Good middle-of-the-week morning. It’s Wednesday, in case that wasn’t clear to your summer-addled brain.
On this day in 1960, the iconic game known as Etch A Sketch was first made available. This mechanical drawing toy was created by a French electrician named André Cassagnes, who was inspired by the ability of aluminum powder to stick to glass through the clinging properties of an electrostatic charge.
There’s actually quite a bit of science involved in this deceptively simply red, white and gray box. Aluminum’s outer surface oxidizes very easily, which means that it loses electrons and becomes ionic.
Without going too more deeply into this (really because my feeble word-based brain can’t quite understand it), the oxidation process enables the small aluminum particles to stick to glass. In the Etch A Sketch, a stylus scrapes the aluminum that is mixed with small beads to keep it from clumping away from the glass, leaving behind a void.
The catch is that you have to draw in one continuous line and you can’t erase your mistakes without eradicating the entire piece by shaking the apparatus to clear the canvas, so to speak. This is why all my Etch A Sketch creations were basically blocks within themselves and sharp angles, causing me to lose interest – not to mention patience – fairly quickly.
It was definitely not my favorite childhood plaything.
There are, however, or at least as far as the interwebs tell me, a fair number of people who are Etch A Sketch artists. Some of them are known for their speed, while others focus on recreating well-known masterpiece paintings.
There’s actually a way to make these works, some of which are incredibly detailed, permanent, though 1) it’s very involved and requires taking the whole apparatus apart, and 2) that seems to undercut the whole purpose of the medium, which is, at its core, ephemeral – like life.
Etch-a-Sketch celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2020. It’s wildly popular, with more than 100 million units sold across the world, and also historically significant. In 1998, Etch A Sketch was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong, in Rochester. Five years later, the Toy Industry Association named it one of the 100 most memorable toys of the 20th century.
Interestingly, however, Etch A Sketch was slow to catch on in the beginning.
Cassagnes originally dubbed his creation L’Ecran Magique, which translates into “the magic screen” from French. He debut it at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1959 and it was kind of a flop, with numerous manufacturers taking a pass on picking it up.
Cassagnes did spark some interest from the Ohio Art Company, which took a leap of faith and invested $25,000 in the gadget – an historic sum for the company at that point. It was Ohio Art that renamed the toy “Etch A Sketch”.
The company mass produced Etch A Sketch and then put some more money behind it in the form of a wall-to-wall TV ad campaign, catapulting it onto ever small child’s “must have” list for Christmas, 1960. It cost $2.99 at the time, which is about $20 or so in today’s dollars. Some 600,000 units were sold that year.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In this high-tech era of toys that talk, pee, interface, morph, sleep, develop, and do pretty much everything else under the sun, perhaps the bloom is off the rose for Etch A Sketch. There’s an electronic version that lets you animate your creations, which was first introduced in the 1980s, but it never really seemed to catch fire the way the original did.
We’re in for still more rain, which we need like a hole in the head at this point. It will be partly cloudy with afternoon showers or thunderstorms and highs will be in the mid-80s.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden celebrated Sweden’s impending admission to NATO while also preparing for a tense meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who blasted the alliance for stalling the membership bid of his war-torn nation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is expected to meet with Biden and join discussions with leaders of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today at the alliance’s summit.
NATO declared that Ukraine would be invited to join the alliance, but did not say how or when, disappointing its president but reflecting the resolve by Biden and other leaders not to be drawn directly into Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Former Vice President Mike Pence said that consideration over Ukraine joining NATO should wait until after the country’s war with Russia is over.
Former President Donald Trump condemned Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions as part of a new U.S. aid package to Ukraine, warning that it could lead to World War III.
A plurality of Americans support Biden continuing to pursue student debt forgiveness after the Supreme Court struck down his original effort, according to a poll conducted exclusively for Newsweek.
Monica Bertagnolli’s candidacy to run the NIH is stalled indefinitely, caught up in a standoff between the Biden administration and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) over Biden’s drug pricing agenda.
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for Biden to be tested for cocaine after a small amount of the drug was discovered in a White House lobby.
The Justice Department said that it would no longer argue that President Donald Trump’s derogatory statements about E. Jean Carroll in 2019 were made as part of his official duties as president — a reversal that gives new momentum to her case.
The determination, revealed in a letter to Trump’s lawyers and Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis Kaplan, all but clears the way for the first of Carroll’s two lawsuits against Trump to proceed to trial in 2024 — adding to three already on his schedule.
Humans transmitted the coronavirus to white-tailed deer more than 100 times in late 2021 and early 2022, according to new research led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
The research also suggests that the virus probably spread widely among deer, that it mutated in the animals and that they may have passed these altered versions of the virus back to people at least three times.
