A.C. Gilbert was an American toy company founded in 1909 in Westville, Connecticut by Alfred Carlton Gilbert. The company first provided magic supplies, but is best known for introducing the erector set which Gilbert invented in 1911.

From the 1930s on Gilbert made microscopes (1935), and in 1938, Gilbert purchased American Flyer, a manufacturer of toy trains. Gilbert re-designed the entire product line, which was successful for decades, competing with Lionel and Marx.

From the early 1930s to the late 1950s A. C. Gilbert Company was the largest employer in New Haven with more than 5000 workers in 3 shifts at its Sound Street Manufacturing facility.

In the late 1930s the company expanded to produce home house products and small appliances including, mixers, milk shake machines, toasters, stoves and ovens, and washers. During the Second World War Gilbert produced equipment for military aircraft. After the war Gilbert trasnformed Aircraft trim tab motors to us in the A. C. Gilbert Whirlbeater, with self-extinguishing cellulose acetate housing. This was the first hand-held device to gain Underwriter approval.

Gilbert produced innovative plastics toys. It introduced a model airplane line which included a wide variety of plastic types of preocesses: blow-molded wings and molded fuselages of high-impact methyl mathacrylate, injection molded nylon propeller, ABS propeller spinners and linear PE gas tanks; fuel lines of flexible vinyl tubing; windshields of butyrate and whells of vinyl plastisol.

The company struggled after its founder's death in 1961, and the family sold its shares in 1967.

See:

A.C. Gilbert Company

"All about A.C. Gilbert" website

DuBois, J. Harry. Plastics History U.S.A. (Boston: Cahners,1972), 279.

"Plane has blow-molded acrylic wing," Modern Plastics, 39 (June 1962), 95.

"Plastics dominant in toys," Modern Plastics, 39 (May 1962), 234.