page_title: Marble (toy)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Marble (toy) / History
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Enfants jouant aux jeux de noix. Détail d'un sarcophage d'enfant, vers 275-300 ap. J.-C.. Musée du Vatican, gallerie Pio Clementino
context_page_description: A marble is a small spherical toy often made from glass, clay, steel, plastic, or agate. These balls vary in size. Most commonly, they are about 13 mm in diameter, but they may range from less than 1 mm to over 8 cm, while some art glass marbles for display purposes are over 30 cm wide. Marbles can be used for a variety of games called marbles. They are often collected, both for nostalgia and for their aesthetic colors. In the North of England the objects and the game are called "taws", with larger taws being called bottle washers after the use of a marble in Codd-neck bottles, which were often collected for play. These toys can be used to make marble runs, a form of art, or they can be used in marble races, a type of race using marbles.
context_section_description: In the early twentieth century, small balls of stone from about 2500 BCE, identified by archaeologists as marbles, were found by excavation near Mohenjo-daro.  Marbles are often mentioned in Roman literature, as in Ovid's poem Nux (which mentions playing the game with walnuts), and there are many examples of marbles from excavations of sites associated with Chaldeans of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. They were commonly made of clay, stone or glass. Marbles arrived in Britain, imported from the Low Countries, during the medieval era.
  In 1503 the town council of Nuremberg, Germany, limited the playing of marble games to a meadow outside the town.
  It is unknown where marbles were first manufactured. A German glassblower invented marble scissors, a device for making marbles, in 1846. Ceramic marbles entered inexpensive mass production in the 1870s.
  The game has become popular throughout the US and other countries. The first mass-produced toy marbles (clay) made in the US were made in Akron, Ohio, by S. C. Dyke, in the early 1890s.  Some of the first US-produced glass marbles were also made in Akron, by James Harvey Leighton. In 1903, Martin Frederick Christensen—also of Akron, Ohio—made the first machine-made glass marbles on his patented machine.  His company, The M. F. Christensen & Son Co., manufactured millions of toy and industrial glass marbles until they ceased operations in 1917.  The next US company to enter the glass marble market was Akro Agate.  This company was started by Akronites in 1911, but located in Clarksburg, West Virginia.  Today, there are only two American-based toy marble manufacturers: Jabo Vitro in Reno, Ohio, and Marble King, in Paden City, West Virginia.
caption: Roman children playing with nuts, child sarcophagi circa 270–300. Museum Pio Clementino, Vatican
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