Joshua Lionel Cowen

American toy train manufacturer

• Born: August 25, 1877
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 8, 1965
• Place of death: Palm Beach, Florida

Cowen did not invent the toy train, electric or otherwise, but his Lionel electric toy trains set the standard in the toy train market during the twentieth century and are a leading collectible of the twenty-first century.

Primary field: Manufacturing

Primary invention: Lionel electric toy trains

Early Life

Joshua Lionel Cowen was born Joshua Lionel Cohen, but no biographer knows with certainty why he changed his name in 1910. Some have speculated that it was to avoid the widespread anti-Semitism in the American toy-making industry at that time, although Cowen never attempted to conceal his Jewish heritage. He was the eighth of nine children of Hyman Nathan and Rebecca Kantrowitz Cohen, who had immigrated to the United States shortly after the American Civil War. Cowen’s father manufactured cloth caps, employing several workers, and later expanded into real estate and jewelry. The family was comfortable but not wealthy.

Mechanical devices fascinated Cowen, who built his first toy train at the age of seven when he attached a small steam engine to a wooden locomotive he had built himself. Unfortunately, the engine exploded and damaged the wallpaper in his family’s kitchen. Cowen attended Elementary School Number One in lower Manhattan and the Peter Cooper Institute for high school, where he studied technical subjects. He entered the City College of New York in 1893 but quickly dropped out. He then enrolled at Columbia University but left after one semester.

Cowen got his first job at the age of fourteen working in a trade magazine office and worked at dry-cell battery manufacturer Henner and Anderson from 1896 to 1897. Then he assembled battery-powered lamps for the Acme Electric Lamp Company.

Cowen met Cecelia Liberman in 1902 and married her in 1904. They had two children, Lawrence and Isabel. Cecelia died in 1946, and Cowen married Lillian Appel Herman three years later.

Life’s Work

Cowen filed his first patent in 1899 for an ignition device for photographer’s flash powder. The igniter used dry-cell batteries to heat a wire fuse. The U.S. Navy contracted with him to build twenty-four thousand of the devices to use as detonators for mines. Cowen filed his second patent in 1900 for an electric explosive fuse that consisted of a cardboard tube packed with a flammable chemical through which wires passed to provide the heat for ignition.

Cowen and a partner formed the Lionel Manufacturing Company in 1900 with the intention of selling small electric devices. In 1901, Cowen invented a battery-powered portable electric fan. Unfortunately, it circulated air poorly. However, Cowen used the fan’s motor to power his first electric train, the Electric Express. Essentially a cigar box on wheels, it was sold not as a toy but rather as a department store window advertisement. To everyone’s surprise, the store’s customers were more interested in the train than what it was advertising, so the store ordered more for resale. Cowen’s second train, the City Hall Park, appeared in 1902, the same year as the first Lionel catalog. The City Hall Park was the first switch to allow figure-eight track configurations and the first accessory, a two-foot-long suspension bridge. By 1906, he was marketing the trains exclusively as toys. Annual sales grew from $22,000 in 1907 to $839,000 in 1921. In 1918, the Lionel Corporation was formed with Cowen at the head, but from then on he spent most of his time on marketing rather than inventing.

During World War I, Lionel manufactured compasses and other navigational equipment, but he returned to making toys after Germany surrendered. In 1929, Cowen bought control of Ives, one of his leading competitors, and intended to take early retirement. However, the Great Depression forced a change of plans. First, the stock market crash reduced the funds available for his retirement. Second, Lionel’s sales declined for the first time, from $2.2 million in 1929 to $1.9 million in 1930, and in 1931 Lionel lost money for the first time. By 1934, Lionel had to go into receivership, although Cowen remained as head of the corporation. Finally, Cowen was a member of the board of directors of the Bank of the United States, which failed in 1930, and New York’s state superintendent of banks required him to pay $850,000 out of his own money to make restitution to account holders.

Lionel returned to profitability in 1934 with two products. First, it licensed Mickey and Minnie Mouse from Walt Disney for a windup handcar. Lionel sold 253,000 of the one-dollar toys by Christmas and took orders for an additional 100,000 that were delivered in 1935. The other product was the Union Pacific M-10000 train, which retailed for $19.50 and became the best-selling Lionel train up to that time. Lionel came out of receivership in 1935 and went public in 1937.

