Cosmo Manufacturing Co.

Cosmo Manufacturing produced small novelty toys and trinkets primarily used as promotional items and prizes, most famously as inserts in Cracker Jack boxes.

Nathan Shure, whose Chicago firm made small cast-metal novelties — including prizes and premiums for the confectionery trade — before it became half of one of America's best-known toy companies.

Cosmo belonged to a Chicago trade that has largely been forgotten: the manufacture of miniature cast-metal novelties by the million, for use as premiums, prizes, charms and confectionery inserts. The work demanded cheap alloys, fast casting and very low unit costs, which is precisely the skill set that small die-cast toys require.

That is why the firm matters. In 1926 Cosmo merged with Dowst Brothers, the Chicago company that had been casting small metal toys on adapted Linotype machinery and had recently begun branding them Tootsietoy. The combined business traded as Dowst Manufacturing and went on to dominate the American cheap die-cast market for decades; the Shure family interest carried forward through Dowst into Strombecker.

So Cosmo did not simply fail in 1926 — it was absorbed. Very little survives that can be firmly attributed to Cosmo alone, both because premium and novelty castings were unmarked by nature and because the company's separate identity disappeared into its successor within a year of the merger.