Eli Whitney Museum

100 years ago, the world tumbled into The Great War. Now we call it World War I, a conflict that drew Europe and its colonial webs into 4 years of brutal stalemate. 100 years ago, A.C. Gilbert was just launching his toy company in New Haven. He had to step carefully around the shadows of war.

The Riess Collection is a rediscovered window in to the A.C. Gilbert Company of the 1920's. Lithograph labels from boxes of Gilbert 'toys' and trains.

Chances are, anyone who lived long in the New Haven area in Herb’s century, has a Herb story to tell. This is one of those stories.

Alfred Carlton Gilbert graduated from Yale in 1909. Rather than enter the medical career he had prepared for, he chose to follow a childhood passion – magic. That was the beginning of an adventure that made him an American icon.

Perhaps it was destiny that made magnetism as essential a force in A.C. Gilbert's empire of experiments. William Gilbert – a distant ancestor of A. C. – published De Magnete, Magneticisque Corperibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet the Earth), in 1600.

Gilbert's experience in the fourth Olympics is a story of sport, Yale, educational trends, social movements, the Olympics as an institution, politics, and a bold young man who loved to compete.