Cassagnes invented the Etch A Sketch in 1959. It was marketed by the Ohio Art Co. a year later, and became an instant hit.PAUL TOPLE
'It draws and writes like magic!" says the announcer, in the eager tones of early sixties TV advertising. "No crayons, no chalks, never any mess!"
The key word in that early pitch for the Etch A Sketch was "magic." André Cassagnes, the French electrician who invented the drawing toy in 1959, was on to the magic theme from the start, and when the Ohio Art Co. improved and marketed his design a year later, they kept a translation of his original name – L'Écran magique – as a kind of subtitle on the red frame.
Cassagnes's death at 86 was announced on the weekend. Within a day or two, his Etch A Sketch image, elderly and as white-haired as you can get on a silver-grey screen, was popping up on the Internet – a tribute to the incredible staying power of his mechanical sketch pad.
It got a few lucky boosts, including a cameo in the film Toy Story, and another during the recent presidential campaign, when it became a symbol of political amnesia. Far from seeing that as a wound to the brand, Ohio Art Co. jumped in with a special edition to appeal to both parties – red for Democrats, blue for Republicans, both now on clearance sale.
But it was Cassagnes's magic that kept Etch A Sketch around for half a century, and the magic came in two parts. The first was that his device separated the act of drawing from the direct movement of the hand. The line appeared out there on the screen, while your hands were occupied elsewhere with the very counter-intuitive business of turning knobs. Etch A Sketch made drawing a remote-control operation, like rocketing a dog into space. But it was more physically involving, like throwing your voice while being forced to adopt a new and more difficult way to speak.
This first gimmick separated Etch A Sketch from more intuitive but less successful stylus-based drawing toys, such as Fisher-Price's Magna Doodle, and the Magic Slate. But knobs alone might not have been enough to boost Etch A Sketch sales into the stratosphere (over 100 million units so far). The magic that closed the deal, and keeps on closing it, is the shaking part. Flip the slate over, make like Tito Puente doing the mambo with a pair of maracas, and the pristine silvery surface is restored more cleanly than any erased paper could be. Not only is there no mess, there's no sign that your clumsy marks ever happened.
That's what Etch A Sketch is really about for people like me: the pure reset, the utter extinction of the botched effort, the perfect do-over situation. It's like being Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, getting another chance, and another, to do the same day over, but better. Murray's character sees the eternal second chance as a karmic curse, as it might be on the large scale. On the small, confined to a little screen found under a Christmas tree, it encourages the magical thought that a mistake in life can be completely erased; that time, in a small way, can be shaken back to a starting point.
Some people, of course, see the two white knobs as an invitation to outwit the toy's relentless perpendicular habit. Show off your perfect circle, Etch A Sketch wizard. Copy van Gogh's swirling night skies. "Etch A Sketch art" is almost always an impressive stunt, like building a clipper ship inside a bottle.
The digital age and LCD drawing pads like ImprovElectronics's new Boogie Board only increase Etch A Sketch's retro appeal. Aside from a few shape-changing trysts with Barbie, Mickey Mouse and Homer Simpson, Ohio Art Co. wisely stuck to its first TV-like design. You can even buy it in a replica of the original packaging – another instance of the core Etch A Sketch illusion: that you can go back, with nothing changed, and do it all again.