Arizona is used to scorching summers, but the region’s 11th straight day of 110-degree temperatures is straining patience and resources.
This week’s flooding in Vermont, in which heavy rainfall caused destruction far from rivers or coastlines, is evidence of an especially dangerous climate threat: Catastrophic flooding can increasingly happen anywhere, with almost no warning.
Officials in Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier lifted an emergency order yesterday that had closed downtown, but warned that many streets remained underwater as the authorities continued to monitor the level in a nearby dam that threatened to spill over.
The Metro-North Railroad restored service yesterday morning to two stations on its Hudson Line, Cortlandt and Peekskill, for the first time since Sunday afternoon. But some service still remained suspended due to flooding damage.
Metro-North announced the Hudson Line would operate nearly full service today, beginning with the morning peak.
The TWU of America said it has voted to authorize a strike as early as the fall. The union said trains cannot function without inspectors, which means a potential strike could disrupt the commute of many Metro-North Railroad riders.
New York state is expected to meet the $37 million federal threshold for reimbursement after floods tore through multiple regions of the state, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.
New York’s top utility regulator Rory Christian acknowledges the transition to cleaner and renewable forms of energy in the coming decades and how that will affect ratepayers in New York will present complications.
Hochul penned a NYT oped in which she highlighted the outcome of an upcoming Supreme Court case, United States v. Rahimi, which next year will decide whether to uphold a gun safety law that protects survivors of domestic violence.
Hochul expressed concern that the state’s burgeoning “Red Flag Law” could be upended by the court, an issue she framed as a threat to survivors of domestic violence as thousands of New Yorkers have been temporarily barred from possessing a firearm.
A record number of paid family leave claims were paid last year in New York since the program first began providing benefits in 2018, state officials announced. All told, 163,124 claims were paid in 2022.
Hochul urged New Yorkers to beat back bias and “defeat the haters,” signing legislation to bolster hate crime prevention policies at colleges.
A 24-year-old transgender Democratic Socialist announced her bid to unseat a Queens assemblyman accused of sexual abuse and become Albany’s first non-binary lawmaker.
Mayor Eric Adams argued that it is “anti-American” not to allow the approximately 84,000 migrants who have come to the Big Apple to legally work in the United States.
New York City is planning to open two new humanitarian relief centers in the coming days to help house the more than 52,000 asylum seekers now in its care, Adams announced.
New York City is still reeling from a “silent crisis” of more than 2,500 asylum seekers pouring in weekly, Adams said — with the total number of arrivals since last spring topping a staggering 87,200.
Days before the City Council will likely override Adams’ veto of bills to expand housing voucher use, he declared success in his adoption of the rollback of a rule requiring people stay in a homeless shelter for at least 90 days before applying for the benefit.
Adams touted what he described as historic progress moving homeless New Yorkers into permanent housing, even as an ongoing battle with the City Council over housing voucher eligibility went largely unmentioned.
The mayor said he is considering a legal challenge against the City Council over a package of bills it passed in May that would expand eligibility for city housing vouchers.
Hank Gutman, a former city transportation commissioner, thinks Adams is taking the wrong approach to fixing a crumbling stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh ignored her staff’’s calls for action against deadly e-bike batteries and refused to publicly support banning them from NYCHA housing out of fear of “political winds,” FDNY chiefs said in a new court filing.
New York Police Department officers and state tax agents raided one Manhattan dispensary and were thwarted from raiding another in an exercise of their newly expanded powers to crack down on unlicensed cannabis shops.
This year’s Global Citizen festival will return to New York City’s Great Lawn on Sept. 24 with a diverse mix of hitmakers from the worlds of rock, hip-hop and pop.
The Italian firm pitching a controversial plan as part of Penn Station’s reconstruction netted assistance from the owners of Madison Square Garden, which could score MSG a half-billion dollar payout, records show.
A new report from the Independent Budget Office finds that the city lost nearly $1 billion in property tax revenue over the last 41 years because of state subsidies to Madison Square Garden.
State Attorney General Letitia James is closely monitoring the planned closure of Burdett Birth Center in Troy and exploring options, her office said.
The Bishop, a self-described “bourbon and beef bar” that opened in August 2019 on North Pearl Street as the collective dream of a partnership of four longtime bartenders, announced that it is permanently closed.
The Capital Region’s first two Chick-fil-A restaurants will begin serving customers next week.
The politicized national debate over drag story hour events attracted a crowd of about 60 to speak up at Monday’s meeting of the board of trustees of the Bethlehem Public Library.
A body found floating in the Hudson River late yesterday morning is that of missing Albany woman Okelly Yhap, a family member confirmed.
More than four years of family conflict over the estate of Aretha Franklin ended when a Michigan jury decided what her family could not — which of two hand-scrawled wills represented the famed singer’s true wishes for how to divide her estate.
