Does anybody remember Erector sets?

In 1955 or 1956 I received a medium sized AC Gilbert erector set for Christmas, as I recall this erector set was my favorite toy, built many  framework structures, that were used in my 1955 Lionel trainset. Always wanted the largest erector set but never received it for Christmas or a birthday. As I recall, erector sets let us use our imaginations, probably one of the best toys ever produced. Probably influenced many boys to pursue engineering as a career, it did for me.

Not only do I remember the Erector sets, I use them on the layout.  Here is a picture of a double decker bridge in the city.  The green painted erector bridge is a highway with the EL as the upper bridge....

 

Alan

Growing up as a kid in the late 1950's in Brooklyn, NY,  Erector sets were owned by nearly all of my friends. We would spend hours constructing the larger items and my favorite was the Parachute jump which was a large set.

Today we live in a world where everyone wants things fully built and handed to them. What was lost is the manual dexterity that we gained from building Erector projects, model kits, train layouts and doing constructive things with chemistry sets and electronic project sets.. You give an Erector set to a young kid today and most would not have a clue to figure out how to build anything. Are we really progressing as a society ?

Sometimes I think that, about kids nowadays not building anything, and then I think

about geeky kids like Bill Gates, and others not so long ago that built their own

computers (not me), and the people nowadays that also seem to keep up with and

be able to replace and repair the electronics in some of today's trains (also not me).

There are still some engineers being graduated, many foreign students go to school

here, and stay here, becoming entrepreneurs, and the Silican Valley boom may be

over, or is it?  Isn't some private company now doing space shots?  Engineering

seems to have gone far beyond screwing girders together, and demands brains more

than mechanics.  When I took physics and chemistry, the emphasis even back in those

dark ages, was on the math and formulas of it (which I found of little interest) , and was little involved with lab practice in, say, taking a steel beam to the breaking point,

or watching hydrofluoric acid eat through glass.  (do they use wax lined tank cars to

ship that?)

Excellent Point. 

 

Face it. Today's world is plastic, disposable, curves, concrete. Yesterday's world was steel, meant to last, angular, repairable, etc. I guess a kid today cant really relate to an Erector set much.

Maybe today the equivalent would be to give a 3D Printer to a kid so that he can fabricate anything he can draw.

It just struck me that some of the girders pictured resemble what were known as Bates expanded steel catenary poles and bridges..used by the CNS&M hmmm.

 

Some are still standing.. shorn of their cross members..

 

Dale, good point, when I studied engineering it was all board work, no CAD, wonder how many engineering staff personnel today can make free hand sketches and pencil drawings on the shop floor. Always wondered how our parents generation designed and  built the P51 Mustang, B17, steam locomotives, civilian and USN surface warships, the GATO class submarine used by  the US Navy in World War 2, radar systems to name a few without CAD and computers?

The sets were number and had an instruction book.  This set is a 7 1/2.  The red metal box is like the one I had as a kid.  Plastic boxes were much later.  With all the snap-lock/click-together spin-offs today, the small slotted screws and square nuts are an antique fastener from another age, IMO.  Grandson Micah has the set from last winter.  He called, said he was grounded from all his electronic devices, and wanted to know if he could use the Erector Set.   

Note the 110 volt electric motor and gear drive system.  Blue-ish grey motor, red gear drive with an engaging lever. 

Note in this picture, top left of the box, is part of the boiler assembly.  Mechanical equipment of the age late 40's/early 50's could have been powered by a steam boiler system, which was part of the more complex Erector sets.

sure do, when i was 12 and my folks and i were on vacation, i came down with the mumps,  oh joy, my favorite piece of heaven Door County wiscand i get the **** mumps

Off to bed i went, tears and all,  later that afternoon, my uncle jim, cousin kirk and my dad came into room, with a brand new erector set, and a Daisy BB gun,  they propped me on the porch and i shot at a tin can nailed to a tree, and then back into bed with the erector set,  mine came with a motor all kinds of pulleys and string and i had a ball, actually spent more time with it than the BB gun

Beautiful graphics..what a lost art.

I believe it is the 7 1/2 set that I still have except my electric motor looks a little different.

.....

Dennis

I had one, I got it in the late 50s early 60s. I rember the metal box being gray with the AC motor.  It all disapeared when I was in service.  I also had some bricks similar to Legos but they were made out of wood.  The disapeared too.  Though I still have my 2035 that I got for Christmas in 51.

