Tippco

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Logo of the company "Tippco"

Tippco or Tipp & Co. was a German manufacturer of tin toys that existed in Nuremberg from 1912 to 1971 .

history

1912 to 1932

In 1912 Mr. Carstens and Mrs. Tipp founded the company; The namesake of the company, however, left her shares to Philipp Ullmann in the same year, who replaced them as a partner and managed the company alone from 1918. In 1919 Carstens left the company entirely. Ullmann, who had good connections to large department stores around the world, remained the sole owner until 1933. The Tippco toys produced under his management in the 1920s were predominantly vehicles, including models of limousines , road rollers , tractors , motorcycles , racing cars , racetracks , caterpillars , buses and trucks . In addition, the company also produced mechanical tin figures, carousels and toy trains with clockwork (so-called floor runners ). A Tippco catalog from the 1930s listed around 160 company products. The best-known objects of this time were an open omnibus, which appeared for the first time in 1928 and was powered by a spiral spring, and a 41 cm long limousine with a pug as a hood ornament . Other types of vehicles from that year had electric lights or electric searchlights . The fire engine and buses from Tippco were equipped with figures that were either folded from sheet metal or made from mass by O. & M. Hausser . The vehicles were of high quality in terms of lithography as well as mortising and lashing of the tinplate, and mostly had clockwork drives.

In the course of the global economic crisis , however, the company went bankrupt in 1932 .

time of the nationalsocialism

  • Tippco motorcycles

  • Model TCO-58, 1950s

  • Model 587 from 1950

  • TCO 59, 1950

  • Police motorcycle from 1960

After the National Socialist seizure of power , the Jew Philipp Ullmann fled to England in 1933 , where he and his colleague Arthur Katz began making toys in a workshop provided by the Bassett-Lowke toy company in Northampton and using the profits to support other Jewish refugees. He named his new company Mettoy , which became known in 1956 as Corgi Toys .

As his successor at Tippco, the former director of the toy company Bing Ernst Horn took over the management of the company. Tippco now mainly produced war and propaganda toys and grew to become the largest manufacturer of tin toys in Nuremberg. Amongst the many services included chain and half-track vehicles , anti-aircraft guns , the " Eva-brown car," guns and army cars , antiaircraft cars and armored cars . The best-known model of this time was the 23 cm long, black so-called "Wagen des Führers" (a Mercedes-Benz 770K ), which was manufactured from 1936 to the end of the war in 1945 and equipped with silver flashing tin fittings, a cardan shaft , rubber tires and turnable front wheels was.

With the opening of a first section of the Reichsautobahn in 1935, Tippco brought out its tinny version of an expressway a year later, with bridges, straights, curves, junctions, a gas station and associated cars, including the KdF car . The “Reichsautobahn” could be expanded as required and was available with a clockwork drive or in a much more expensive electric version.

Between around 1935 and 1939, Tippco produced a motorcycle that featured Mickey and Minnie Mouse , but the item was not licensed by Disney .

Although metal was needed as a raw material for war purposes, Tippco was able to continue to produce toys during the Second World War , while other tin toy manufacturers had to cease operations or switch to the production of war goods .

post war period

After the end of the war, the previous manager, Horn, was dismissed and the company was returned to the Ullmann family, who had been expropriated in 1933. This initially put the family member Dr. Eddmeier as company manager; from 1948 on, Ullmann ran the toy company with his son Henry.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Tippco manufactured numerous commercial vehicles such as dump trucks , tractors , road rollers, excavators and cranes , with which the company oriented itself towards the reconstruction of destroyed cities and the associated everyday street scene. The new range also included logistics vehicles such as Postbuses, Coca-Cola delivery vans, milk trucks and gasoline trucks. In addition to the non-military vehicles of the prewar years, which continued to be produced in a similar form, motorcycles and scooters as well as ships , airplanes , coaches and American road cruisers were added. Motorways continued to be an important pillar, whereby the systems of different manufacturers were often compatible with each other, so that they could be played with models from the Tippco, Huki or Technofix brands at the same time. Models of Shell - gas stations and BP - parking garage complete the offer.

Like many other tin toy manufacturers, Tippco also missed the development of plastic toys, especially by Japanese manufacturers, so that Henry Ullmann had to close the Tippco company in 1971.

literature

  • Rudger Huber: Tipp & Co. Largest tin toy manufacturer in Nuremberg after 1932. Tümmel, 2003, ISBN 3-921590-96-5 , 271 pp.
  • Paolo Rampini: The Golden Book of Toycars 1900–1980. Edizioni Paolo Rampini, Milano 2004.

Web links

Commons : Tippco  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f The story of Tipp & Co. In :ammlung-sammler.de
  2. ↑ a b Tip & Co - the real toy story . In: Antiques Trade Gazette of November 7, 2012.
  3. ↑ Tippco WWII Models. In: DFW Elite Toy Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
  4. ↑ Mickey and Minnie Riding a Motorcycle, a mythical 1930s Toy by Tippco, Signed TCO In: Antique Toy World Magazine from November 2017.
  5. ↑ Tippco. In: Virtual Toy Museum from the 1950s to 1970s