THE SECRET TOY LAB

Marvin Glass and Associates did not manufacture toys for store shelves.

It manufactured ideas.

Marvin Glass founded the Chicago design firm in 1941 and built a business model that changed how independent inventors worked with large toy companies. His staff conceived mechanisms, built prototypes, secured patents, and licensed finished concepts to manufacturers for fees and royalties.

The distinction is essential. Ideal made Mr. Machine and Mouse Trap. Milton Bradley made Operation and Simon. Marx made Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Hasbro made Lite-Brite. The ideas passed through Marvin Glass and Associates, but the firm did not operate the mass-production factories behind the final boxes.

Glass was born Marvin I. Goldberg in 1914 and changed his surname as an adult. He studied at the University of Chicago and developed a reputation as a brilliant, difficult, restless promoter. Profiles described a chain-smoking workaholic driven by both invention and fear of failure.

The firm’s early years were not an uninterrupted rise. Around 1949, Glass attempted to manufacture a product himself. Quality problems and poor execution left him reportedly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The failure taught him which side of the business he wanted.

Manufacturing required plants, tooling, materials, inventory, distribution, and the risk that unsold products would remain in a warehouse. Licensing allowed Glass to sell creativity while manufacturers carried the larger capital burden.

An early connection with independent inventor Eddy Goldfarb helped clarify the model. Goldfarb brought Glass ideas including a marble-dropping mechanical chicken that became Busy Biddee Chicken. The toy reportedly sold millions. Glass also helped place Goldfarb’s wind-up chattering teeth with a novelty manufacturer.

Their relationship ended in a royalty dispute. Goldfarb moved to California in 1952 and built his own independent design career. He was not a long-term Marvin Glass employee, though later histories sometimes blur the distinction.

Glass assembled a company around specialists. Designers developed play patterns. Engineers made them work repeatedly. Model makers turned sketches into convincing objects. Patent lawyers identified protectable mechanisms. Business staff negotiated presentations, advances, and royalties.

General counsel James F. Coffee, accountant Ernest Sonderling, and patent counsel Robert J. Schneider helped formalize the system. A manufacturer could inspect a working prototype rather than gamble on a description. If the company licensed it, Marvin Glass and Associates received an initial payment and a continuing percentage tied to sales.

The studio treated secrecy as part of its identity.

Its building at 815 North LaSalle Street became famous for recessed or barred windows, locked doors, cameras, intercoms, and prototype vaults. Buyers signed confidentiality promises before seeing new concepts. Some former employees later argued that the fortress image was partly publicity, but the myth served a business purpose. It told manufacturers that the ideas inside were valuable enough to steal.

The first great proof arrived with Mr. Machine.

The transparent wind-up mechanical man reached Ideal Toy Company in 1960. Children could see the gears and take the toy apart. The mechanism, presentation, and personality formed one concept. Ideal president Lionel Weintraub embraced it as a company mascot.

Mr. Machine showed manufacturers what the Glass studio could deliver: a product that explained itself from across the room. The child did not need to hear the complete play pattern. The visible gears promised action.

Anson Isaacson helped build the relationship with Ideal and later became one of the design firm’s managing partners. Gordon Barlow, Burt Meyer, and other creators joined a growing staff whose individual names often disappeared behind the firm logo.

Glass became unusually successful at winning credit. Manufacturers sometimes printed the Marvin Glass and Associates mark on licensed products, a rare acknowledgment for an outside design house. Yet even that logo could obscure the people who made each idea work.

The company’s true creative unit was the team.

A mechanism might begin with one inventor, change through a model maker, acquire a theme from another designer, and receive final development from the manufacturer. Operation, Mouse Trap, and many later hits followed variations of this route.

By the opening of the 1960s, the Chicago studio had created something larger than a workshop. It was a bridge between individual invention and corporate scale.

Inside the locked rooms were no assembly lines.

There were prototypes waiting for someone else to make millions of them.

The firm’s product was not only the prototype. It was the moment a manufacturer understood the prototype. Glass’s teams learned to make an idea legible at a glance. A lever moved, a light flashed, a figure jumped, or a chain reaction completed. The demonstration had to create the same excitement in an executive that the finished toy might later create in a child.

