Ghosts of Christmas Past: The long-ago geek gifts that made us what we are

happy christmas

The Lego motor just gave me a huge wave of nostalgia, thank you! Probably the best gift ever was a set of military meccano though, and I remember my nerdy brother firing up his stream engines in the garage. But no airfix? Loved making models - the Saturn v and the hovercraft both made it into my stocking on various occasions

Aw, thanks.

That was a wonderful "Got, got, want, got, want ..."-esque trip back to a 70s childhood.

I first saw Fischer Technik in Rackhams in Birmingham and yearned for it. This surely, was the future. Perhaps tellingly for a child of the metal-bashing Midlands I knew that Meccano was somewhat more appropriate. Oh, and Girl's World, obviously. With a chemistry set you could try to manufacture your own make up.

Nice. My parents were as poor as church mice, but they managed to put most of these things my way at Christmas time. My nostalgia trip is complete when I think of the John Bull printing set, Space Hoppers, the Stylophone (fronted by a good guy) and the Chopper bike.

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49.26m was 208 on SW.

Chemistry Sets

A quick poll of our research lab a couple of decades ago yielded the fact that of the 20 chemists working there, not a single one of us had a chemistry set when we were kids. All of the males had possessed Meccano, most with Mamod steam engines and everyone, male and female, had owned fairly extensive lego sets.

God I feel old now.

That's all.

My static Mamod steam engine was an expensive novelty. No doubt I had expressed a desire for one - but all you could do with it was fill it with water, light the meths burner - and watch the flywheel go round. I did add a rather useless "stamping press". My nephew dug it all out of his attic recently in a house move. It went to a local toy collectors' shop.

He also found my Bayko building set - which would probably be considered dangerous these days with its matrix of fine metal rods on which to slide the bricks. You could construct buildings like Metroland suburbia - but nothing else.

My Rovex "Princess Elisabeth" 00 gauge train set, or at least parts of it, are waiting for me to visit my sister next year. The "H0" observation car was a prized addition - and much time was spent building Airfix kits of stations, shops, and churches. The Airfix 1/72nd scale was a perfect match to add people and vehicles as well. Electric points and lights were something desired but never achieved. A friend had the much-prized Royal Mail carriage with its clever mailbag pick-up and dropping on the fly.

One Christmas my father bought a wooden boxed Meccano set at an auction. IIRC a No2 set with lots of beautiful gears to make things like differential gears. A clockwork motor was added later. It was interesting recently to see the current prices of individual gear wheels on eBay.

My father aspired to one of the new transistor radios - so he bought a kit from a newspaper advert "so simple a child can make it". Having failed to make it work it was left for me, age 13, to prove the advert correct. Instead of soldering there were 8ba nuts and bolts to join the wires together in a rats nest. Several years later - as the electronics bug bit - a matched pair of OC72 were added to give proper loudspeaker volume.

Chemistry sets were common - but usually we went to the local chemist and bought the chemicals we wanted. They also sold thin glass tubes which our school chemistry lessons had taught us how to blow or stretch.

Our astronomy lessons came from collecting the Brooke Bond tea cards on the subject. The night skies were less polluted then and most people seemed to know the prominent constellations.

It is interesting how often our local charity shop has chemistry sets, electrical sets, telescopes, even Meccano kits - that have never been opened. With the recent proposals to remove practical work from "A" Level science subjects - the current generation seems to be being discouraged from any hands-on experimentation that looks like real engineering and science.

At Christmas the ordinary toyshops no longer have window displays of Meccano ferris wheels with lights - and large scenic layouts of electric trains. In the 1950s austerity years of dim street gas lights and smoke-aided fog - the toyshop windows at Christmas were oases of magical light.

Blue and Yellow Meccano

Sigh. Thanks for making me feel even older. Mine was the green and red version from the 60s. I remember getting highly frustrated trying fit one particular nut onto a bolt. It was only when I peered inside the nut that I saw it hadn't actually had the thread cut into it!

ICF7600D

Mine is still on the bedside and I use it most days - albeit mostly just on FM...

Remember having it in Greece on holiday and listening to the BBC reports on the death of Princess Diana on shortwave

You left out flying models

I too had a Mamod stationary steam engine but, as others have said, once you're run it a few times and you found out that you couldn't really do anything with much with it except watch it run, it got boring. I got much more fun from the clockwork Magic Motor that came with a red and green Meccano No 6 set and let me make tanks and tractors that actually worked.

However, the thing that really got my interest going in designing and building things that could be made to work was model aircraft. Almost every kid I knew at the time made and flew models at some point. Initially control-line models were the thing to have because you could fly them anywhere there was a grass patch 50m square and you couldn't lose them. The favourites among my friends were either a Keilcraft Phantom kit with a Mills 1.3 diesel up front or a Veron Beebug with the smaller Mills 0.75 diesel pulling it. Building and flying them taught you a lot, from operating the engines without getting your fingers hit, through building (and later repairing) the models to eventually learning how to fly them without crashing.

Then, a few years later, the excellent Cox TeeDee glowplug motors appeared - such wonderful precision engineering that running them in consisted of running the engine rich for 30 seconds and then leaning it out and hearing that lovely scream.