Tinkertoy

The construction set was designed in 1914—six years after Frank Hornby's Meccano sets—by Charles H. Pajeau, who formed the Toy Tinker Company in Evanston, Illinois, to manufacture them.

Pajeau, a stonemason, designed the set after seeing children play with sticks and empty spools of thread.

Pajeau partnered with Robert Pettit and Gordon Tinker to market a toy that would allow and inspire children to use their imaginations.

[1][2] The cornerstone of the set is a wooden spool roughly 1.4 inches (3.6 cm) in diameter, with holes drilled every 45 degrees around the perimeter and one through the center.

To assist buyers in differentiating between the various offerings, sets were placed in mail tube packages of different sizes and also delineated with a number (e.g.: 116, 136) and a name (e.g.: major, prep, big boy, junior, grad).

They are color-coded by size; in the 1960s-era sets, they were, in order from shortest to longest, orange, peach, blue, red, green, and violet.

Most of the larger sets also include a driveshaft (an unfinished wooden rod without slotted ends, of an intermediate length between "green" and "violet", normally turned with a small plastic crank.

Sets with battery-powered electric motors were available; these sets also typically included at least one wooden "double pulley" with a single snug-fitting through-drilled center hole, and grooved rims at two diameters, allowing different moving parts to operate at different speeds.