Strauss Manufacturing Co.

Ferdinand Strauss was a pioneer of the American tin toy industry. Louis Marx learned the toy business working for Strauss before founding his own competing company. Strauss's colorful clockwork toys including Zippo the Climbing Monkey were beloved.

Ferdinand Strauss, an importer and manufacturer whose New York firm was where a young Louis Marx learned the business before leaving to compete with him.

Strauss called itself "the Toy King" before Marx did, and its lithographed tinplate clockwork novelties were the American answer to the German trade. The toys are small, mechanically clever and often comic: Zippo the Climbing Monkey, Ham and Sam the minstrel band, the Yell-O-Taxi, Leaping Lena the shaking car, interurban streetcars and a long list of animated figures.

The company's importance is partly genealogical. Louis Marx worked for Strauss, rose to management, was pushed out, and set up his own company in 1919; he then took Strauss's market with better tooling economics and harder marketing, and eventually acquired the Strauss business itself. Several toys sold as Marx originated as Strauss designs.

Some Strauss subjects, Ham and Sam among them, are racial caricature of a kind that was ordinary in 1920s American popular culture. They are collected as period artefacts and are catalogued under their original names; buyers should know what those names refer to. The company ended in 1940.