"Twenty-five years ago, I discovered that if children see a scientific principle incorporated into a toy, they understand it better." - Arvind Gupta

At BRINQ, we’ve long been fans of magic man and toy tinker Arvind Gupta and his Little Toys, so we think it’s high time we do our part in sharing his work with the world!

The range of his toys is unlimited. Like a magician, he puts his hand into his magical bag and pulls out all kinds of wonderful science-based toys. Mechano sets made out of cycle tubes, motor cars made from batteries and magnets, air pumps to blow balloons from empty film roll cans and cycle tubes, fun toys like a marble-swallowing rat made from newspaper, different games from matchsticks and boxes, and many many more. What gets the children totally hooked is the fact that all these marvellous little gizmos can be created by them too.

Keeping simplicity and affordability as his guiding principles, Gupta’s toys are made out of household waste. Discarded tetrapaks, cycle tubes, toothpaste tubes, paper, battery cells, refills, film rolls, cartons, bottles, straws… there’s nothing that doesn’t qualify as raw material in his laboratory. To make his toys, one doesn’t need to shop for expensive and new things; any used item can be recycled into a wonder toy of science. "After all, in a world so full of junk, there can be no dearth of material," he points out. "Half the fun is in collecting the material," he adds and children ought to be trained to look at waste as the birthplace of new creations. [Read more from "Toying with science"]

Gupta, the winner of India’s first National Award for Science Popularisation, has taught hands on science and toy-making workshops to thousands of children throughout India. His trash-to-treasure lessons have been written up in numerous books, freely available for download. "Little Toys" is one of his most well known books:

An attempt has been made in the book to show how some of this modern junk can be recycled into joyous toys. Film-roll cases can be transformed into a high-efficiency pump, Frooti tetrapacks into measuring cylinders or butterflies, packets of cigarette into merry-go-rounds. These new raw materials offer innumerable possibilities for use in low-cost science experiments and in making dynamic toys.

Try making some of his toys yourself, and enjoy these treasures from India’s Magic Man!

Additional Links and Resources:

• An interview with Arvind Gupta - by Multiworld.org
• Books from Arvind Gupta - more science and toy-making books for download
• Little Toys Excerpt - a color excerpt on the web of six toys from the book
• Gupta books for purchase - physical copies of three of Gupta’s books, including "Little Toys"

Past "Toys from the Brinq" articles:
The Power of Play — A Playful Exchange — Invention at Play — Finding Blue in a Sea of Gray — Brazilian Toys Libraries — Geppetto’s Dilemma — Playing on Empty

How can the multinational company become the driver of an inclusive capitalism?

That’s the critical question the Base of the Pyramid Protocol seeks to answer. Developed by Stuart Hart and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab, the BOP Protocol Project is a collaborative effort to develop guidelines and business models for successful Base of the Pyramid ventures, enabling them to meet the needs of the world’s 4 billion poorest people while discovering huge new growth and innovation opportunities.

The Vision: to create inclusive, mutually beneficial business processes through which the private sector and local communities build economic, social and environmental value.

The protocol is a best-practices methodology to discover new business opportunities, create sustainable growth, and incubate disruptive innovations; the theory goes that by following the protocol’s three iterative and repeating steps (see image right), a company will discover the answers to capturing and delivering value in BOP markets.

The first draft of the protocol was developed by a diverse group of academics and practitioners and will have its first field test this summer in Kenya, through a joint project between the BOP Lab, SC Johnson, and Approtec. The target community? Kenya’s pyrethrum farmers, who struggle with a global decline for their crop of natural pesticide. A series of follow up tests and organizations are also in the works and the BOP Protocol will be released with an open source development model (The protocol will eventually be available at www.bop-protocol.org).

BRINQ will be involved in field-testing the protocol, either in the initial Kenya field trial or potential follow-ups in Latin America. We are currently taking part in the protocol draft review.

