Collectors’ Corner

A key supplies the power, but the gear lever decides what happens next. Schuco’s Girato 4000 Mercedes-Benz 250 SE lets its driver select forward motion, reverse or neutral, rather than simply releasing a wound-up car across the floor. The little convertible also has steering and a handbrake. Its doors open and the front seat backs fold forward: controls and fittings to try before the next run. The box calls it…

This could be the perfect title for this little tinplate telephone booth, although the toy itself was manufactured long before the 1981 film. Its exact age remains a mystery. It could date from the 1920s or perhaps even earlier. There are no markings, logos or manufacturer's names to help identify it. Could it have been made by Ernst Plank? Possibly, but we have yet to find a catalogue reference confirming…

Lehmann gave this cart a rather unexpected team: a cowboy holds the reins, while a zebra stands between the shafts. The toy is Galop, no. 852, a post-war clockwork model recorded in our museum from 1952. The printed decoration does much of the work. Black-and-white stripes cover the animal; the driver wears a checked blue shirt, patterned trousers and a wide yellow hat. The large cart wheels carry bright green,…

Bing’s sawyer is more than a figure placed beside a tool. His jointed arms hold a large frame saw over a log on a trestle, with a connecting rod running down towards the drive beneath it. The museum identifies the piece as an Antriebsmodell: an accessory made to receive power from another model, such as a small steam engine. Belts and pulleys allowed a model engine to drive workshop scenes…

Bing’s no. 135/22 puts two horizontal cylinders beside a tall firebox and chimney. A red flywheel and the exposed connecting rods make the mechanism easy to follow in the museum photographs. The working medium in a hot-air engine is air, heated and cooled to produce changes in pressure. Those changes move a piston, while the flywheel carries the mechanism through the rest of its cycle. Heat is supplied from outside…

Turn this Bing wagon towards the camera and the large red fan becomes its defining feature. The 0-gauge tinplate model represents a rotary snowplough, a machine built to cut into snow rather than simply push it aside with a wedge. On full-size steam rotaries, the engine powered the cutting and throwing machinery, while locomotives pushed the plough along the line. The rotating equipment cleared snow to the side of the…

The tinplate lorries in our museum show one part of Distler’s output. The Nuremberg company also made an unusually elaborate battery car: the Electro Matic 7500 FS, based on a Porsche 356 cabriolet. A study of the example in the Lower Austrian state collections describes a working ignition key and a flexible remote-control shaft. The shaft fitted over the steering wheel and gear lever, allowing the operator to steer and…

Bing’s name appears on railway toys and working steam models, but the Nuremberg maker also supplied children’s magic lanterns. The Science Museum records that it began advertising small tinplate lanterns for domestic use in 1886. These projected pictures from glass slides. A surviving Bing example in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, dated around 1900–10, has a painted metal body, a lens and a round reflector, together with boxes of lantern pictures. The…

Joustra’s name comes from Jouets de Strasbourg. The company was founded in the Neudorf district in 1934 by the Kosmann brothers, according to the Musée du Kochersberg’s account of its Joustra exhibition. The museum arranged the toys partly by the ways they moved: a display traced materials and mechanisms from 1934 to 1982, while another grouped inexpensive friction-driven figures. Aircraft and helicopters hung above the cases. One particularly curious pairing…

GAMA and Schuco began as separate names on German toys, but their histories later became closely connected. GAMA acquired the Schuco name in 1980 after the collapse of its British owner, DCM. Schuco’s own published history records that GAMA brought back the Silver Arrow racing car. Classic tinplate designs were returning for a collector market, rather than simply continuing unchanged from their original production years. The Salzburg Museum’s maker record…