History
Miniature models of automobiles first appeared as slush cast plaster or iron toys made in the early decades of the 1900s. Tin and pressed steel cars, trucks, and military vehicles followed in the 1930s and 1940s. Casting vehicles in various alloys, usually zinc (called zamac or mazac), also started during these decades and came on strong particularly after World War II.
Post war, the zinc alloy vehicles became ever more popular in Europe in particular. While diecast metal cars were seen in America they were often simple, while plastics also surged and became prominent, even by the mid-1950s. Tin and pressed steel came to Japan, rather late, during the 1950s and 1960s, and that country quickly moved into diecast by the 1970s. Today, China, and other countries of Southeast Asia are the main producers of diecast metal miniature vehicles from European, American, and Japanese companies.
Read more about this topic: Model Car
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)