Additional Links and Resources:

• BOP Protocol Presentation (PPT)- Stuart Hart (Cornell) & Scott Johnson (SC Johnson) at WRI’s Eradicating Poverty through Profit conference in December, 2004
• Capitalism at the Crossroads - Stuart Hart’s new book on "The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems"
• Base of the Pyramid Resource Center - the BOP Resource Center has more information from the draft of the BOP Protocol

Photos from the field trial site in Kenya:

Past "How to Change the World" articles:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid — The Model T Trap — Going Beyond Networking

A toy designer and BRINQ advisor talked to us yesterday about his recent trip to volunteer in Nicaragua. He shared a number of observations on children there:

"Kids seemed more interested in clothing than toys, we met a lot of people who were much better dressed than we were but who also happened to sleep on dirt floors. Kids wanted better shoes for playing sports and most never had a pair of tennis shoes in their life. But what every child really seemed to want was a bicycle! However, most couldn’t afford them."

If you have spent much time in developing countries, chances are you have seen A LOT of bicycles. I have very vivid memories of crossing through a river of bicycle traffic in Saigon (the trick is to walk slow and steady so they can dodge you) and seeing whole families on a single bike in central Viet Nam. Bicycles are the workhorses of many societies, and it’s no wonder that children want the freedom and mobility bikes represent.

So this got us started on the subject of innovation for bicycles in the Base of the Pyramid. Have people found ways to make bicycles more accesible and useful for the world’s poor? Here are few examples we came across (and don’t forget our previous find of a bicycle that rides on water).

Brazilian inventor, Flavio Deslandes, has invented a bamboo bicycle (Bambucicleta, pictured right):

"Bamboo is a resource of immense potential. And it is strong too. What makes it possible to build bicycles from it is that it is stronger than steel when strained in the longitudinal direction, 17% to be exact."

"This is going to be a revolution: the bicycle wheel made out of bamboo. There is steel in the assemblies of my bicycles. But unlike everything else that is made out of bamboo - for instance the furniture that you talked about - the steel used here serves the bamboo, not the other way around. I use bamboo in its natural form in the bicycle. If you start bending it, drilling holes in it or you put nails or spikes into it you’ll weaken the structure”

"But I keep on researching in order to find even more replacements for the metal parts. This wheel here is one hundred percent bamboo: Rims and hub are made out of laminated bamboo and the spokes are made out of straight bamboo sticks. I also work on being able to produce pedals and pedal arms in bamboo,” Flavio says proudly.

SSAC reports an article from the Calcutta Telegraph about Dodhi Pathak, an Indian inventor of an almost all bamboo bicycle:

"Like most of the innovators, Pathak, too was driven by necessity. He didn’t have money to buy even a second-hand bicycle, so he built a bicycle out of bamboo. Except for tubes and tyres, which are of standard rubber, the piston, handles and barrels of his bicycle are all made of bamboo."

"Pathak belongs to the breed of inventors who, without a laboratory or research infrastructure, and sometimes without a formal education even, have churned out valuable innovations. In addition to meeting their own needs, those inventions may turn into commercial products for the indian,and perhaps even global markets."

Could there be a market to sell bicycle-making kits? Import the chains, spokes, joints and extra parts and then just add your own frame from locally grown bamboo? Would it be cheaper than just importing the whole bike? We’ll have to wait to hear back from our bamboo expert before answering that one. In the meanwhile check out AfriWheels.org and why there is no bicycle that meets the needs of Africa’s poor.

Additional Stories and Links:

• Two more articles in Portuguese (but with photos) on bamboo bicycles:
  Flavio Deslandes (referenced above)
  Milton Felicissimo - another Brazilian inventor
• Pedals for Progress - recycling the millions of discarded bicycles to places that can use them
• The Bicycling Empowerment Network - promoting bicyle mobility in South Africa
• XAccess, based in bike friendly Berkeley, CA, develops low cost cargo systems for bicycles

Past "Innovation from the Brinq" articles:
Poor People’s Knowledge — India - Innovation Central — Building a Better ATM — Keeping it Cool - Clay Pot Refrigeration

Recently we’ve received a number of requests for more information on the Base of the Pyramid. One of the best places to start is with the work by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart. Prahalad and Hart were both featured prominently at December’s WRI "Eradicating Poverty through Profit" conference in San Francisco, which we along with 900 other representatives of businesses, NGOs, universities, and governments attended. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Prahalad about his new book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid":

Your book’s subtitle reads “eradicating poverty through profits.” A rather sweeping promise, isn’t it?

