Background
Joshua Lionel Cowen was born on August 25, 1880 in New York City, New York, United States. His Jewish immigrant parents were Hyman Nathan Cohen, a hatmaker, and Rebecca Kantrowitz.
(Soft cover with illustrated front board. EDITION NOT STAT...)
Soft cover with illustrated front board. EDITION NOT STATED. Magazine style with illustrations, lists of Lionel trains and prices. 36 pages.
https://www.amazon.com/Lionel-Trains-Market-Prewar-1925-1944/dp/0930543114?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0930543114
Joshua Lionel Cowen was born on August 25, 1880 in New York City, New York, United States. His Jewish immigrant parents were Hyman Nathan Cohen, a hatmaker, and Rebecca Kantrowitz.
Repelled by the efforts of teachers to guide him in uninteresting directions, he began experimenting at home with various explosive mixtures. This dangerous situation led his father to enroll him in supervised laboratory classes at Cooper Union. He later attended classes at the City College of New York and, at sixteen, entered Columbia University's engineering school. One semester of studying bridges and dams was enough because, as Cowen liked to recall, his interest lay in smaller things.
After leaving Columbia he worked at various jobs, staying after hours to tinker with his own projects. The first fruit of Cowen's efforts was a fuse to ignite the magnesium powder used in flash photography. The Navy Department saw merit in this device as a fuse to detonate submarine mines.
Cowen, only eighteen, was called to Washington, where he presented his idea with such skill and confidence that he won a contract to supply fuses that netted him and his one assistant a profit of $12, 000. Cowen's next idea was an early version of the battery-powered flashlight. Bemused by its novelty applications (an illuminated flowerpot was one), he failed to see that the real value of his invention was as a practical hand torch. When the first design failed to work as well as it should, he lost interest and gave the entire rights to his partner, Conrad Hubert, who went on to found the Eveready Flashlight Company. Cowen next fashioned a miniature electric motor that he fastened to a fan blade, but lost interest when the weather turned cool. Always fascinated with miniaturization, he decided to see if he could capture some of the excitement of railroading in a tiny train.
He took the novelty to a local toy store, the proprietor of which was so delighted with it that he ordered a half dozen more. Nationally, the railroads had captured the public's imagination. They were in their most vigorous era, before their strength was sapped by government intervention. "Lionel Lines" trains soon became as much a symbol of Christmas as Santa Claus or the Christmas tree around which the little trains chugged. Little girls continued to hug a new doll on Christmas morning, but boys forsook toy drums to kneel on the floor (often alongside their equally entranced fathers) and operate the new electric train.
In 1907, Cowen introduced a model of the locomotive that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had placed in operation in its Baltimore tunnel, starting a craze for models of electrically propelled locomotives that paralleled the short-lived era of electrification of American railroads. Intelligent product innovation was Cowen's strongest point. In the following years came the transformer (about 1910), which made batteries unnecessary; the sequence switch (1926), which permitted remote control of switch positions and locomotive direction; specialized freight cars, such as cranes, milk cars, and log cars, that actually performed their functions, often by remote control; a completely separate line of two-rail "HO" gauge equipment for the "full scalers, " or serious hobbyists, who promised to become as important as the "high railers" (mostly youngsters, who were the backbone of the "O" gauge, or toy market).
After the war, during which Lionel put toy trains aside for war production contracts including radar equipment, the company moved toward electronic remote-control devices. Founded as a proprietorship in 1901, the company was incorporated as Lionel Manufacturing Company in New Jersey in 1906, and reorganized under New York laws in 1918 as Lionel Corporation. Cowen's other strong point was his thirst for realism in the modeling of toy trains. The anecdotes are endless of how the exact number of rivets in a locomotive tender was determined, how smoke could be made to come from the stack of an engine, and what was involved in duplicating the chugging, puffing noise of a highballing locomotive. While not losing sight of the fact that the trains had to be durable, simple, and safe for their juvenile operators, Cowen never forgot the deep yearning to recreate the real world in miniature that he had known as a boy, and that he knew lay deep in the psyche of all youngsters.
The Great Depression years were lean ones for all toy manufacturers, but Lionel, which had built a large 450, 000-square-foot factory in Irvington, New Jersey, just before World War I, came through safely, while its major competitors, Ives and American Flyer, fell on hard times.
In 1934, Cowen eliminated spring-wound trains, which he had always hated, from his line; and when the Ives Company, whose carelessly designed equipment he considered "inartistic, " fell into bankruptcy the same year, he bought its assets and dropped all its dies into the Connecticut River.
In 1941, Lionel had sales of $4. 25 million, but its great growth came with the population boom of the postwar years.
According to the company, Lionel Lines had laid more than 25, 000 miles of track by 1960, more than any single real railroad.
Even when his work force had grown to 3, 000, his constant physical presence greatly helped labor relations. But as business became more "professionalized, " formal labor relations became a necessity; and when the rising tide of conglomerate mergers washed over American business in the early 1960's, the Cowens lost control of the company.
Cowen died at Palm Beach, Florida.
Cowen co founded Lionel Corporation, a manufacturer of model railroads and toy trains. He built a "locomotive" (hardly more than a wooden flatcar with motor and battery), another flatcar, and a caboose of sorts, all running on a circle of handmade brass track. He also invented the flash-lamp, an early photographer's flash light source.
(Soft cover with illustrated front board. EDITION NOT STAT...)
Cowen was a short, peppery man who seldom contained his impatience with stodginess, even while attending the board meetings of more staid companies of which he was a director.
Cowen married Cecilia Liberman on February 25, 1904; they had two children. Cowen's wife died in 1946, and he married Lillian Herman in November 1949.
