The Mobaco construction system
My grandchildren play with Lego. My children played with Lego. I and my brothers played with Lego. But my mother and my uncle had their childhood before Lego was invented; and they played with Mobaco.
Mobaco was a children’s construction system introduced in the 1920’s. Unlike later systems like Lego or Meccano, it was not based on many small parts you can connect every which way to build almost anything; it had a fairly rigid framework that used large parts to build buildings, and only buildings. The parts were primarily sections of walls, some blank, some with windows or doors in them; which brings to mind prefabricated building techniques used for rapid construction in the real world today. The wall sections, made of thick cardboard stock, were held in place by sliding them between slotted wooden posts; the posts, which came in various lengths, were positioned by sticking them into holes in an even thicker cardboard baseplate.
My mom’s set has survived for almost a century (the lid layout identifies it as a 1929 edition), and the years have treated it well – the box is scuffed, but the contents are good as new. It is the Mobaco set No. 0, the second smallest the company made, sufficient to make small 1- or 2-storey houses, like the one I built for the next photo.
There were larger sets, and the cover of the included manual shows some of their impressive constructions; but the inside pages contain very detailed directions for building a handful of less ambitious edifices. The strips with square holes seen in the diagrams ride on top of each story to connect and align the tops (or middles) of the posts.
This was a simple construction set in today’s terms. You couldn’t build with it a gigantic model of the Death Star (or of a WW1 battleship, I guess), nor were there hundreds of add-on kits with castles, vehicles, dinosaurs and superheroes; but it was quite adequate for developing basic skills while imparting the pleasure of building something with your own hands. The children of the 1920s and 30s must’ve had good fun playing with Mobaco!
Mobaco was manufactured by the Dutch company Moubal between 1924 and 1961. For more information about Moubal and Mobaco – lots and lots of information – check out https://www.mobaco.nl/.