Not at all. My book is about a new world economic order in which there is an invisible market constituency of 5 billion people. It is invisible to us because of the way we’ve been socialized to think. If you take the top developing countries—China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, the usual suspects—they represent 70 to 75 percent of the world’s poor population and about 90 percent of the GDP of developing countries. We tend to look at the GDP in U.S. dollar terms, which don’t give you any idea of the nature and intensity of commerce in those countries. You have to look at purchasing- for-parity dollars. If you look at those dollars, it’s about $14 trillion —and that sum is larger than that of Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom put together.

How can they afford to buy companies’ goods and services?

We always assume: If you have money, I can sell it to you. The more interesting question deals with creating the capacity to consume: How do I sell something to you—commercially, profitably—if you don’t have the money? A very American example of how to do it is the Singer sewing-machine company 150 years ago. Poor people who needed the machines didn’t have the $100 to pay for them, so Singer said, Why don’t you pay in installments of $5 a month? They sold a lot of sewing machines using that scheme. That’s exactly what Casas Bahia, a large retailer of consumer durables, is doing now in Brazil. If I live in one of the favelas—the shantytowns in São Paolo or Rio de Janeiro—I don’t have the $300 that’s required to buy a television. But I can pay $25 a month, and therefore if you trust me and give me credit, then I can pay you back. That means I am saving and consuming simultaneously, If you look at Casas Bahia, or Cemex in Mexico, or other companies I mention in the book, you see that they’re first creating this capacity to consume. So the first order of business for business is not to say there’s no market but, rather, to focus on how to create a market. Traditionally, however, the management focus of large multinationals has always been on creating more efficiency in existing markets.

Whatever the price—5 rupees or 10 rupees —I can imagine people in civil-society organizations seeing it as another instance of Western exploitation: “Here comes Coke again to dominate us.”

We continuously make choices for others, and it’s a very elitist attitude. Who are we to say that a kid shouldn’t have an ice cream or a Coke? Then there’s the other assumption: Poor people make dumb choices. Well, rich people make dumb choices, too. How many times do people buy PDAs that don’t work for them? So, then, my book also asks, Can we just eliminate all this elitism: managers who say, These people don’t matter for me; NGOs who say, These people are my constituency and I can make choices for them? Can we just agree that, if this is an opportunity to change the world, we must come together and not be on opposite sides of the fence? The only way to do that is to look at cases in which both sectors have successfully worked together

[Read the rest of the CK Prahalad interview at Wharton School Publishing]

Past “How to Change the World” articles: The Model T Trap - Capturing Future Value in the Base of the Pyramid Going Beyond Networking - Launching a Venture in the Base of the Pyramid

How do you help children cope when their whole world has been swept away? A number of tsunami relief organizations and corporations are showing that one answer is helping children do what they do best . . . play.

The Christian Children’s Fund reports on CCF’s role in the tsunami relief and helping children heal through play:

Amidst the death and destruction, CCF’s child centered spaces are providing an oasis of hope for children left homeless or orphaned by the tsunami. The child-friendly places provide organized activities to thousands of children living in camps who have lost their homes in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.

Toni Radler, CCF’s Communications Director, visited the child-friendly places while assisting in the tsunami-affected areas. “They are making a huge difference for the children. Before these spaces were created, children were walking around listless or sleeping part of the day. Now they are playing games and singing, and even receiving informal education, such as math instruction. Several of our parent volunteers are actually kindergarten teachers,” she said.

The Baltimore Sun article "A Haven for child’s play" reports of one play center in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, set up by the American relief organization Save the Children:

Toddlers stacked building blocks into towers. Five- and 6-year-olds played board games, paged through storybooks and chased one another in circles. Teenage girls in headscarves and skirts sat cross-legged side by side, whispering in each other’s ears and giggling.

These might be scenes from children playing almost anywhere in the world. But here, where the violent shaking of the earth and a giant wave made it seem that the world was about to come to an end, the sights and sounds of children’s play and laughter this week were nothing short of remarkable, as refreshing and rare for residents as a cool breeze in this steamy city at the northern tip of Sumatra island.

