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| The idea to have gathered in a new directory all the industries relative to the toy, is happy double, because it will return big services, at the same time as it allows to measure better the considerable importance of this special manufacturing. It takes year by year an extension such as it becomes one of the strongest branches of our trade; we are stunned at the same time by the number of the workers whom it feeds, and by the variety of the jobs which it uses. The biggest diversity reigns in toys. It is bottom in Paris, like what takes place bigger abroad, commercial muses for the article toy, specially. A number of manufacturers become allied and unite in company for the sale and the (selling) of their products. Nothing is curious as the one these rooms, where are combined and moved closer the samples of all the articles appropriate to this particular industry. It is as a council of the toy, where all the orders are represented, since the trinket in a penny up to the automaton dressed in satin, since humble commoner up to the musical aristocrat. There are summoned and exposed all the specimens of any orders, the rattle in the box of paints, the kepi of the general to the game of livened up skittles, the locomotive in young rat in Buffalo smoker, of the rabbit with bell in electric France; and nowhere we better become aware of the infinite complexity of an industry which holds everything. What of workshop it is necessary to it ! Varnished, ropes, cardboard industries, crockery and tin for the houseworks, the cut wood, the printed iron, the moldings, the colossal factories, painting established, chemistry laboratories, offices of physical appearance, geographical or scientific knowledge, it uses everything and implements thousands of men. Consider this small locomotive thrown untidily on one of the small boards in the middle of cabs, streetcars, wells, buckets, dishes and rickshaw of the same qualité .It costs a penny: the parts which compose it are solidly fastened; wheels are cut with clair, and a lead smudge represents enough a plume of smoke. The confused spirit when we dream in which considerable progress of the science and the industry one owes it modest trinket, made by two printed, folded up, hung on printed, folded up, collided parts the one in the other one. It was necessary the most complicated workshop where the workers make with difficulty their living to level scraps of metal, to submit them to the steammutton, to cut them, to weld them; an immense hall was needed where all these machines are aligned, where the evening with the electric lighthouses illuminates, where moan strong machines under pressure, where high fireplaces dominate, and that support of very major. One needed that besides an army of craftsmen and workers whom we see, in the evening, tilted in the light of the lampshade in garrets, and which hurry to bring back to the factory the prescribed task. |
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What is remarkable, it is the good mood of these modest labor which take a stand of their condition, and make by buffeting the funniest toys, sometimes most really satiric. If we want tto fall in the last levels of the bimbelotière industry, we cross the street vendor, who travels boulevards by selling the state of the last cries of the year! Sometimes he is the manufacturer, mostly the intermediary enters the public and modest inventor. It is maybe among these workers or bosses in the creative spirit that we find the most curious types for their originality, their ingenuity, their talent of observation. We do not think rather how much it is necessary of studies, essays, réflexion to find the toy which will seduce the public. It is not of yesterday that we invent toys, and as in literature, it seems seems good " that everything was said and that we come too late ". It has been years and years since we make novelties; it is not an inexhaustible vein. However, the public is insatiable
It is necessary new, it is not any
more for the world ! |
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The manufacturer studies, tries, trick, and every new year brings his(her) contingent of unpublished work: it is admirable. This manufacturer and an observer, and our forced toys are of a surprising realism. The dining room and of the purest style HENRI II, and the kitchenware have follows all the progress of modern tinplate making. There are cows which we milk, automatons which gesture to delight, cars which we would take for his(her,its) former(old) diminutives of masters(teachers) of corporations, so much the models are exact. These ladies loseurs are put in the last fashion; As them have in their narrow inside a record player and cogs, they speak as you and me, and if we give them the hand, as Faust to Marguerite, they make fewer manners than the girl of Goethe, far from answering "
" And I do not need that we give me the hand, " they tighten theirs and begin walking for your to follow, playing legs how one grown-up, or as a banker at thé border! Is not all this wonderful ? This is the way the novelties of toys follow one another and occur as a result, following the novelties of the fashion or the science. But the source the fold fertile it is the current events of which the toy takes advantage with a relevant, a spirit and a mockery which return it of the most attractive. Hardly an event occupies the opinion, the street vendor dashes on the macadam in search of the customer for the small object of cut and varnished zinc which fixes for the childhood the menus details of the historie: A frog drilling the isthmus of Panama, either Béhanzin going out of a box, or the game Chicago, or the question of the triple alliance), or the French-Russian alliance, under the species of a symbolic nutcracker. |
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Even though the new toy indicates no current events, what a diversity and what an ingenuity in its multiple adversities, since rich and luxurious baby whose needlewomen the most renamed cut toilet, up to the trinket of the shop in thirteen or nineteen money! Among the latter, which small masterpieces of mechanics and science, and that of studies for a profit so little ambitious. The learned publications take care themselves of these humble bare which are the most grassy applications of the scientific laws, in their rigorous simplicity, as this small masterpiece which is the doll rider, or still the bicycle, the locomotive, the angler or the far-sighted miller!
