"From the mountains to the ocean, the radio man hears everything." This advertising slogan from the 1930s for the radio man experiment kit from the Kosmos publishing house has long been history itself.
And yet the fascination that emanated from this and other experiment kits from Franckh'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung for children and young people can still be felt.
This also included boxes about drive technology (“The technician creates machines for water, air and steam power”) and chemistry (“Everything in the house is examined by the all-chemist”).
The experiment kits mentioned are part of a success story that began 100 years ago.
In 1922 the Stuttgart publishing house, which also published the popular scientific journal Kosmos, published the first sets for scientific experiments based on the ideas of the Swiss pedagogue Wilhelm Fröhlich.
The broad market success was probably more of a coincidence.
Because the teacher initially wanted to use the boxes to offer age-appropriate and clear material with easy-to-understand instructions for school lessons.
However, the products proved to be attractive for private buyers as well, despite the quite handsome selling prices – and that far beyond Germany.
The publisher says on the occasion of the anniversary:
However, Fröhlich and his Stuttgart partners did not invent the genre of experiment kits sold in toy shops.
In 2009, for example, Viola van Beek described various providers in an essay on “Experimental kits, experimental instructions and narratives between 1870 and 1930”.
The scientist traces the tradition of such bourgeois learning toys back to “mobile home laboratories” and “test cabinets” of the 18th and 19th centuries, among other things.
The well thought-out Kosmos experiment kits were convincing right from the start with a focus on certain fields of the natural sciences.
This self-image sounds self-confident in the description of the early Kosmos Elektro construction kit from 1922.
There it is said that the wooden sliding box equipped with wires, coils, switches and other elements makes it possible to explore "the entire electrical engineering in 389 experiments".
A decade later, boxes like the aforementioned radio man with their rhymed advertising slogans came along in a more flowery way.
Many other manufacturers adopted the concept of the experiment kits with detailed instructions.
Here it helped if there were already construction toys such as metal construction kits in the range.
Märklin from Göppingen, for example, advertised its construction sets made of perforated sheet metal in 1931 as "the ideal toy and teaching aid" with a view to mechanics and steel construction.
The step to products such as the electrical experiment kit Elex was only logical.
The 1950 catalog says of the series of these sets: "They want to introduce young people to the basic laws of magnetism and electrical engineering."
"Experimentation is an essential part of our kits and is deep in their DNA," agrees Hartmut Knecht, Head of Development at Fischertechnik.
The construction toy made of plastic was initially used in school lessons for experiments in areas such as mechanics and statics.
Other subjects have long since been added, with a focus on computer science and electrical engineering.
Not only children and young people benefit from this, but also adults at university and at work.
Because complex experimental systems such as the Fischertechnik learning factory are used, among other things, to simulate and test the concept and control of real industrial plants.
Nothing has changed in the fascination of children and young people in trying things out and discovering things since 1922.
However, many of the questions that the MINT disciplines of mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology deal with have evolved.
The Kosmos experiment kits therefore also cover topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence (“The AI listens to the word”).
For the radio man's great-grandchildren, the experiment of the century was a success.