Teddy Bear
A Classic Looking Teddy Bear…Roosevelt Would Be Proud
I started thinking about how the teddy bear came about. Such a simple creation that looks almost antiquated compared to a hot new Playstation 3 these days, but you would be surprised just how important the teddy bear has actually been.
In 2002, the teddy bear celebrated its 100th Birthday. Actually, i would have thought this would have been a lot longer. Only a 106 years old? Seems strange. I am surprised people way back in the 1700s didn’t coin the teddy bear name. It so iconic, even to this day, that it actually seems quite young when you think about it.
DID YOU KNOW?
The teddy bear is younger than the electric light, the telephone and the motor car? Yep. Now how weird is that?
The teddy bear was invented almost simultaneously in the US and in Germany, but it was the US that gave it its name. The name came about when Brooklyn based shopkeepers Morris and Rose Mitchum made a soft toy in the form of a bear and named it “Teddy’s Bear”, displaying it in the shop window with a copy of a cartoon. The cartoon depicted an image of a bear tied to a tree, which had been a sketch created after Theodore Roosevelt had been out shooting. He failed to make a killing, so his hosts found a bear and tied it to a tree. Roosevelt exclaimed “spare the bear” and the rest is history.
The US went bear mad and Roosevelt had a very effective and rather quirky political mascot!
However, let us not forget that the teddy bear invention came about in the US and Germany at the same time. Over in Germany, a disabled German seamstress with a soft toy factory in Giengen had added a soft plush bear to the Steiff catalogue and sold 3,000 to America in 1903. Between 1903 and the First World War Steiff sold literally millions of bears, with their trademark button in the left ear, to the United States, Germany and Britain, as the teddy bear overtook the diabolo as the latest toy craze.
(Source: http://www.theteddybearmuseum.com/history.htm)
So, there you have it. Once warring countries were in fact joint inventors of the famous teddy bear.
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt
You can read more about Roosevelt here
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