Category:Meccano

Toy Brands and Manufacturers
Meccano

Meccano is a famous metal construction toy designed by Frank Hornby, that allows models to be built from perforated metal plates and strips, in conjunction with nuts, bolts, rods and wheels.

Hornby's original patent for the system that became Meccano was granted in 1901, and after starting out as a business with one employee, operating out of one room (and with the less-than-catchy name "mechanics made simple"), Hornby's product finally got going with the help of a recommendation from a professor of engineering () and a new name and commissioned logo, and Meccano Ltd. started as a limited company in 1908.

Although an early set designed by Hornby for the educational market described Meccano as having metric measurements, the finalised system used imperial measurements and was based on half-inch-wide strips with half-inch hole spacings (with holes designed to take rods and screws of ~3/16 of an inch diameter).

Design

Meccano's success was partly down to its' stylised simplicity and its strong design statement. The strips didn't pretend to correspond to anything that existed in the "real world" of engineering, and (unlike the drawings in the patent application) had distrinctive rounded ends that eliminated sharp corners and allowed strip ends to be bolted together at any angle and still show a "flush" fit.

The strong emphasis on "prototypic" geometrical shapes mean tthat while Meccano sets often included specialised types of cogs and other fundamental mechanical components (such as bevel gears and worm gears) that had a strict functional purpose, Meccano resisted the temptation to make specialised parts solely for cosmetic reasons (outside very specialised sets, such as the airplane sets). Occasionally one could find specialised dedicated parts such as train buffers, but in general Meccano stayed fairly true to the idea that if you wanted a specific shape, you had to build it yourself.

Meccano spawned a lot of imitators, but it's geometrical simplicity made it difficult to copy the basic idea without also copying the basic shapes, resulting in a product that looked like a cheap copy of Meccano ... which then further increased Meccano's reputation as the product that other people were tryng to emulate.

Branding

Meccano Ltd. and the Binns Road factory went on to produce a number of other key brands, notably Hornby Trains and Dinky Toys, but these toys often also included the Meccano name, and sometimes had other references to the Meccano parent brand, such as the Hornby Trains gauge 0 lattice footbridge, which was clearly made to match and reference the lattice plates in Meccano sets.

Promotion

Meccano Ltd didn't seem to miss a trick when it came to promotion and developing brand loyalty, and the company experimented with a range of publications that promoted the Hornby and Meccano names, the most successful being Meccano Magazine, which carried serious articles on engineering news and (engineering-related) current affairs.

External links

UK Meccano Events 2012, MW Mail Order (hsomerville.com)

Tim Robinson's Meccano Computing Machinery website: Bibliography (meccano.us) - Building computers out of Meccano

Shirley Dent, the Meccano Man] - profile of Harry Kroto, co-discoverer of Carbon 60 "Buckminsterfullerine", describing how he was influenced by Meccano as a child.