he toy followed the progress of the civilization; all them " She begins her feminine role; Tours(Towers,Ballots) under sciences brought him(her) their discoveries, and the baby young, by deceiving modern rattles that we give to him(her), becomes electrician, mechanic, a physicist, a chemist, a photographer; optician, geographer, until humble father and mother. |
| The scientific toy is one of more surprising inventions century. We claim that he(it) existed for a long time, and that Heron of Alexandria already made éolipyles which were small steam turnstiles. Since the childhood became more demanding and better served. We would find hard to believe how much ingenuity we spend on educating the children by amusing them by boxes of optics, geography, electricity, geometry, drawing. They are games(sets) of bingo for which it is necessary to know sub-prefectures at the risk of being burdened by fines; they are lists where the question is telegraphically connected to the answer; And a stamp rings when the player put his two keys on the buttons which correspond each other: then the silence of its box is the lesson of the small ignoramus His soul also,hais heart and his conscious undergo the decisive influence of the toys with which he has fun. Without going as far as demanding, as some physiologues, that we begin the education of the children before their birth, there is good reason to worry about questions of morality in the question of the toy. .IlIt would be necessary to watch with big care the toys that we give to the children, in a way that they receive from the young age only from beautiful and profitable impressions. |
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Hippolyte Rigaut became enraged because he saw giving to the babys of rattles with little spherical bells, which seemed to him unpleasant and deafening, appropriate to inculcate them a musical education of the wildest: " They begin in the life with a dissonance " he said. He insisted on the importance of the first received impressions they persist and go on under all the weft of the life. Yet they come to us largely by the toy which is the first instrument of study of the child; it is at the origin of our knowledge and of our observations, in a period when the play looks like strangely a work. Observe the child who played: what an attention, what a study, what a work that this game! He examines, turns, returns, feels, measure, analyzes the object which heholds; he scrutinizes it, questions it, tears it, dissects it, studies the hidden competences, it is the most meticulous inquiries: we would say a scholar on the lookout for a secret of the nature. He furnishes his spirit of notions who he ignored; he learns the world by happening. From there came the concern to deliver to the hands of the child objects appropriate to awaken the esthetic instincts, either by their proportions, or by their outside aspect, unlike these horrible wooden dolls, unlike Nuremberg, the body of which seems a skeleton and the articulations of which seem pegged matches. In this account the childhood of our time arrives just in time, because never we live more flattering toys in the eye, or more artistic, by the shape and the colors. |
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There are more affinities than we believe between the girl and the one that she calls her daughter. She gives her affection, her confidence, she makes , she watches her education, her scolds , forgives her. It is also a faithful friend towards whom she takes refuge when she has a great sorrow, by this need which have the women to have a friend and a support. Michelet very nicely noted this character of customs of the girl:
" She begins her feminine role; always under the authority, she moans a few with her mother, as later of her husband. She needs a girl, every small confidante, with whom she sighs! Of what? Of nothing today maybe, but of I do ont know what, which will come in the future. It is especially the winter, in the home, that you will observe the thing, when we are more contained and than there are fewer movements outside. A day when we a little scolded her, you see her in a corner wrapping quite slowly the slightest object, the small stick maybe, with some linen, with a piece of one of the dresses of her mother, to squeeze it of a thread in the middle, and an other one a little higher, to mark the size and the head, then kiss it tenderly and say it: " you, you love me, she says in a low voice; you never scold me. " |
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The doll is a person, who occupies a big place in the existence of the child and who awakens at the girl's the first feelings of maternal love, as the first impressions that she will not forget.Her quite young and quite fresh imagination lends her qualities, tastes, habits,a reciprocity of affection which is moving, which makes, in her, the instinct of her future homework and the presentiment of her future hatch. The big poet who had a practice in a way so soft the art to be grandfather, Victor Hugo, had not made a mistake there when he wrote: " Imagine that something is someone, all the future of the woman is there. While dreaming, and while playing, while making of little outfits and small baby clothes, while sewing small life jackets, the child becomes a girl, the girl becomes big girl, the big girl becomes a woman: the first child will continue the last doll. "  |
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