Barbie
Call her the preternaturally perky perennial preteen product with a past.
Don’t tell the millions of Barbie devotees that have made Mattel’s doll a billion-selling global sensation since 1959, but Barbie’s original name wasn’t Barbie — it was the far more staid “Barbara.” Ruth Handler, who founded Mattel in 1945 with her husband and another investor, named the doll after her own daughter.
Handler’s real inspiration was, however, the realization that young girls didn’t really want to play with baby dolls. They wanted grown-up figures upon which they could project their dreams of love and romance. Handler developed and marketed the first adult woman doll and revolutionized the toy industry. Today three Barbie dolls are sold every second somewhere in the world.
Of course, Barbie isn’t exactly a normal adult woman, and her unlikely physical proportions reflect a lineage Mattel would rather forget. Handler modeled the doll on a German gag gift for men, a toy derived from a risqué comic strip character named Lilli, a practitioner of the World’s Oldest Profession. Barbie is, to put it bluntly, a recycled German hooker.
No wonder her boyfriend Ken (created in 1961 and named after Handler’s son) always looked a bit anxious. Sadly (at least for Ken), Mattel announced just before Valentine’s Day 2004 that Barbie and Ken were breaking up after 43 years of going steady. Russell Arons, vice president of marketing at Mattel, explained that the pair “feel it’s time to spend some quality time apart,” and denied rumors that the split was caused by the arrival of a new male doll, Blaine, described as “an Australian boogie boarder.”
Motorola
Most people would consider parking your car at the curb and cranking up the radio rude or worse. But when Paul Galvin did it in 1930, it was brilliant guerilla marketing.
When Galvin founded his Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928, the timing could not have been worse. The Chicago company had early success with its “battery eliminator,” which allowed radio owners to run their sets on household current, but the stock market crash of 1929 threw the continued existence of Galvin’s enterprise into serious doubt.
Searching for a new product to revitalize his company, Galvin learned that some auto shops were doing makeshift installations of radios in customers’ cars. Galvin realized that a radio made specifically for cars, easy to install and insulated from interference, could be a winner. He rushed his staff to work on the project, and they produced a working model just in time for the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Unfortunately, Galvin lacked the funds to rent a booth at the convention, so he had his engineers rig an external speaker to the radio mounted in his own Studebaker, drove to the convention, parked out front, and cranked up the volume. A crowd quickly gathered, and as Galvin pitched his product his wife took down the names of distributors interested in selling the radios.
One hurdle now remained — what to call the gizmo? Gavin polled his team of designers, and they quickly settled on “Motorola,” combining a sense of “motion” from “moto” with “sound” from the suffix “ola,” well-known in the trade names of “Victrola” phonographs and “Pianola” player pianos.
Eureka
There was a time when most schoolchildren in America would have been able to explain why Eureka vacuum cleaners bear that name.
The origin of “Eureka” lies in Ancient Greece, where, according to legend, a certain King of Syracuse commissioned a goldsmith to fashion a new crown for him. The King suspected that the artisan had substituted cheaper silver, and turned to the philosopher Archimedes for a way to prove his case. While mulling the problem over, Archimedes decided to take a bath. While getting into his bath, he noticed that the water rose as he sat down, and realized that gold, being denser than silver, would displace less water than silver, and that the honesty of the King’s goldsmith could be measured by just such a simple test. When Archimedes realized this, goes the story, he leaped from the bathtub and ran through the streets of Syracuse stark naked shouting “Eureka! Eureka!”, which is Greek for “I have found it!”
Fast forward now to Detroit in 1909, where businessman Fred Wardell was founding his company to produce a new lightweight kind of vacuum cleaner. Dreaming of revolutionizing the industry, Wardell felt that “Eureka” was the perfect name for his creation, and within a few years the industry apparently agreed, awarding Eureka the Grand Prize at the 1915 San Francisco International Exposition. And Fred Wardell didn’t even have to get in a bathtub.