Good morning Hank, it’s Tuesday. So important inventions are
almost always created not by individuals, but by broad
collaborations involving lots of people building knowledge
and systems. Like Thomas Edison did not invent the
lightbulb and it’s common these days to hear “well
actually, someone else invented the lightbulb.” But no, the solution
to wrongly worshiping individuals is not to change which individuals
you worship. The truth is, no one invented the lightbulb.
It was invented over many decades of collaboration and
competition among many people. And that is almost always what
drives human changes. But the work individuals do still matters
as do the choices they make. And to explore how both systems
and individuals can matter at the same time, I would like to introduce
you to this lady, Margarette Steiff, who invented the stuffed animal. Sort of.
Margarette Steiff was born in 1847 in a small town in southern Germany.
Before she was 2 years old, she contracted polio, which paralyzed
her legs and caused profound weakness in her right arm.
Margarette and her two sisters went to school until they were
teenagers which was quite uncommon for their time, and then
they enrolled in a sewing school which was somewhat less uncommon.
Due to her limited use of her right hand, Margarette really
struggled with sewing. She would later write that her sisters
“were so capable and talented, where I seemed to make every
mistake that was possible to make. They gave up hoping that I would
produce anything worthwhile with my needle.”
It is here that Margarette’s life intersects with two much larger trends.
First, a musical instrument called the zither was becoming very popular in
Europe; like, this was around the time that Johan Strauss II was writing
solos explicitly for the zither. Now Margarette’s muscle weakness made
it difficult to play the violin or the piano, but she had a wonderful ear for music,
and she could play the zither by bracing her right hand against the instrument.
She became an accomplished zither player, and then started teaching
zither lessons and used the money from those lessons to purchase
the very first sewing machine that her little town in Germany had
ever seen. She refashioned the machine so that she could work
primarily with her left hand, and suddenly, she could sew despite her
disability. At this point she was in her mid 20s, and Margarette began
a successful tailoring business with her sisters. But she loved fashion
and it was a little bit of a bummer just to be like tailoring pants all day
long. So she began sewing and selling ready-made clothing, especially
these underskirts made with felt, a soft textile that had made its way to
Europe via central Asia. Her clothing became so successful that she
eventually opened up a factory and branched out into women’s dresses
and children’s coats, all made out of felt which was so soft and cuddly and
warm. So by now, Margarette is in her early 30s and to keep track of fashions,
she subscribed to all these different magazines and newspapers that print
patterns of clothing and other stuff that you can sew. And one day in
1879 she’s looking through a magazine and comes across a pattern called,
“elephant of cloth.” Margarette later wrote, “felt was the ideal material for
this toy, and the filling would be of the finest lamb’s wool.” She was big on
quality, often saying “only the best is good enough for children.” These initial
felt elephants were quite small. They resembled and were often used as
pin cushions. Margarette mostly made them for friends and family, she
only sold 8 of them in 1880. But pretty soon she was making more stuffed
animals, often working from patterns she would find in magazines. She made
donkeys and dogs and lions and bears, even parrots. Again though,
most of these designs were not invented by Margarette, they came from
places that published patterns. What Margarette saw, was that lots
of people lacked the time or the resources or the expertise to make their own stuffed
animals, so she would do the work for you and probably better than you could do it.
And soon, a stuffed animal from Steiff became a popular children’s gift because
they were relatively cheap and also because they were sturdy, especially
compared to the porcelin dolls that were the most popular proper play thing at the time.
By 1890, 11 years after she made that first elephant, Margarette Steiff’s company
was selling over 5,000 stuffed animals per year. She then expanded
internationally and things really took off just after the turn of the 20th century
with the introduction of the first Steiff Teddy Bear. By 1907 when Margarette
was 60, her company employed over 2,000 people and was making over a
million stuffed animals per year. Margarette died just a couple years
later of pneumonia but the company survived, in fact over 100 years
later they still make some of the cutest and cuddliest stuffed animals around.
Like the rest of us, Margarette Steiff was a product of circumstance. Had
her parents lacked the resources to educate their daughters, or had the
sewing machine not been invented, or had the zither not become popular,
or had she not developed an expertise with felt, or had those magazines not
published those animal patterns, she would not today be remembered as the
inventor of the stuffed animal. And of course, in all those alternate histories,
stuffed animals probably would have still been invented around the same time
just as lightbulbs would still exist even if Edison and Tesla never had.
Considering the circumstances and systems that drive historical change
helps us to understand why those changes occured, but it is also a window
into understanding who ends up in a position to benefit from those changes.
Part of what makes the history of stuffed animals so important is, I think,
that it’s one of the few places where a disabled woman in 19th century Europe
could succeed in business. But at the same time, we must make space for individual choices
that also help drive historical change. Margarette Steiff saw the potential for
ready-made soft toys for children. She made excellent ones, and as her business grew,
she was very careful to hire extremely talented people. She attracted and retained
those employees in part by treating them much better than most other businesses
at the time. Her focus on quality control ensured that Steiff stuffed animals looked
and felt better than their competitors. And her tremendous self-belief helped
her persevere when her society and even her friends doubted her ability to
become a musician or to sew or to run a large corporation. So here’s to
perseverance and to stuffed animals. Thanks Margarette.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.