Construction set:American Plastic Bricks Set No. 71

Two brothers-in-law, Hal Elliot and Sam Goss Jr., founded the Halsam Products Company in 1917 to mass produce wooden toys. They derived the company name by combining their own first names, they located the business on the northside of Chicago. For more than 20 years, the company produced wooden building blocks, alphabet blocks, and domino and checkers game pieces. In the late 1930s, the company patented a process for manufacturing interlocking wooden bricks that used studs and sockets to hold bricks together. By the 1940s, the company offered American Plastic Bricks made from the injection mold process�many years before Lego blocks arrived in the United States in the early 1960s.