Chicago offered a useful home for that work. The city combined industrial shops, skilled model makers, advertising talent, patent lawyers, and access to major transportation. A design studio could fabricate convincing mechanisms without owning the factories required for national production.

The licensing model distributed risk. A manufacturer could review many ideas and choose only those suited to its catalog. The design house could present concepts to different companies rather than bet its existence on one production line. When a product succeeded, royalties could reward the studio long after the original pitch.

The model also complicated authorship. Teams revised one another’s mechanisms, and manufacturers made changes after licensing. Patents might name particular inventors while company publicity emphasized Marvin Glass. Some creators sold their interests outright; others participated in royalties. A familiar toy could therefore have a designer, a prototype builder, a design-house owner, and a manufacturer, all with different claims to the story.

Glass’s real innovation was making that collaboration repeatable. The studio treated invention as an organized professional practice, with deadlines, testing, model construction, legal protection, and sales. Inspiration remained necessary, but it no longer had to work alone.

That professional discipline became the studio’s hidden product. Manufacturers came back because the next demonstration could be as persuasive as the last, even when the mechanism and audience were entirely different.

IDEAS BUILT AN INDUSTRY

At its height, Marvin Glass and Associates could place one idea in nearly every major toy company’s catalog.

The studio’s business model encouraged variety. It could develop an electronic memory game, a mechanical boxing toy, a light board, a surgical dexterity game, and a stunt motorcycle without rebuilding a factory for each one. Manufacturers selected the concepts that fit their customers and carried them to market.

Mouse Trap became one of the studio’s defining games. Marvin Glass, Gordon Barlow, and Burt Meyer developed the Rube Goldberg-inspired action concept, and Ideal’s Harvey or Hank Kramer helped shape the published version. Players built a chain-reaction machine whose performance mattered more than the simple race around it.

Glass reportedly declined to pay Rube Goldberg for use of his name, so the box did not carry an official Goldberg license. The contraption still made the influence obvious. The game helped establish three-dimensional mechanical action as a mass-market category.

Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots followed through Louis Marx and Company in the mid-1960s. Burt Meyer helped transform an early human-boxer concept into robots after the death of boxer Davey Moore made the original theme uncomfortable. Two players hammered controls until one plastic head sprang upward.

Operation began elsewhere. University of Illinois industrial-design student John Spinello created an electric-probe game called Death Valley. Through a family connection to a Glass model maker, he sold the idea to the studio for $500, a patent credit, and a promised opportunity that did not develop as expected. Milton Bradley staff transformed the theme into humorous surgery and published it in 1965.

The buzzer made failure immediate. A player did not need another person to judge whether the metal probe touched the edge. The circuit enforced the rule.

Lite-Brite used light as the reward. Burt Meyer led the project, with Dalia Verbickas contributing the translucent-material idea and Joseph Burck helping design the toy. Hasbro released it in 1967. Colored pegs pushed through dark paper created glowing pictures, combining pattern, craft, and illumination.

The firm’s catalog kept expanding: Mystery Date, Time Bomb, Hands Down, Toss Across, Which Witch?, Masterpiece, Gnip Gnop, Inchworm, SSP Racers, and the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle all carried Glass connections through different designers and manufacturers.

The studio’s most important late-1970s success was Simon.

Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison encountered Atari’s arcade game Touch Me and saw a good memory pattern trapped inside harsh sound and dull presentation. Working at Marvin Glass and Associates, they created a circular electronic game with four colored lenses, musical tones, and a sequence that grew one step at a time. Lenny Cope programmed it, and Douglas Montague designed the housing.

Milton Bradley launched Simon in 1978 with a famous event at Studio 54. The electronic game became one of the season’s largest hits. It looked futuristic without needing a television and taught players its rules by performing them.

Simon also represented the firm’s recovery after tragedy.

Marvin Glass had suffered a severe stroke and died in January 1974 at age fifty-nine. Anson Isaacson took over as managing partner. On July 27, 1976, electronics specialist Albert Keller entered the LaSalle Street offices and opened fire. He killed Isaacson, partner Joseph Callan, and designer Kathy Dunn, wounded two others, and then killed himself.

