Tank:Marx Dough Boy Metal Wind Up Tank

Having worked for the Ferdinand Strauss toy company as a young man, Louis Marx gained enough experience to start his own toy company in 1919. By the mid-1920s, the Marx company had established a national reputation creating clever mechanical toys solely for the delight of children. The secret to the Marx's success was in offering a variety of toys similar in make-up to popular or successful toys produced by other companies. Marx, however, varied the toy enough to avoid charges of piracy and undersold the competition. Yearly alterations to his toys kept them in production for decades and thus held down per unit costs. Revenues for the company actually grew during the Great Depression, and they continued to rise in the 1950s and 1960s when Marx based many of its toys on popular television and movie characters.In 1955 Time magazine named Marx "the Toy King."