But if you're an experienced player, you probably have a half-dozen slang terms to describe the sphere in front of you. To the layman, a marble is just a marble. It enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1970s, and continues to be played today, but it has never been able to reclaim its title as a childhood institution. Marbles were really popular throughout the early part of the 20th century, but World War II rationing, plus the utter chaos of the European Theatre, put a damper on the sport. Watch marble production on 'How It's Made': The design worked so well, it has remained essentially unchanged and is still the most common way to make marbles today. A 'slug' of molten glass was placed between the cylinders on one end and it was gradually carried down to the opposite side, simultaneously cooled and shaped into a sphere by the rolling grooves. His machine consisted of a screw conveyor made up of two grooved cylinders spun next to each other. In 1915, mass production of glass marbles began, thanks to a machine invented by Akron's M.F. Other businessmen jumped on the bandwagon and Akron soon became the marble capital of late-19th century America. Mass production made marbles much cheaper to make, allowing the price to drop from about one penny each to a bag of 30 marbles for the same price. With around 350 employees, Dyke's factory was cranking out five train carloads, or about one million marbles, every day.

An operator would roll a wooden paddle over all the clay balls at once, with a back-and-forth and slightly lateral motion, creating six marbles. Mass production became possible in 1884, when Sam Dyke of Akron, Ohio, created a wooden block with six grooves, each of which held a lump of clay. The earliest examples were simply stones that had been polished smooth by a running river, but for centuries artisans made them by hand from clay, stone, or glass. They've been found in the ashes of Pompeii and in the tombs of ancient Egyptians, and they were played with by Native American tribes, so it's impossible to pin down a precise country of origin. Rolling Through Historyīelieve it or not, but no one really knows where marbles originated. If you're among the many people who have no idea what any of that means, stick around as we explore the history of marbles. If you're the type of mibster that has knuckled down with a taw and shot for an aggie duck, then you already know quite a bit about mibs.

When u lose your marbles