Steph

👍

Thank you.   I never would have guessed the stripeys were so early.  Winnie said that she had a for sure pre-WWII box of marbles with them, but still I couldn't wrap my head around it.  These days my memory is not serving me very well but I will try to make a place for this. 

Wow.  Way to nail down a date.   Gorgeous pictures too.  

Fun find!

Awww.  Good job.

18 hours ago, Shamrock Marbles said:

Things like this create more questions. 😀

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!

2 hours ago, Shamrock Marbles said:

Bearing balls were made long before MFC’s patent.

In fact, there was prior art to his patent. US and foreign.

He may have sold 80% of his patent rights, but can anyone point to a company that used his device successfully in a commercial adventure?

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good story, but the plot has to be rooted in fact.

MFC was NOT the inventor of the bearing ball machine. He just had a variation on the theme.

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?

 

15 hours ago, Fire1981 said:

That’s really cool Steph that that came to you on a bike ride. Heck ! I never knew the ball bearing MFC history. From steal to glass. How cool is that🔥

RAR

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.

     

On 3/10/2025 at 11:03 AM, Royal3 said:

Last time I tried that link it was kaput, unfortunately. The most comprehensive website for identifying contemporary spheres that I currently know of is Brian Bowden’s offering: https://www.pbase.com/bkbowden/marblesforsale&gcmd=add_comment

He may also be very interested in obtaining some of your items. 

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

6 hours ago, DRCtrent said:

Are these the same kind of marble?  Looks like it 

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

9 hours ago, Ric said:

I think I know which transitionals you're talking about (pinched "pontil"?) and I think that many of them have now been attributed to Japan.

 

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.