Meanwhile, multi-national companies like Hasbro, the world’s #2 toy company and home to Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe and Monopoly, are donating to the relief:

Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE: HAS) announced today it is providing a $400,000 contribution to assist with the short and long-term needs of children affected by the tsunami disaster in southern Asia. Hasbro’s contribution includes financial gifts to World Vision and UNICEF to support various programs benefiting children and their families, as well as a large toy donation to children in some of the hardest hit regions.

Finally, U.S. Navy sailors quickly donated some of their most prized possessions to help children heal.

Sailors came from all over USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) and lined up in the ship’s hangar bay in January to donate some of their most prized possessions - stufffed animals and toys - to victims of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia.

Additional Stories and Links:

Children of the Tsunami Play Again - by World Vision International
World Vision International Tsunami Response
100,000 play packs for children of tsunami-hit Indonesia - from Channel NewsAsia
“Rain Dance” by Patrick Donohue - a short story on the importance of joy and play

Projeto BIRA (Brincadeiras Infantis da Região Amazônica) is all about playful exchange, an effort to document and share the games and play cultures of Amazonian communities in the north of Brazil:

This project is totally focused on games that are carried out by children, in areas where spontaneity is the principal means of communication and where the forest and its embellishments are the source for materials and challenges that motivate a diverse range of actions. These actions are easily recognized by parents, grandparents, and ancestors who play along in some form, even if it’s only through a look that conveys the recognition: "Ahhh, I know how to play that." [StreetPlay.com]

Brazilian educator Renata Meirelles and American documentary film-maker David Reeks started the project in 2001 with an eight month tour of sixteen marginal communities in the states of Pará, Amapá, Amazonas, Roraima, and Acre, where they lived and played with children of the communities while sharing the toys and games of the other regions in Brazil.

"We recall a little top made from a tucumã seed, painstakingly cut and drilled by children of the Galibi (from Oiapoque) and the Wapichanas (from Roraima). Its spin generates a fascinating scream that can be heard from afar, and it is at least one example of how games open paths that don’t deplete the pleasure and beauty of one’s actions, while leaving conversation open with the cultural, historical and social dialects of each people’s tradition." [StreetPlay.com]

The Project is collecting material and stories to publish a book and a documentary film. In the meanwhile, you can visit the Projeto BIRA website (available in English e em português), which includes a diary of Renata and David’s travels, pictures of games and toys of Amazonia, and letters and drawings from children.

When we last heard from Renata and David in January, they were once again traveling throughout Brazil, no doubt playing all the way!

More images are also available from StreetPlay.com.

"How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge—rather than from their sweat and their muscle? This book is about promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly about improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills."

The World Bank’s "Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries" is a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners covering the subject of knowledge development and intellectual property in the Base of the Pyramid. The book (available in PDF) is an informative and thought-provoking read. Today we touch on Chapter 2 "Handmade in India" by Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy.

Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World

India’s 9.6 million craftsmen contribute an estimated $3.3 billion to the Indian economy. Crafts also provide part-time income to seasonal agricultural workers and women, a means for workers to remain in their villages rather than move to overcrowded cities, and act as archive for India’s rich cultural heritage. Handmade in India discusses the struggle of traditional crafts making in the face of more mechanized, cheaper alternatives and intellectual property problems.

"Artisans in India face the same IP problems as in other developing countries: cheap knockoffs, extensive copying among artisans, artisans who pass along (and sometimes sell) designs belonging to a client, and buyers who have a sample designed and produced in India, then manufactured in bulk somewhere else."

"Problems with enforcing ownership are particularly complex given what the artisans themselves accept as norms of behavior. Copying among artisans is a long-established tradition. Artists acquire their skills by copying."

The authors note that successful craftsmen are market-accepting individuals, who understand that societies evolve and that [outside of a museum] no craft can or should survive without a viable market. As entrepreneurs, craftsmen must seek new markets for their skills, but face four major shortcomings in doing so:

• Lack of knowledge on how to increase quality, productivity, and technical innovation.
• A constrained worldview that keeps them unaware of and an unable to access the new market opportunities available to them.
• A lack of working capital and access to credit. Even if a craftsman receives a large order, they do not have the upfront capital to fund the work and materials.
• A total lack of civic, professional, and social service infrastructures.

