch art penguinOthers agree with me about the importance of Lego and the British Association of Toy Retailers named Lego the toy of the century.įrom Lego to leg over because 1960 was a big year for literature when the book ‘ Lady Chatterleys Lover’ was published by Penguin books and whipped up a legal storm. ![]() Lego changed everything and the only restrictions on creativity thereafter were the number of bricks in the toy box and our imagination! Pre-Lego I had a construction set called Bako, which was a set of bakerlite bricks and metal wires that could be used to construct different styles of houses but nothing more inspired than that. Now this just has to be one of the best toys ever and when it was first introduced the brightly coloured bricks sold by the bucketful. Lego is a Danish company and the name comes from the Danish words ‘LEg GOdt’ meaning ‘play well’. Much more important was the introduction of Lego which was seen at the Brighton Toy Fair for the first time in 1960. The box suggested all sorts of drawing possibilities but in reality although it was alright for houses or anything else with straight lines beyond that it was excruciatingly frustrating to draw anything that anyone would be able to meaningfully identify. After several years of being ignored as a load of magnetic rubbish L’Ecran Magique was eventually bought up by an American toy firm and renamed Etch-a-Sketch.Īctually Etch-a-Sketch was really hopeless and it was impossible to draw anything really creative. Etch-a-Sketch was invented by a man by the name of Arthur Granjean who developed L’Ecran Magique, The Magic Screen, in his garage. But rather than use your finger you had to demonstrate enormous amounts of patience and dexterity and twiddle two knobs which was an action that required almost impossible eye to hand co-ordination. The first was the Etch-a-Sketch, which was a big bag of aluminium dust behind a plastic screen that you scraped doodles into, like you would on the window of a steamed-up car. This was an event that would leave the west dependent on the Middle East for its oil and has resulted in a succession of international difficulties in the region.ġ960 saw the introduction to Britain of two new must have toys: The South Africans, sensing a loss of white supremacy, didn’t approve of this and the speech led directly from their withdrawal from the Commonwealth and their continuing support for the apartheid system.Īnother significant event of 1960 that was to have far reaching consequencies was the formation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The speech sent a clear signal that the British Government intended to decolonise and most of the British possessions in Africa subsequently became independent nations in the 1960s. ![]() He didn’t become President in 1960 because America has a curious system whereby the winner has to wait two months before officially taking office, that is two months being paid for doing absolutely nothing but I suppose this at least gives time for the outgoing Chief Executive to clear his personal possessions out of the White House.Īlso in politics it was in 1960 that the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan gave his “ Wind of Change speech” to the Parliament of South Africa, on 3 February 1960 in Cape Town at the end of a month spent in Africa visiting a number of British colonies, as they were at the time. In November John F Kennedy was elected the thirty-fifth President of the United States, the youngest ever at forty-three and the first Roman Catholic. In 1960 there was an event which I suppose stimulated this part of my story. The 1950s had been a steady decade not so different from those that had gone before but the 1960s were about to change the world forever and there would definitely be no going back. 1960! And so the famous decade began, pop music, mods and rockers, flower power and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or CND for short.
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