Steph

Awww. Good job.

Like why did they pay Christensen so much for his patent? 0_o And how did I get the idea that he made such great bearings so efficiently? Oh well, he got the money, we got the marbles, and I had a magical bike ride beside my lake.

Zounds!

I know ball bearings existed before his patent. But I thought his process was considered a quantum leap up from the older versions. More reliably round, lower cost, and possibly better physical integrity. Do you have reason to believe that his improvement/variation was not employed in manufacturing ball bearings?

The money he made from the ball bearing patent allowed him to retire from his previous profession and start his marble business. Now that would have been an interesting series of thoughts and discussions ... following how Martin came up with the idea of going into marbles and making the marbles in a way that no one else had ever done before.

I am riding my bike home tonight, alongside Lake Michigan. At night, it is like a time machine and I think about the people who lived and worked beside this massive body of water 100 or more years ago. But since I am going by bike I tried to conjure up a circa 1900 version ... and I thought of the circa 1900 ball bearings somewhere in the bike .... And I heard myself say, "Thank you, Mr. Christensen." Because M. F. Christensen revolutionized the manufacture of ball bearings before he applied his genius to the rounding of glass. Okay, not so funny. Lol. But it amused me. 😜

Fun river finds. Nice imperial display! Welcome to our happy band!

Thinking Akro corkscrew here.

I am trying to make out whether this marble has seams like a Peltier or if it's a swirl that just happened to fold this way. If it is a swirl and if it is vintage then I will say Alley.

One vote for Peltier.

I would be a wild plum tree in some slightly remote location where whoever knew my location felt that I was their own secret treasure.

They were called imitation agates.

All the Benningtons I know of are German. Imported to the U.S. in the mid 1800's to early 1900's.

What a sweet group.

oooh

Cute!

It's too easy for me. Killing Me Softly, Roberta Flack. And the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. The list is easy for me because I didn't listen to much music as a kid. But I spent my 17th birthday up on a mountain playing The Sound of Music on my walkman. My brother introduced me to more music when I was almost 20 and he when he went against our parents' orders and set up a stereo in his bedroom and dug out their old records. But that's past the "kid" cutoff

With some marbles, the ribbons easily make one think of an equator. I snipped these pictures out of another thread. If I had to take the pictures fresh, I would have turned them so that the equator ran horizontally. But I'm still going to says these have equators even though the equator is running up and down. Hope that helps.

@carolk, I think contacting Brian Bowden would be a good move.

These look Vitro to me. If I had to make a second choice it would be Akro. But I'm sticking with Vitro.

Hard for me to recognize the red and white as particularly a Canadian example but probably! I particularly like the ones in two nonwhite colors which can be matched to mushroom marble shades. Anyway, an example of something Canada seemed to import more of than we did.

I just stumbled across a lovely and sadly serious book. https://www.amazon.com/Idriss-His-Marble-Rene-Gouichoux/dp/1635921325 Preview: Idriss and His Marble - Google Books

I just rechecked Google Books to see if they would give me a better look at Volume 26. They didn't. But they give us Volume 27, 1911. And there's some good MFC stuff in there. Bookseller & Stationer and Office Equipment Journal - Google Books So, yeah, that's one way that Canadians got some American marbles. Maybe we could find some Argentinian marbles in such ads as well. But my brain is full so I will save the search for another day or let someone else have the fun.

Found what I was looking for. Not an ad exactly, but something to drum up business in Canada. Back when Google would give you "snippets" of books that they couldn't give you the full text of, I assembled these snippets into a mostly complete article about MFC in a Canadian trade journal.

There are also those transitionals which are most often seen in Canadian lots. I'm not aware of Canadian marbles makers so they had to do a lot of importing to meet the needs of the kids. Some came from the U.S. but not all. The earliest Canadian import ad I remember was from MFC. I just went down a rabbit hole trying to find it. Will try to stay focused and find it after I finish fixing up that last bit of rabbit hole I found myself in.