Meccano

Frank Hornby invented Meccano as a system of perforated metal strips, plates, and rods combined with nuts and bolts to build working mechanical models. It became one of the most educational toys ever made. Hornby also founded Hornby Railways and Dinky Toys under the Meccano umbrella.

Frank Hornby, a Liverpool meat-importer's clerk who devised a perforated-strip construction system in 1901 to amuse his sons and patented it as "Mechanics Made Easy".

Meccano is the most influential construction toy ever made and one of the few genuinely educational toys that deserves the description. Its principle — standardised perforated metal strips, plates, girders, gears, axles and brass fittings, joined by nuts and bolts on a fixed half-inch hole pitch — means anything mechanical can be modelled, and the modelling teaches real engineering: leverage, gearing, torque, structural triangulation.

Hornby renamed the system Meccano in 1907 and built an industrial empire on it from Binns Road in Liverpool. Generations of British engineers began with a Meccano set, and the company's manuals, with their graded model designs and numbered sets that could be upgraded step by step, are a genuine curriculum. Meccano Ltd also created Hornby Trains and Dinky Toys, which makes Hornby responsible for three of the most significant toy lines of the twentieth century.

Lines Brothers bought Meccano in 1964, Airfix in 1971, and Binns Road closed in 1979 — an event still remembered with real bitterness in British model engineering. The Meccano name continues under French ownership, latterly Spin Master, with production of both traditional sets and modern equivalents.