Category:The Life Story of Meccano

  1932:     Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - [image info]

The Life Story of Meccano, written by Frank Hornby, was originally an ongoing series of short, typically single-column articles in the earliest (very slim) issues of Meccano Magazine, that at the time made up a significant part of the magazine's content.

1932 republication

A laminated page from the 1932 series [image info]

The articles were revised, merged and re-edited and a new version of the series was published in the magazine in 1932. The revised articles were typically longer (sometimes merging parts of the original serial into a single entry).

Some of the alterations are interesting: for instance, Hornby's original optimistic column on the opening of the New Jersey factory in the US, and his opinion that nothing seemed to be in the way of a large expansion into the US market, is understandably not present in the 1932 series, after the loss of the factory and the selling-off of the US company to Gilbert in ~1929.

We've transcribed some of the 1932 articles, linked below.

• 1: Origins and Inspirations
• 2: Imitations, Originality, and Early Production
• 3: New Manuals, and New Factories
• 4: Model Design
• 5: Meccano in Engineering
• 6: Hornby Trains
• 7: The Meccano Guild, and the Hornby Railway Company
• 8: Meccano Magazine