The big knobs drawing-on-a-screen game

Developed in the late 1950s by Frenchman Arthur Granjean, the Etch-A-Sketch was first marketed as L’Ecran Magique (The Magic Screen). The toy hit the big time in ‘59 at the International Toy Fair held in - surely the world capital of all recreational fun - Nuremburg. Here it was snapped up by the Ohio Toy company and given the “ETCH… A… SKETCH!!” moniker that would later lend itself to a bafflingly catchy jingle¹.

Was it magic, though? Readers who wish to preserve their disbelief in a suspended state should look away now.

No, of course it wasn’t, you fools! Essentially a box full of industrial grade crap (aluminium flakes, if you’re going to be fussy) Etch-A-Sketch worked thanks to an internal stylus moved around by twiddling two satisfyingly chunky knobs. The stylus scraped the film of flakes off the inside of the screen, ergo producing a line. In short, it was a bit like scraping your car windscreen but with more impetus for producing a single-line drawing of a house with blocky smoke coming out of the chimney. To erase your picture when you’d finished looking at it for a bit you’d simply shake the thing about thereby flinging the aluminium crap back onto the inside of the screen².

In appearance, the red-clad Etch-A-Sketch was a Tron-esque vision of the future, an apparent plasma slab you could sit on your lap and create Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style animations with. As a seemingly miraculous device it was much coveted, but in truth its appeal was limited, really only lending itself to drawings of steps, mazes and circuit diagrams³. Mind you, that lad off of the ’80s QED doc who could draw the London skyline from memory, he’d have been ruddy fantastic on it we reckon.