Our New Life-History of Toys

Our New Life-History of Toys

Today I want to talk about the development history of toys.

There are dolls made of materials such as clay, wood, animal bones and ivory in the ancient Egyptian cultural relics dating back about 5,000 years ago, and there are small drinking utensils and living utensils in children's tombs.Pulling toys with round wheels were found in Persian cultural relics about 3,000 years ago.In ancient Greece, there were sounding tops activated by strings and animal figure toys.

In some ancient poems, we can see what the ancient Chinese played. Kites are a kind of "toy" with a long history. Chinese folks once made kites out of bamboo and paper, and then painted them with exquisite patterns. The royal family used silk and damask to make patterns such as dragons, butterflies, and fish, which are of high ornamental value and have certain symbolic meanings.In addition to kites, there are also toys such as tambourines, and Cuju (the earliest football).They have survived to this day.

During the era of the Industrial Revolution, during the 17th and 18th centuries, skilled artisans created a variety of extravagant toys for the amusement of wealthy children and their parents.Gradually, there were inexpensive play houses, metal soldiers, and mechanical toys for children and adults to play, as well as jigsaw puzzles, alphabet blocks, and various board games. By the late 18th century, Germany was the toy center of the world.

In the 19th century, toys began to be mass-produced. As railroads traversed Europe and America, toy trains appeared, sometimes with clockwork or steam-powered locomotives. In the 20th century, educational toys became the development trend of the toy industry. People began to apply a new power source, electricity, to toy trains.In the 21st century, various high-tech toys integrating sound, light, and electricity functions began to seize the status of traditional toys.  Children's toy cars are a very typical case.

Now, toy cars have lots of functions, not only lights, but also some multimedia functions such as music, early education, fairy tales, etc., which can satisfy children to understand the world better.Some toy cars can satisfy the needs of parents and children to play together, so that the warm parent-child time will also become a precious childhood memory for children.

Toys have carried historical changes, placed humanistic feelings, demonstrated the power of technology.Our life is inseparable from toys.