In the end, effective solutions to promoting and protecting poor peoples’ knowledge in India will need to account for Indian culture, community & family structures, the Indian caste system, and even deeply held beliefs about individualism: "Aesthetic forms are often thought of as springing from a kind of universal, divinely inspired subconscious." The authors suggest two types of solutions:

• Adapting traditional skills to new products for changing markets.
• Repositioning skills and products for upscale markets that appreciate and are willing to pay premiums for handcrafted quality and character.

On the flip side of a problem is always an opportunity. Organizations that offer effective methods to deal with the problems and solutions described in Handmade in India have the potential of opening up huge market opportunities in the Base of the Pyramid. Just remember that the promotion of innovation must be deeply ingrained in culture, a lesson not lost on us here at BRINQ.

Here’s a wonderful website and organization that is right up our alley, Invention at Play of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, part of the Smithsonian museum.

"The Lemelson Center is dedicated to exploring invention in history and encouraging inventive creativity in young people."

Invention at Play is both a website and a travelling exhibit, currently on display in Omaha, Nebraska and Wilmington, NC. More about the exhibit:

Invention at Play is a highly interactive, engaging and surprising traveling exhibit that focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. It departs from traditional representations of inventors as extraordinary geniuses who are “not like us‚” to celebrate the creative skills and processes that are familiar and accessible to all people. Visitors of all ages will experience various playful habits of mind that underlie invention.

The website includes biographies of historical and modern inventors and organizations, an interactive online play space to spark creativity, and articles and videos on the importance of play.

Invention at Play does a great job of explaining the importance of play to creativity and innovation, both in your personal life AND in your working life. This same playful spirit is at the heart of what we do here at BRINQ, so we couldn’t agree more!

“We are all too much inclined to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all around us, and right at our very feet, that we have never seen; because we have never really looked.”
-Alexander Graham Bell

The Ford Model T: Available in any color as long as it’s black.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Ford Model T, a "car for the common man", which both created and dominated the modern automobile market for the next 20 years, with more than 15 million units sold in its lifetime. Ford, however, failed to read the changes in perception of the market he had created, and continued to offer only one model to an evolving market looking for upgrades. The upstart General Motors capitalized on this shortcoming and surpassed Ford and the seemingly unbeatable Model T, by providing a ladder of car brands and upgrades. Some argue that Ford never really recovered from that misstep. This trap of not understanding and capturing the future value a venture enables we dubbed the “Model T Trap”*.

The “Model T Trap” is a critical issue for Base of the Pyramid (BOP) ventures, which by nature are enabling ventures, offering products and services “for the common man”. By enabling progress in the BOP, these ventures run the risk of lifting the customers they serve up and beyond the very services the ventures provide, potentially allowing others to capitalize on that future value, as GM did with Ford. Admittedly, falling into the trap itself is initially a sign of success both for the company and BOP development, but for ventures looking to attract continued investment to the BOP, they must have plans to capture the current AND future value their efforts enable.

This is even more critical if your goal is to incubate disruptive innovations in the Base of Pyramid. As Clayton Christensen details in "The Innovator’s Dilemma", before an innovation can disrupt its mainstream competitor, the innovation first incubates in an emerging market that values its attributes (attributes which are initially considered inferior by the mainstream). The innovation then follows an upward climb of improvements to eventually disrupt the mainstream market. That upward climb is a series of steps driven by customer demands in the emerging market. If you are not improving in step with your customer’s demands or you are unaware of the innovative ways in which your customers are using your offering, your unlikely to understand which aspects of your innovation are disruptive.

To avoid the trap, BOP ventures must find ways to embed themselves in their markets, capturing and leveraging local knowledge and shifts in perception, and to continue evolving their product and service offerings with their customers. Most critical is understanding how your customers are using your products and capitalizing on the new opportunities and innovations they are creating.

