What do these two things have in common?
Hmmm, lessee. They're both artillery, of a sort. They're both made of metal. They're both in the Holdings of Castle Argghhh! And they were both made by the same company in the same factory. The Bing Werke, in Nuremburg, Germany. Founded by brother Ignaz and Adolf Bing in 1863, working out of their home, Bing was, by the time WWI started, the biggest toy company in the world. They are best known for their toy trains and live steam-powered toys, but they produced a *lot* of types of toys in prodigious amounts. They pretty much invented the litho-toy industry, of which that cannon is an exemplar. Unfortunately for them, their major markets were in England and the US.
So, during the war, like many patriotic companies, they made a meal out of the hash the war had done to their business, and turned to armaments production - in this case, the
Minenwerfer ("Bomb-thrower") 16. The MW16 came to the Castle from a defunct Americal Legion post in Jetmore, KS.
After the war, the Ives company in the US (Bing's major competitor in the US) lobbied Congress for tarriffs and other protections against competition and Bing struggled. Britain didn't take up the slack in markets as they were still recovering from the costs of the war, and when world financial markets collapsed in 1929, so did
the world's largest toymaker.
Not my usual kind of post, eh?
Read the complete post at http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2012/11/improvise_flex.html
Posted
Nov 26 2012, 05:42 AM
by
Argghhh! The Home Of Two Of Jonah's Military Guys..