Some later retellings wrongly identify the shooter as toy engineer Robert Jeffway. Contemporary Chicago reporting establishes Keller’s identity. Jeffway was an unrelated Massachusetts engineer and student at the time.

The attack devastated a company already adjusting to its founder’s death. Surviving partners selected Jeffrey Breslow as managing partner. The studio continued, and Simon proved that its creative system could produce another blockbuster.

By the mid-1970s, Marvin Glass and Associates employed roughly seventy-five to one hundred designers, engineers, model makers, and support staff. Secondary accounts estimate millions of dollars in annual royalties from products generating far larger retail sales.

Its scale changed Chicago. Inventors, model makers, patent specialists, and manufacturers gathered around the ecosystem Glass created. Employees learned how to present a toy in a few seconds, protect the core idea, and design for mass-production limits even when their own company would never operate the line.

The model also contained a permanent tension. The firm logo could receive credit while an individual inventor received little. A $500 prototype sale might produce a brand worth millions. Royalty-sharing, employment agreements, and patent assignments determined who benefited.

Marvin Glass and Associates made invention into an industry.

It could not guarantee that every inventor would share equally in the success.

Operation became the clearest example of that tension. John Spinello developed the electrified dexterity concept while studying industrial design. Marvin Glass’s firm bought the prototype for $500 and placed it with Milton Bradley, which adapted the design into the hospital game released in 1965. Spinello’s idea became famous, but the original agreement did not give him continuing royalties.

Simon followed a more collaborative route. Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison developed the electronic memory concept, and programmer Lenny Cope helped realize it. The game was presented through the Glass organization and manufactured by Milton Bradley. Its sequence of colored lights and tones made electronic play understandable without a screen or complicated instructions.

These histories do not reduce Marvin Glass’s contribution. The studio knew how to recognize, improve, protect, and place ideas. Its teams turned mechanisms into products that manufacturers could price and advertise. The mistake is treating the company name as proof that one man personally invented everything attributed to the firm.

The catalog also shows how carefully the designers studied action. Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots converted boxing into two plastic figures with a clear victory signal. Lite-Brite turned light into a reusable picture-making system. Evel Knievel toys transformed a flywheel and ramp into a child-controlled stunt performance. Each product made its central promise visible before a rulebook was read.

That clarity helped the firm define the television era of toys. A commercial had seconds to establish the fantasy and prove that the mechanism worked. Marvin Glass and Associates learned to design the advertisement into the play itself.

CHICAGO KEPT INVENTING

Marvin Glass and Associates dissolved in 1988.

Its ideas did not disappear, and its people did not stop designing.

After Marvin Glass’s death and the 1976 office shooting, Jeffrey Breslow and the remaining partners kept the firm operating. Simon supplied a major comeback. During the 1980s, the studio also worked beyond traditional toys, contributing contract design to Bally/Midway arcade games including Tapper and other projects.

The business around independent invention was changing. Toy companies developed more internal capability, electronic products demanded new expertise, and the patent lives of older Glass mechanisms were expiring. Trademarks and product brands generally belonged to the manufacturers that had licensed them, not to the design house.

When the firm closed, an auction dispersed physical assets. There was no single buyer that became “the new Marvin Glass and Associates.” The corporate story ended, while several alumni created separate firms.

The largest was Breslow, Morrison, Terzian & Associates, founded in May 1988 by Jeffrey Breslow, Howard Morrison, Rouben Terzian, and other former Glass staff. It soon became Big Monster Toys while keeping the initials BMT. The studio carried the Chicago team-design tradition into another generation of licensed inventions.

Big Monster Toys was a creative successor, not a legal continuation. It did not inherit universal ownership of the old firm’s catalog. It built new ideas through many of the same people and methods. BMT ended future operations in November 2023, remaining only to collect royalties and settle continuing business.

