1/21/2024 0 Comments Etch a sketch drawingsToday, his Etch a Sketch original drawings bring up to $10,000. I don't know who might have been the first to consider an Etch A Sketch as a valid, 20th-century drawing medium (I doubt Ohio Art even knows) but it was probably some ten-year-old kid from Cleveland like George Vlosich. As anyone who has ever tried to open up the back of an Etch A Sketch in an attempt to preserve their painstakingly drawn masterpiece will tell you, they're practically indestructible. I don't know what ever happened to it but I recall it lasted for years. For all I know my mother may have bought the first one. In any case, the first red plastic toy slid off their assembly line on July 12th, 1960. Ohio Art ended up with it through a complicated chain of events involving various Ohio Art investors. The original drawing device was invented by a French electrician named Andre Cassagnes in the late 1950s (the only electricity involved might be the static kind). The company started out in 1908 stamping out metal photo frames, then moved on to cheap metal toys (windmills and the like) before graduating to faux wood grain metal sheets used to make faux wood grain metal picture frames. The Etch A Sketch is made by a small toy company called Ohio Art in Bryan, Ohio (far northwestern corner of the state near the Michigan and Indiana borders). If Leonardo had owned an Etch a Sketch, he might have done something like this. Then you're ready to make another "fatal" mistake. If you make a mistake, you just turn the thing face down, shake it a few times, the image disappears. ![]() As simple as that sounds, they're devilishly hard to master and probably one of the most unforgiving art media known to exist. It's a little like drawing with a soft pencil on light gray paper. One knob controls the vertical movement of an enclosed stylus, the other the horizontal movement (above) as it removes from the back of a plastic screen a thin line of extremely fine aluminum powder leaving a dark gray image with a light gray ground. One changes the channel the other turns up the volume (no, just kidding). It looks a little like a fairly flat, black and white TV screen with two white knobs. The knobs move the rods, The rods move the stylus.įirst of all it's red. Although somewhere around one-hundred million of these toys have been sold world-wide, for the benefit of those deprived of the frustration of trying to draw a neat diagonal line with two rotating knobs, I suppose I should stop here and explain what an Etch A Sketch is.Īn Etch A Sketch autopsy. I never got very good at drawing with it, though I did enjoy drawing freehand city skylines (quite easy with the simple, horizontal/vertical axis principle of the thing. No one considered it an art medium, just a clever, fascinating, time-killing toy. Actually, the whole family played with it. I don't remember precisely what year it was, but sometime in the early 1960s I got an Etch A Sketch. Every Christmas and sometimes on my birthday, I'd get some sort of art related gift. Turning the screen over and giving it a shake erases the picture.When I was a kid my parents recognized my interest (if not my talent) in art. Experts can draw a curved or diagonal line. ![]() The point scores a line across the screen’s reverse side. Knobs control the horizontal and vertical rods that move a stylus where the two meet. Static charges hold a mixture of aluminum powder and tiny plastic beads to the inside of a clear plastic screen. Etch A Sketch has changed little since then. ![]() Saturation advertising on television turned the toy into a must-have item for Christmas, 1960, and Ohio Art’s factory worked feverishly until noon that Christmas Eve. Ohio Art renamed the toy “Etch A Sketch” and began mass production later that year. However, the Ohio Art Company took a second look and invested $25,000, more than they had ever paid for a license. ![]() Numerous manufacturers passed over a chance to pick up the new toy, concluding that Cassagnes wanted too much money for it. Introduced at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1959, the gadget failed to draw much attention. He called his creation L’Ecran Magique, the magic screen. French electrical technician André Cassagnes applied his experience with the clinging properties of an electrostatic charge to invent a mechanical drawing toy with no spare parts.
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