The Etch A Sketch Was Rejected Everywhere, Then Bought for $25,000 at the Last Minute

US3055113 covers the drawing toy the world knows as the Etch A Sketch. Its inventor was André Cassagnes, a French electrical technician and garage mechanic, and the mechanism he worked out is considerably stranger than most people realize.

Cassagnes' account of the origin involves a light-switch plate at work. He peeled a translucent decal off a switch panel and noticed that marks made in the fine coating on the back showed through the front clearly. That observation turned into a toy he called L'Écran Magique — the Magic Screen.

How it actually works

There is no ink, no lead, and no screen technology in the modern sense. The inside of the glass is coated with an extremely fine aluminum powder, held there by static electricity, which makes the screen look uniformly gray.

The two knobs drive a stylus on a pair of rails behind the glass — one knob moves it horizontally, the other vertically, which is why the toy draws only in horizontal and vertical strokes and why diagonals require turning both knobs at once. Anything curved is an act of coordination.

The stylus does not deposit anything. It scrapes the aluminum powder away from the inside of the glass, and the dark interior of the case shows through as a line. Turning the toy over and shaking it tumbles the powder and beads inside, recoating the glass and erasing the drawing.

Rejected, rejected, rejected

Cassagnes showed the Magic Screen at the Nuremberg International Toy Fair in 1959. It attracted essentially no interest. Toy companies passed.

The Ohio Art Company, of Bryan, Ohio, saw it there and declined. They saw it again later and declined again. The version usually told is that as the company's representatives were leaving, an executive took another look, reconsidered, and Ohio Art eventually bought the rights — for a figure generally reported around twenty-five thousand dollars, a substantial sum in 1959 but a rounding error against what followed.

Ohio Art renamed it the Etch A Sketch and put it out for Christmas 1960. It sold about 600,000 units in that first season and went on to sell well over 100 million.

The long tail

The Etch A Sketch was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998. It has an unusual second life as an artist's medium — practitioners produce astonishingly detailed work on it, and because the drawing is only powder on glass, finished pieces have to be carefully drilled and drained of their aluminum dust to be preserved without shaking themselves blank.

Cassagnes, for his part, largely stepped back from toys and spent much of his later life designing competition kites, at which he was also extremely good. He was not widely credited as the Etch A Sketch's inventor in America for decades; the recognition arrived late, and he died in 2013.

The object is a sealed box of aluminum dust with two knobs, invented by a mechanic, turned down by everyone, and bought on a second glance.

See the original

The full text and figures of US3055113 are on patents.us.