Burt Meyer founded Meyer/Glass Design, whose later products included Pretty Pretty Princess and Catch Phrase. Its interactive subsidiary became Day 1 Studios and eventually Wargaming Chicago-Baltimore. Gordon Barlow, Steve Rehkemper, and other alumni established additional design houses.

The phrase “shards of Glass” became an apt description. The old studio broke apart, but every fragment reflected part of its method.

The famous products followed their manufacturers.

Operation and Simon had been Milton Bradley games. Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley in 1984 and continues producing them. Hasbro also controls the Lite-Brite trademark, while Basic Fun! manufactures current versions under license.

Mouse Trap began with Ideal. Ideal moved through CBS, View-Master Ideal, Tyco, and Mattel, while Mouse Trap editions became associated with Milton Bradley and Hasbro. The exact international history depends on territory and product version.

Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots traveled through a different chain. Marx failed, old tooling and rights moved among successor companies, View-Master Ideal revived the concept, Tyco bought View-Master Ideal, and Mattel acquired Tyco in 1997. Mattel became the modern home of the battling robots.

These chains explain why the Glass firm’s name is missing from many current boxes. The design house created and licensed mechanisms. Manufacturers accumulated the trademarks, consumer relationships, and later corporate succession.

Creator credit requires going below the brand.

John Spinello created the prototype that became Operation. Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison designed Simon with programming by Lenny Cope and housing by Douglas Montague. Burt Meyer, Gordon Barlow, Joseph Burck, Dalia Verbickas, and dozens of other staff contributed to products often summarized as “a Marvin Glass invention.”

Marvin Glass deserves credit for building the organization and business model. He does not replace the individuals who designed inside it.

The company’s darkest history also needs accuracy. Albert Keller, not Robert Jeffway, committed the 1976 murders. Anson Isaacson, Joseph Callan, and Kathy Dunn were the people killed. Treating the event as a colorful legend about a secretive toy lab would diminish the victims and repeat a serious identity error.

The more meaningful legacy is professional.

Glass demonstrated that an independent design house could negotiate with multiple manufacturers, protect concepts through patents and secrecy, and earn continuing royalties. The model allowed teams to work across categories without carrying factory risk. It also made Chicago a center for toy invention long after the original firm closed.

Modern toy companies still review prototypes from independent inventors. Designers still build demonstration models, prepare pitch videos, negotiate royalty rates, and decide how much ownership to exchange for access to production and distribution. Every one of those decisions echoes the structure Glass helped normalize.

The toys themselves remain active. Lite-Brite entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2022. Simon still tests memory through light and sound. Operation still punishes an unsteady hand with a buzzer. Mouse Trap still makes players wait for a machine to complete its ridiculous journey.

Marvin Glass and Associates ended as a company.

Chicago kept the workshop.

The windows opened, the alumni formed new studios, and the ideas continued traveling to factories the inventors would never own.

The company’s closing did not end Chicago’s importance to toy invention. Alumni carried its methods into Big Monster Toys, Meyer/Glass Design, Breslow Morrison Terzian, and other studios. They preserved the core practice of building a persuasive prototype and licensing it to a manufacturer with production and retail reach.

The famous products followed their manufacturers and later corporate owners. Hasbro inherited Milton Bradley properties including Operation, Simon, and Lite-Brite. Mattel controls brands associated with makers such as Ideal and Marx. Basic Fun and other licensees have revived classic formats. Those paths belong to individual contracts and acquisitions rather than a single sale of the entire Glass catalog.

The company’s final years were shaped by events larger than product design. Marvin Glass died on January 8, 1974. On July 27, 1976, Albert Keller entered the studio and opened fire, killing Anson Isaacson, Joseph Callan, and Kathy Dunn, wounding two others, and then killing himself. Earlier accounts sometimes misidentified the shooter. The corrected identity matters because tragedy should not be repeated through a convenient error.

The surviving partners continued for another twelve years, proving that the organization had grown beyond its founder. Its 1988 dissolution ended the firm, but not the independent-invention economy it helped establish.

Modern toy shelves still follow the route Glass professionalized: inventor, studio, prototype, pitch, manufacturer, mass market. The company’s name may be absent from the box, yet its business model remains inside the industry.