Ted Talk — Fearless Girl
A crippling disease was cured by a remarkable antidote
On July 24, 1847, in a small Bavarian village, eighteen-month-old Margarete Steiff woke up with a high fever. She told her father, “I can’t move my legs.” It was the first symptom of poliomyelitis. Unlike Covid-19, polio primarily strikes children under five, leading to irreversible paralysis and often death. But very much like Covid-19. the virus enters the system when an infected person coughs or sneezes or due to waste contamination. According to a national public poll from the 1950s, Americans feared polio second only to the atomic bomb.
The diagnosis meant Margarete Steiff would walk on crutches from age two until she could ride in a wheelchair, bedridden and immobile for the rest of her days. There was no cure, and as Dr. Jonas Salk would not discover the vaccine until one hundred years later in 1952, Steiff was doomed to a life of misery.
The problem was that no one asked Margarete.
Steiff had a child’s habit of fearlessness. It is why they run on the ice to the consternation of worried parents or pick up candy from the ground. When Margarete’s siblings went off to school, she didn’t realize there was no way she could be with them. They pulled her in a hay cart. Once she arrived, a neighbor picked her up and climbed the stairs to the second floor. After graduating, Steiff enrolled in sewing school at age 17, the equivalent of taking a computer class today, working with the latest technology. In time, she became one of the most talented seamstresses in the village, and it became a mark of distinction to wear a dress by Margarete Steiff.
Habit: Fearlessness
In 1874, her dressmaking business took off. Her father built a small studio, and she bought her own sewing machine. Ordinarily, the machine’s flywheel is placed on the right, but Margarete was paralyzed on that side, so she reversed it and put it on the left. Her cousin’s husband, Adolf Glatz, admired her work and suggested she should start a company. In a short time, she had 15 employees.
On December 8, 1879, while reading a craft magazine, Modenwelt or Fashion World in German, she saw a pattern for a stuffed animal, a small baby elephant, and made it into a pincushion (Steiff still sells them). Sales took off. Only she later found buyers were using them as pet toys for their children.
By 1880, Margarete sold 5,000 stuffed elephants. She designed other animals. Monkeys, donkeys, horses, camels, mice, dogs, cats, hares, and giraffes became part of her collection. In her catalog, Margarete gave the company its motto:
“For children…only the best is good enough!”
Among the employees was Steiff's nephew, Richard, who attended art school in Stuttgart and taken design courses in England. His fine animal sketches were the basis of many Steiff toys. Then, in 1902, he used mohair for the covering, making the first children’s toy that could be called ‘cuddly.’
The problem, it was a bear, which in Germany were not considered warm and fuzzy. However, Steiff allowed him to present his bears at the Leipzig toy fair. An American buyer recognized their popularity for children. In 1906, he bought 3,000 Steiff bears and marketed them in the United States as a Teddy Bear, named after Theodore Roosevelt*.
According to Steiff.com, “Morris Michtom a Russian-born businessman and inventor saw the drawing of Roosevelt and came up with a “Teddy” bear to go along with the story and the cartoon. This became an immediate success and Michtom founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co and started to produce the teddy bear on a larger scale.
At roughly the same time in Germany, the Steiff firm, unaware of Michtom’s teddy bear, produced a stuffed bear from Richard Steiff’s designs. While attending the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart, Richard Steiff would regularly visit the nearby Nill’scher Zoo. He spent most of his time sketching inhabitants of the bear enclosure and in the summer of 1902, after one of his visits to the Zoo, a prototype teddy bear called, Steiff Bär was produced.
The Steiff bear was born.”
Takeaways
By 1907, Steiff produced a million Teddy Bears.
The Steiff company still produces the Teddy Bear and about 20,000 other animal designs. You can read more about the company on the Steiff website.
The Teddy Bear
The famed children’s toy named after U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (who loathed being called “Teddy”) comes from a story about the president on a hunting trip. In 1902, he was in Mississippi on a bear hunt when hunting partners tied one to a tree and suggested Roosevelt shoot it. Roosevelt refused. He said it was unsportsmanlike. When the story broke, political cartoonists had a field day poking fun at Roosevelt — giving him the nickname Teddy Bear.
