Marbles
There are the toys that have just come hot off the toy presses, there
are your older toys, your folk toys, and then you got your toys that
have been around, oh, for a couple thousand years. These are the ones
that make a timeline-artist’s life tough. The ones that have been
around so long, nobody remembers a time that they weren’t around. Marbles, baby. Marbles belong in that last category. They may be small, but they pack a longevity punch.
The earliest marbles weren’t called marbles, of course, because
marble wasn’t the source material just yet. The earliest marbles were
actually round stones, nuts, fruit pits or fired pieces of clay and
pottery. Some say they were found in the Egyptian pyramids and in North
American Indian mounds. The young Roman boy Octavian (that’s Emperor
Augustus to us) was written to have played games with nut marbles. And
jumping forward, there has been a National Marbles Tournament in
Tinsley Green, England every Good Friday for at least a few hundred
years. Marbles also made appearances in plenty of literature during the
1800’s. All of which is just to say, once again, that they’ve been
around for a long time.
We know that handmade glass marbles were produced in Germany
starting in the mid-19th century, because there is a known patent for
‘glass marble scissors’ from that time. But there’s also some evidence
that early marbles were crafted in England, and in Venice, Italy, so
the winner of the ‘First Handmade Glass Marble’ contest isn’t crystal
clear.
The German glass company Elias Greiner Vetters Shon, the same
company that holds the patent on the marble scissors, made swirl-design
marbles up by hand until the 1920’s, which were exported to American
and English markets. The orb began at the end of a rod of semi-molten
glass, and after a blob was formed, those special scissors sliced it
off. Since the rod contained strands of different colors, the little
glass results would as well. Today, collectors clamor for the Greiner
company’s brightly-colored creations, because as names like Core Swirl,
Mika, and Latticino indicate, these were little works of art. They’re
still known to turn up in attics and historical dig sites.
The production of handmade marbles ebbed in the 20’s to make room
for the machine-mades. American companies like Akro, Agate, Peltier
Glass and Master Made Marbles began to really churn them out. They were
made out of all sorts of materials: baked clay, glass, steel, plastic,
onyx, and agate. The machines also meant better shooting marbles,
because there were no nicks or misshapes like there were with the
handmades. Their names were based on a marble’s particular use (a
Shooter, for instance), the material it was made of (Steelies from
steel, Ally’s from alabaster), or its appearance (Flints, Cloudies,
Corkscrews, Peerless Patches, etc.). By the 1940’s, Japan was producing
cat’s-eyes, which were the most popular marbles, and by the 1960’s,
nearly all the world’s little round ones were produced in the Far East
or Mexico. But handmade glass marbles rolled onto the collector scene
once more in the 70’s and 80’s—glass craftsmen once more having a go at
the orbs. Maybe it was something to do with the scissors.
Marble play involves rolling, throwing, dropping, or knuckling
(marble balanced on forefinger, thumb shooting marble outward) your
little round guys against an opponent's marbles or another prescribed
target. There is taw, ringtaw, ringer, lagging, tic-tac-toe,
hit-and-span, assorted pot games, bridgeboard, Chinese marbles, boxies
and keepsies (probably the most heartbreaking of all, because if your
opponent wins, he gets to keep all of your marbles). There are
tournaments for the people who play, and conventions for the people who
collect. If we had pyramids today, we’d stick marbles in them too.
There’s just something about them that’s inexplicably, well, nifty.