The Erector Set was instrumental in developing my mechanical skills when I was young.  It taught me so much about how to build an item that was structurally sound, where the stress points were on a structure and how to enforce them, and especially alot about gear reduction.  I had the Rocket Launcher set similar to the model 7 1/2 Engineers Set that ENP shows up above.  The motor was wonderful.  It was the big one, except painted dark blue.  It is still running.  The assortment of gears to achieve the proper speed and torque helped me understand that concept more than book reading could have.  And I got my fingers chewed more than once in the gearbox of that motor.  I gave the set to my 11 year old grandson, who hasn't shown much interest in it, because nowadays it's Legos, which he has a large collection of and can build just about anything.  (Of course, he has rebuilt lawn mower engines, drives tractors, and works right alongside his very talented and skilled dad in the garage rebuilding cars and such.)

 

After seeing the pictures of the cans full of American Plastic Bricks and the American Skyline sets, I was really hit with nostalgia.  I had those, and also the Girder and Panel set, which was my favorite, except when the tabs would break off of the ends of the I beams.  It was HO scale, and I would build engine houses and loading docks for my lone HO diesel.  Forgot to mention Block City and Lincoln Logs, too.  I think that Lego got the idea of their design from the Block City pieces.  That was a really fun building kit.

 

What was the name of the toy that had dowel rods and various sizes of spindles with holes in them where the rods would fit?  I remember the basic set was unpainted and the more expensive set was dye colored with multiple basic hues.  The dowel rods had a slit in the end of them so that they would give enough to be snug once they were placed in the holes.  The center holes in some of the spindles were oversized so that a dowel could go straight through without binding, which made it possible to build spinning models.  The era of creativity, ah, it was fun. 

 

 

I think you are talking about tinker toys.

That's it!  Tinker Toys.  Thanks.  That would have bothered me all night.  I was about to hit the internet to see if I could find any info on them.

 

Mike

I also have one set of the Kenner Girder and Panel set. Yes it is fragile.

 

I remember playing with those Skyline bricks as a boy. In the instruction manual, it shows many skyscrapers built on an HO scale layout. American plastic bricks were my favorite when I was a boy. I still remember the simulated brick detail on the sides of the bricks. Maybe I will post some more pics of the Erector stuff later. I promise guys, I also have a good size collection of trains somewhere around here. He He

Seems that many us had the educational toys of the 50's and 60's, I also had Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and I believe Block City , these were white plastic blocks as I recall 3/4 inch long by 3/8 inch high by 3/8 inch wide, windows, doors and brick caps green, Block City was a early 50's predecessor to Legos. I also remember using the Lionel magnetic crane to load Erector Set frame stiffeners into Lionel gondola cars.

There is an interesting theory that children of this computer age society will develop brains that are wired differently.  I really don't know if that is true, but consider that the toys the boomers played with were not "virtual reality" but "actual reality."  We used our  hands and senses to actually construct things physically rather than manipulating them on a screen through a keyboard or mouse.  I do believe that one learns more effectively at a younger age through the actual use of tangible objects rather than abstractions.  For example, it is more meaningful to describe mathematical concepts that a child can relate to, like 1 apple and 3 apples, rather than the abstraction 1+3.  The child can hold apples; he/she cannot hold concepts like 1+3.  Of course, after awhile we have to advance to more abstract thinking, assuming, of course, that we have normal intelligence to do so.  But if the psychological theorists are correct, we might be facing a new era in the educational maturation of our coming generation with computers.  Hence, there may be no need to actually construct gear ratios and create spans with erector sets when one can do it on line.  Even today, biology classes in high school no longer physically dissect frogs to study their systems.  It is done with computer programs.  Funny though, I hope the surgeon that should ever work on me studied anatomy in med school with cadavers rather than computer learning tools.  I'd feel just a bit more confident as they wheeled me into the operating room!

I also had years of fun with Tinker Toys and made all sorts of operating gismos that you operated with the simple hand crank and string for the belts.  The Gilbert Erector Set came along later in my childhood.

.....

Dennis

Excellent points.

 

All of those construction toys were fun and educational to me as a kid. Wood blocks, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Kenners girders, and Erector set are the ones I recall. Unfortunately it seems we always had the smaller sets and I was often wishing for more parts to build larger creations.

 

It was also fun to build houses of cards, trying to make them as large and tall as possible before it all collapsed.

 

An elderly friend used an erector set girder to patch up this very old Lionel loco.