Little wonder: Leslie Smith, left, with Jack Odell , inventor of Matchbox Toys
Matchbox cars are the Lilliputian-sized, die-cast and authentically detailed models of real vehicles that are small enough to be clutched in a child's hand. Invented over half a century ago, they became one of the best-loved and best-known of British toy brands and are still on sale today.
The inspiration for Odell's creation came, surprisingly, not from a motor-obsessed small boy but a girl, his daughter Anne. Her school forbade pupils to take in any toys that would not fit in a matchbox. Anne quite happily used to fill hers with a selection of spiders and other creepy-crawlies.
Since then, more than 12,000 different models, and more than 3 billion miniature vehicles, have been produced and bought in 130 countries under the Matchbox brand name. The bestselling vehicle of all time is the boxy Model A Ford car, while one of the most popular has been the Shovel-Nose Tractor.
One of the reasons for the toys' enduring success is that they have always sold for pocket-money prices; the very first cost around seven-and-a-half old pence and they now retail for £1 to £2. But some original, well preserved examples of super-rare models from the early Matchbox decades have acquired cult collector status and led to heady auction-room bidding frenzies.
In 1999, a Matchbox model of a Mercedes Benz 250SL, part of a tiny batch to be produced in 1968 in a particular shade of apple green, sold for £4,100. At the same auction, a red Vauxhall Victor went for £3,000 with experts predicting it could have gone for as much as £5,000 had it still been in its original box - thrilling, considering Matchbox's humble beginnings.
The story starts in 1947 when Leslie Smith and his friend Rodney Smith, who had served together in World War II, pooled their savings and used them to buy a second-hand die-casting machine for £600 which they used to make parts for real car engines. They called their business Lesney Products, a combination of their two christian names, and ran it from a bombed-out North London pub.
But it was the arrival of Jack Odell who changed the firm's fortunes. Born in 1920, Odell had also served his country, as an engineer in Italy and North Africa. After the war, he returned home where he worked as a casting engineer in factories on the outskirts of the capital, and, in 1952, he joined Lesney as a replacement for Rodney, who had emigrated to Australia.
Their first miniature was a model of Elizabeth II's Coronation coach. It had initially been struck to commemmorate George VI's approaching Silver Jubilee which would have been celebrated in May 1952. But the King died some months earlier, leaving Lesney with one million tiny stagecoaches on their hands and no idea what to do with them.
According to Leslie Smith's son Andrew, "Someone came up with the idea of gilding the coaches and marketing them for the new Queen's Coronation. "The problem was that the Queen travels by herself and the coach they'd already made had a king and a queen in it. So they changed the colour and chopped the king off at the knees. If you look inside, you can see the Queen and a pair of shins."
Nonetheless, the coaches sold like the proverbial hot cakes. Their success, and the tiny roadroller that he had made for his daughter Anne, gave Odell an idea. He began work on a series of toy vehicles cast in zinc. There were four in the initial range. No 1 had, of course, to be the Diesel Roadroller. The other three were a dumper, a Massey Harris tractor and a cement mixer. All were packed in a smart yellow box and sold through sweet shops and tobacconists.
The real beauty of them lay in their precision: each was an exactly-to-scale replica of the real thing, with all the dashboard dials in precisely the right place, and they could have more than 300 separate parts. As the company expanded, Matchbox experts would fly round the world taking countless photographs and measurements of the vehicle they were working to reproduce, just to make sure it was exactly right.
More toys were added to the series every year - a Land Rover, a London bus, a bulldozer and a fire engine were all among the early additions - until it eventually numbered 75. While Smith ran the business side of things, Odell looked after manufacturing and design. He was incredibly hands-on. One worker recalls being interrupted by Jack as he was cutting the one-inch passenger seat cushion for a Model T Ford. "He said he wanted it deeper as he felt it did not look as if you could sink into it, so he started cutting it himself until he said: 'That's what I want.' He was an engineer inside and out and he wanted perfection." The company went public in 1960, making Smith and Odell millionaires. By the end of the Sixties, Matchbox cars, with "Made in England" stamped proudly on the chassis, were being churned out of 13 factories by 6,000 employees.
The cars even conquered the American market. In 1968, both its founders, Smith and Odell, were made OBEs. The following year, the firm felt its first serious competition, from Mattel's Hot Wheels cars produced in Hong Kong where labour was cheap. The Seventies brought more turbulent times for Matchbox, in the form of national electricity strikes and a strike at one of Lesney's factories. Odell and Smith persuaded the workers to return by cutting their own salaries by 75 per cent, from £100,000 to £25,000. Then, Odell retired in 1973, leaving Smith to run the company without him.
Faced with fierce competition, Smith was forced to move some of his manufacturing to the Far East, and replace the distinctive matchboxes with modern blister packs, but it was not enough to save his company and Lesney was declared insolvent in 1982. To everyone's surprise, in the next year, Odell acquired some of the Matchbox die- casting and set up in business, making a range called Days Gone at a factory in North London.
As for Matchbox, it was sold first to Tyco Toys, which in 1997 was bought by Mattel, who still own the brand that has given so many millions of children millions of hours of simple and innocent fun.
whew...few weeks ago, i went home to my hometown in bandung, west java. it was rainy day there (well, bandung is always under dark clouds last couple months). i decided to go to hunt for some toys with my wife and my sister. there was a store in bandung, that sell a huge numbers of collector items. it's like kinda heaven for me, spoiling my eyes with a lot of 1/64 diecast. i spent about 2 hours in that store, searching and searching and keep searching. but suddenly my eyes stucked in a rare johnny lightning car (at least here in indonesia), a 1970 blue chevy vega. i can't believe my eyes. you know, it was rare and been hunted by a lot of toy collector here.
diecast, we certainly heard it often, isn't it? but what the hell is that? this blog, is totally different from other blog that only show off a huge numbers of diecast collection and/or selling a certain diecast item. this blog is dedicated to newly diecast fan, and digging much deeper in the world of diecast car toy collecting. well, with once or twice show off my collection, of course, hehehe... :D.
back to our main topic, what on earth is diecast? according to wikipedia, a diecast car toy refers to any toy or collectible model produced by using the die casting method. the toys are made of metal and plastic, the metal used commonly is zamak (or mazak), an alloy of zinc and aluminium. zamak is also referred to as white metal or pot metal. the most common die-cast toys are scale models of automobiles, aircraft, construction equipment and trains.
that's why, a tiny car toy, which is not as big as your hand, often called diecast. see? and again wikipedia told that diecast (or die cast, or die-cast) toys were first produced early in the 20th century by manufacturers such as meccano (dinky toys) in the united kingdom and dowst brothers (tootsietoys) in the United States. the first models on the market were basic, consisting of a small car or van body with no interior. In the early days it was common for impurities in the zamak alloy to result in metal fatigue; the casting would crack or decompose for no apparent reason. as a result, diecast toys made before world war II are difficult to find in good condition.
hmm...so that's diecast description and history, for further information about diecast, you can open this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die-cast_toy
