IDEMA Spielzeugfabriek was established in Germany after the war.
Traditionally, construction sets were of two types of which one used a skeleton to which panels were fixed (e.g. the British BAYCO) and the other used connecting bricks. Bricks could be made of wood, hard rubber, paper pulp, stone dust, and other materials. The stone bricks were often used in Germany and were obtained by aggregating stone dust with a glue or other congregating medium. Often they looked like small bricks with protuberances on top and recessions underneath, so as to be connectable and improve the stability of walls built with them.
According to sources [1] in 1946 the German inventor Josef Dehm started tinkering with the idea of using Bakelite as a manufacturing material for toy bricks similar to the stone bricks of pre-war times. A trial run was distributed in 1949 to a few kindergartens [1] and the system was named IDEMA.
Production started in 1950 by subcontracting to Hans Kirchmayer of Diedelsheim, then it was taken by Adolf Beisele in Nussbaum, before Dehm managed to finance his own works in Rinklingen and take up production in 1953, exhibiting his product for the first time at the Nurenberg Toy Fair of 1954. The two former subcontractors entered subsequently the field with their own similar systems, but that is another tale.
Figures 1 and 2 below show a construction box of this early period and a set of the different brick sizes in both colors used. The bricks were made of a Bakelite-like plastic and were not hollow. The middle holes are a feature patented by Dehm to allow a string to be passed through aligned holes, to fasten bricks together. The early system was clearly original.
|