What's in My Toy Box? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Slinky

The Slinky was invented in 1943 by Richard James of Philadelphia, PA. He invented the toy by accident when he was trying to develop a spring that would keep sensitive instruments steady on board ships. The Slinky is often used by physics teachers to demonstrate such things as wave properties, forces, and energy states.

Answer: Knucklebones or Jacks

Whether you call the game Knucklebones, Jacks, Iguni, Abhadho, Cincos Marias or Huripapa, you're playing a game that is hundreds and perhaps thousands of years old. There's evidence that Cro-Magnon parents taught the game to their children as a way to develop the hand-eye co-ordination that they needed to be good hunters.

In ancient Egypt, children played the game using the toe bones of sheep (hence Knucklebones). The old song "This Old Man, He Played One" was inspired by this game.

Answer: Tiddlywinks

Originally called Tiddedly-Winks, the game was the brain child of Joseph Assheton Fincher of London, England in 1889. For many years, it was produced only by a London firm of toy and game makers called John Jacques and Son. It became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Nowadays, Tiddlywinks is an annual championship game between those old rival universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

The Duke of Edinburgh awards the Silver Wink to the team which wins the annual match.

Answer: Jigsaw puzzles

Jigsaws were invented in 1767 by a London engraver named John Spilsbury. He glued a map of the world onto a board, and then cut it into little pieces. Back then, teachers used Spilsbury's jigsaw puzzle to teach geography.

Answer: Train set

My train set was an O gauge Hornby and it was my favourite toy. My passenger and goods (freight) trains whizzed along yards of track through towns and villages, and stopped at stations. I had a roundhouse, where the trains would move onto a turntable affair so that they could change direction, signals, crossing gates, sidings - it was a fine set up.

Answer: Meccano

I wasn't a very girly girl, and one of my prized toys was a Meccano set. The first Meccano set was invented and patented by Frank Hornby of Liverpool, England in 1901. He called it 'Mechanics Made Easy'. I built some interesting (and fantastical) things with my Meccano set.

Answer: Draughts or Checkers

People were playing Draughts or Checkers (as it's called in North America) as early as 600 BC, and the roof of the Temple at Kurna in Egypt is made up of slabs of stone in the style of an Alquerque board (Alquerque is the forerunner of draughts). Later, the game was called Quirkat in the Arabic countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

It was the Arabs who started playing the game on chess-style boards. The game was imported into Europe by the Moors when they invaded Spain in 711 AD. It may have been brought to England by Crusaders returning from the Holy Land and Europe.

Answer: Happy Families

'Happy Families' was created by London game manufacturer John Jacques in 1851 (just before the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace). The idea of the game is to collect whole families, and players do this by asking another player if he or she has the card the player is seeking. If the answer is no, then it is the turn of the other player to ask for a card.

The game ends when all the families have been re-united and the winner is the player with the most families. The original 'Happy Families' cards were designed by Sir John Tenniel (the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland') and one can still buy packs with the original Tenniel illustrations.

Answer: Doll house

Our doll house was a replica of my great-grandparents' house in Wales, and it was made for my grandmother and her sisters. It was passed down in the family to succeeding generations of girls. Our doll house had an attic and maid's room in the upper story, a second floor with four bedrooms, a nursery, and a bathroom. On the main floor there was a sitting room, a breakfast room, a library, a dining room and a reception hall with a staircase.

The kitchen and scullery were downstairs in the basement. On the swing-front there were doors leading to the basement down a flight of steps, and a flight of steps leading up to the front door. Quite a magnificent toy! We wouldn't have exchanged it, not even for the doll house that Sir Edward Lutyens designed for Queen Mary in 1924, which is housed in Windsor Castle. Doll houses have a long history, but the doll house as we know it today first appeared in Europe around 400 years ago.

Answer: Teddy Bear

In 1902, so the story goes, President Theodore Roosevelt was out hunting bear in Mississippi. Some of his companions found a scrawny old bear, lassooed it and brought it to the President so that he could shoot it. Mr. Roosevelt was horrified. He would have nothing to do with the heartless scheme.

The story got around, and Clifford Berryman, the cartoonist for the Washington Post, published a cartoon showing the incident. In 1903, Morris and Rose Michtom of Brooklyn, New York, exhibited two stuffed bears in their store window, with a placard indicating that they had permission from Roosevelt to call their little creations Teddy's Bears.

The name stuck - although it became teddy bear. In the 1890s, Margarete Steiff of Germany had started producing stuffed toy bears, but they resembled real bears more than the cute, baby-faced bears that we all love today. My teddy bear's name was Arthur (because the Welsh word for bear is 'arth', and my first language was Welsh).