*The "Model T Trap" was presented at the 2004 meeting of the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab, included in our recommendations for a consulting project to the Grameen Technology Center on the MTN villagePhone venture in Uganda.

In English, to feel "blue" signifies being depressed or sad, but in Portuguese "azul" (blue) signifies the opposite emotions of well-being and happiness. At first glance then, a sea of gray-brown shanty houses and slums seems like the least appropriate place to be named with this color of hope, but the Monte Azul (“Blue Hill”) favela in São Paulo carries the name regardless, and since 1975 the Associacão Monte Azul has been proving that the name fits.

German Ute Craemer was living and teaching in São Paulo, Brazil in 1975 when a young girl from the Monte Azul favela knocked on her door begging for food. The teacher recognized the girl’s needs went beyond food though, so she built a work area in backyard to help meet the needs of those living in the Monte Azul favela. Her backyard workspace would later migrate to the favela and become the Associacão Monte Azul.

Today the Associacão improves the lives of thousands of favelados (favela dwellers) through a number of its services, including basic literacy education, kindergarten and preschool, outpatient clinics, carpentry and electrical workshops, bakeries and toy making facilities. Monte Azul’s toy dolls and wooden educational toys are sold both locally in Brazil and throughout the world, and its “bonecas” (dolls) are popular items in Fair Trade shops.

Several photos of Monte Azul toys are depicted below, with more available from Monte Azul’s product catalog.

Links and Resources:

Associacão Communitario Monte Azul - (Portuguese) (German) - home site in English, Portuguese, and German
The Whole Child Initiative - with a summary of the Monte Azul organization
Favela Children: A Brazilian Diary - Ute’s Craemer’s 1981 book on children’s life in the favela, translated into English and available for download
Ute Craemer - more about the founder

In his brilliant work, the Mystery of Capital, Hernando De Soto argues that the United States has forgotten its own history and methods behind its current success. So here at BRINQ, we try to learn as much as we can from the great innovators of history. Today we profile one of the greatest, A.C. Gilbert: medical doctor, Olympic gold medallist, magician, and inventor of the Erector Set, one of the most popular toys of all time.

Gilbert’s Erector Sets allowed children to build mini metropolises, bridges, Ferris weels, and even zeppelins in their living rooms. An estimated 30 million of these steel and wooden construction sets have sold over the years. Although Erector Sets have lost ground in recent years to more modern toys and video games, they are still a popular toy for purchase, especially for children with an imagination for building things up rather than tearing them down (a common theme in today’s video games). EBay alone clears hundreds of new and vintage Erector Sets each day, some bidding as high as $1000!

Inventor A.C. Gilbert was born in 1884 and as child had a love for all things magic. When he began medical school at Yale he started Mysto Manufacturing, a company which manufactured magic kits, to pay for his tuition. After a break from school and work in 1908 to win the gold medal for pole-vaulting at the 4th Olympic Games, Gilbert graduated with his MD and made the fateful decision to design toys rather than practice medicine. As the story goes, it was on train trip into New York City when Gilbert had the inspiration for Erector sets:

“Watching out the train window as some workmen positioned and riveted the steel beams of an electrical power-line tower, Gilbert decided to create a children’s construction kit: not just a toy, but an assemblage of metal beams with evenly spaced holes for bolts to pass through, screws, bolts, pulleys, gears and eventually even engines. A British toy company called Meccano Company was then selling a similar kit, but Gilbert’s Erector set was more realistic and had a number of technical advantages — most notably, steel beams that were not flat but bent lengthwise at a 90-degree angle, so that four of them nested side-to-side formed a very sturdy, square, hollow support beam.”

Lessons? Well, A.C. Gilbert’s story emphasizes the fact that innovation can come from many different places and can be inspired at any moment. Just keep looking at the world from different angles and who knows what treasure you’ll discover. It also probably wouldn’t hurt to live as eclectic and stimulating a life as A.C. Gilbert’s!

Resources and Links:
Girders and Gears - the Web’s #1 resource for metal toy construction systems
A.C. Gilber Heritage Society - honoring the memory and accomplishments of a very great man in American toy history
The Great Idea Finder - A.C. Gilbert - More facts and links about A.C. Gilbert