Erector Set is the trade name of a toy construction set that is popular in the United States. It consists of collections of small metal beams with regular holes for nuts, bolts, screws, and mechanical parts such as pulleys, gears, and small electric motors.
The brand name is currently used for Meccano sets sold in the United States.
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Patented in 1913,[1] The Erector Set was invented by AC Gilbert in 1911, and was manufactured by the A. C. Gilbert Company at the Erector Square factory in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1913 until its bankruptcy in 1967. The Gabriel company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania bought the Erector name, and continued to make nearly identical sets into the 1970s and 1980s.
The Erector Set is believed by many to have been the subject of the first national advertising campaign in America for a toy. Its great success made it part of American folk culture, although its popularity has faded in recent decades in the face of competition from molded plastic construction toys, electronics, and other more "modern" toys.
The Erector Set was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 1998.
Scores, perhaps hundreds, of different Erector Set kits have been made over the decades, most famously the "No. 12½" deluxe kit that came with blueprints for the "Mysterious Walking Giant" robot.[2]
Current "Erector" sets are actually Meccano sets manufactured by Meccano S.N. of France, part of the Nikko Group of Japan. They do not have the flanged beams of the original Gilbert Erector Sets. In the United States, since January 2008, these Erector sets have been distributed by Schylling Toys.
An extensive collection of Erector sets, model trains, chemistry sets, radioactivity experimentation kits, microscopes, and other AC Gilbert Company scientific and educational children's toys is housed in the Eli Whitney Museum, in Hamden, Connecticut.
In 2002 a movie based on A.C. Gilbert's life [3] called The Man Who Saved Christmas was made for TV.
In 1949, an Erector Set was used to build the precursor to the modern artificial heart by Drs. William Sewell and William Glenn of the Yale School of Medicine. The external pump successfully bypassed the heart of a dog for more than an hour.[4]
An Erector Set was used by Dr. Kevorkian to design his first assisted suicide machine, as seen in the HBO movie, You Don't Know Jack, featuring Al Pacino.
The "Soarin'" attraction at Walt Disney World's Epcot near Orlando, Florida was designed with an Erector Set.