Lionel manufactured compasses, navigational instruments, and percussion primers during World War II. Although the corporation manufactured no toy trains from 1942 to 1945, sales rose to $7.2 million in 1943 from military contracts alone. After the war, Cowen passed responsibility for day-to-day operations to his son, Lawrence, but stayed on as chairman of the board. In 1946, sales reached $10 million a year; they peaked at $32.9 million in 1953, when Lionel was the largest toy manufacturer in the world. Two-thirds of the toy trains sold in the United States and 62 percent of those in foreign countries were Lionel trains. However, annual sales dropped to $14.4 million by 1958, because the toy market changed. Most American households now owned a television, and airplanes and cars had overtaken trains as the most popular toys for boys. While Lionel manufactured both kinds of toys, it was not a leader in either category.

Lionel attempted to diversify, but it consistently guessed wrong in choosing new products, including an electric cattle guard, a toy chemistry set, a toy construction set, fishing reels, and a 3-D camera. The last product lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, because the 3-D camera market turned out to be a fad, and the fishing reels, while initially profitable, eventually lost market share to inexpensive Japanese imports. Under pressure from stockholders, Cowen resigned as chairman of Lionel in 1958 and sold his Lionel shares in 1959.

Impact

The U.S. Postal Service included the 1929 Lionel catalog cover in its 1998 Celebrate the Century series of stamps. In 1999, the A&E cable channel produced a show about the top ten toys of the twentieth century in which it ranked Lionel toy trains as number four, behind the yo-yo, crayons, and Barbie dolls.

Cowen’s marketing had the negative impact of reinforcing sexual stereotypes, because he marketed trains exclusively to boys. One of the few toys for girls that Lionel ever manufactured was an operational electric range so that girls could learn to become housewives. In 1957, Lionel finally attempted to market a train to girls, called the Lady Lionel, but its pastel colors, including a pink locomotive, did not appeal to girls any more than it did to boys and contributed to Cowen’s departure. So few sets were sold that they are especially valuable in the twenty-first century as collectibles.

Lionel trains are still being manufactured in the twenty-first century, but it is a completely different market. Toy trains, which can cost more than $1,000, are mostly owned by adult hobbyists rather than preadolescent boys. The Train Collectors Association, founded in 1954, boasts of a membership of more than thirty thousand. Classic Toy Trains, the leading magazine of the hobby, has a circulation of seventy thousand and found from a year 2000 survey of subscribers that their average age was fifty-four. Richard Kughn, who owned Lionel from 1986 to 1996, was a typical hobbyist in that he remembered receiving a Lionel train for Christmas when he was nine years old in 1938. In other words, the twenty-first century market for toy trains is a niche, rather than a mass, market.

Bibliography

Carp, Roger. The Art of Lionel Trains: Toy Trains and American Dreams. Waukesha, Wis.: Kalmbach, 2003. An illustrated history of Lionel catalogs and print advertising that occasionally points out the sexual stereotyping in Cowen’s marketing philosophy.

Hollander, Ron. All Aboard! The Story of Joshua Lionel Cowen and His Lionel Train Company. 1981. Rev. ed. New York: Workman, 2000. Illustrated biography of Cowen and a history of the Lionel Corporation. Includes many sidebars, photographs of Lionel trains, information on Cowen’s competitors, and commentary on the state of the toy and model train market as of 2000.

Kelly, Jim. “MR News: One Hundred Years of Lionel Trains.” Model Railroader 67, no. 1 (January, 2000): 56. An appreciation of Cowen on the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Lionel Corporation.

McKerrel, Mac. “Keeping Track of Santa.” The Business Journal 20, no. 50 (December 8, 2000): 66. A middle-aged man recollects receiving a Lionel train for Christmas when he sees a photograph of that particular model.

Sobey, Ed, and Woody Sobey. The Way Toys Work: The Science Behind the Magic 8 Ball, Etch a Sketch, Boomerang, and More. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008. One of the toys described and analyzed is the electric toy train.

Souter, Gerry, and Janet Souter. Lionel: America’s Favorite Toy Trains. Osceola, Wis.: MBI Publishing, 2000. Illustrated history of Lionel trains and their competitors up to 2000. Includes many photographs and sidebars and much biographical information on Cowen.

Watson, Bruce. The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made: The Life and Times of A. C. Gilbert. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Biography of the inventor of the Erector Set and one of Cowen’s top competitors.