Collectors’ Corner

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…

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…

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…