BB Guns Might Have Been ‘Dillies,’
Instead Of ‘Daisies’

In 1885, the Markham Air Rifle Company introduced two toy air rifles. Although made almost entirely of wood, they had remarkable accuracy and power.

Charles Hamilton was a watch and clock repairman who had invented a self-controlled windmill in his spare time. After seeing Markham’s wooden rifles, he headed for his workshop where he soon came up with a prototype of a toy air rifle made of metal.

He took his new invention to the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company, who were marketing his windmill. It is said that the company’s general manager looked it over and exclaimed, “Boy, that’s a daisy!” And thus was born and named the Daisy BB gun.

The first full year of production for this toy gun was 1888, and 86,000 were sold. By 1895, the company apparently recognized that wind was not the power of the immediate future and the toy was selling so well that it changed its name to the Daisy Manufacturing Company. By 1929, they had eliminated all toy-gun-making competitors within the United States.

The company was always astute at marketing its products. In 1934, in an early display of the power of merchandising tie-ins, American kids by the millions were zapping each other with their own Buck Rogers space pistol.

Later in the 1930s, Daisy latched onto a comic strip character who first appeared as Bronc Peeler, and then evolved into Red Ryder. Red never developed into a first-class cartoon hero, but he became known to a whole generation of kids as the cowboy with the Daisy rifle. This was the first attempt to create a Western rifle and it was tremendously successful.

The Daisy toy that set all records was introduced in 1953: the No. 960 Noisemaker. It was a BB gun that didn’t shoot anything, It looked, felt, worked and sounded like a BB gun, but it shot nothing. They were retailed through the S.S. Kresge Co. for $1.95 and it was the best-selling toy of 1953.

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Mercury Mirrors Not Very Stable

A late 17th century process for making a looking glass, or “mirror,” was by silvering glass. A sheet of tin was laid on a backing. It was covered with a layer of mercury (quicksilver) and then with a piece of glass. Pressure was applied to fix the quicksilver to the glass. It was not a very stable arrangement, and the mirroring was easily damaged.

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Curtis Photographed his way through Life

Photographer Asahel Curtis left a wonderful legacy of photographs of the Northwest when he eventually passed away in 1941. He was interested in progress - how towns grew in to cities and how farmland produced crops. However, he was equally interested in the natural beauty of the Northwest and his scenic photos are also treasured by collectors.

Curtis was born in Minnesota in 1874, and moved with his family to Washington when he was 13. His first years in Washington were spent in Port Orchard, but when he was 18, he moved to Seattle to pursue a career in photography.

For most of his working life he remained in Washington, spending only a few years in Alaska, the Yukon and San Francisco in the 1890s.

He produced the Washington State exhibits for the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco and the World’s Fair in New York. He was a staff photographer for a while with the Post Intelligencer and the Seattle Times, and maintained a photography studio in Seattle from 1905 to 1941. His photographs were also used in numerous magazine advertisements, including Sunset and the National Geographic.

He and his family (wife, Florence, and four children) also spent time on the eastern side of the Cascades, where he purchased an apple orchard in 1906. While there, he did photographic work for the railroads. He loved Mount Rainier, and in addition to his thousands of pictures of the mountain, he also climbed it dozens of times and served as a guide. He chaired the Rainier National Park Advisory Committee for many years, and is credited with originating the proposal for a national park on the Olympic Peninsula.

At his death, his negatives, (numbering about 60,000!), along with his albums and business records, were placed in the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma.

Asahel’s older brother, Edward Curtis, was also a well-known photographer. Originally, when Asahel moved to Seattle, he went to work in his brother’s photography studio. They eventually had a falling out over the rights to the photos that Asahel took when he was in the Yukon. Edward specialized in photos of Native Americans and published 20 different volumes containing these photos.

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