Revell

Revell pioneered the American plastic model kit industry, launching their first model in 1950. Their car models and precise military kits set the standard for the hobby. Revell's snap-together kits made model building accessible to younger enthusiasts, and their Apollo/space program models captured a generation's imagination.

Lewis Glaser, whose Precision Specialties company in California turned to plastic model kits after the war — the Revell name came from a plastics venture Glaser had been involved with.

Revell created the American plastic model kit as a mass-market product. Its 1953 Maxwell car kit, developed from a British Gowland "Highway Pioneers" arrangement, established that a scale kit could be sold cheaply through drugstores and dime stores rather than as a hobby-shop specialty, and the business that followed was enormous.

The company built its catalogue on aircraft, ships and cars, and on tie-ins to whatever the public was interested in — the USS Constitution, the B-29, the Mercury capsule, the annual American car kits, and the Visible V-8 engine, a working transparent internal-combustion engine that turns over and is one of the best educational toys ever produced. Revell also pioneered box art as a selling tool, commissioning illustration of a quality that is collected independently of the kits.

Revell merged with Monogram in 1986 and the combined business has passed through several owners; Revell-branded kits remain in production in both the United States and Germany, where Revell AG operates as a separate business. Much current product is reissued from tooling fifty or sixty years old.