Madelman

Selected excerpts from our archive offer more context on this subject. Each reading links to the original article and its sources.

From the Electric Train to Madelman: A Cautious Timeline of Spanish Toys, 1931–1975

Toy timelines often offer a neat sequence of launches, brands, and fashions. The evidence available for this feature calls for a different approach: gathering only the landmarks documented by the cited sources and stating what they do not establish. The result is not intended as a complete history of Spanish toys or as a product catalogue. It is a limited timeline, useful for observing changes in technology, materials, consumption, and cultural representation between 1931 and 1975.

How we look also matters. Madrid’s Del juguete al cielo exhibition proposed connecting displayed toys with their sociological context and, at times, comparing them with photographs of the real object or means of transport. That method prevents us from treating a toy as an isolated miniature: a locomotive, doll, or action figure retains traces of industrial techniques, domestic aspirations, and ways of imagining the world.

The Almassora Toy Museum places the launch of the first electric trains with current transformers, points, automatic brakes, and tunnels in 1931. The wording should be read literally: the source identifies a set of features and a year, but does not specify a maker, model, country of manufacture, or commercial reach. It would therefore be unsound to turn the information into an attribution to a particular brand.

Even so, the landmark matters. Unlike a clockwork toy, the electric train incorporated power, route, and control elements. It does not by itself show how every household played, but it records that railways could enter play through more complex technology. For collecting and documentation, the lesson is straightforward: transformer, track, points, brakes, and tunnels are not simply interchangeable extras; they belong to the historical description of a set.