Nuremberg banned marble games to a meadow in 1503
Marbles are small spheres of glass, clay, steel, plastic, or stone, usually 0.5–3.5 cm across, for games, runs, and art. Indus Valley digs yielded possible marble balls from about 2500 BCE; Romans wrote about them. A German glassblower’s 1846 scissors industrialized glass orbs.
The English name comes from Nuremberg in that era, when mills and quarries polished chips of marble, agate, alabaster, limestone and even brass into balls. Marbles had already reached Britain from the Low Countries in the Middle Ages, examples turn up at Chaldean and ancient Egyptian sites, and Ovid's poem Nux describes a similar game played with walnuts.
Nobody knows where marbles were first manufactured. Cheap ceramic ones arrived in the 1870s. In Akron, Ohio, S. C. Dyke made the first American mass-produced clay marbles in the early 1890s and James Harvey Leighton some of the first glass ones, and in 1903 Martin Frederick Christensen built a patented machine that turned out glass marbles by the million until his firm closed in 1917. Akro Agate followed in 1911, and today Marble King in Paden City, West Virginia, is the only American maker left.
In ring taw, or ringer, players flick a larger taw at small marbles inside a drawn circle, trying to knock them out. South Asian kanche starts with a flick toward a hole to decide who goes first, and whoever strikes out the most marbles from the circle wins; in pili goli, players knock marbles into holes dug in the ground.
Every Good Friday since 1932, Tinsley Green in West Sussex has staged a world marbles championship, and a London girl, Ellen Geary, won the first; TIME traced local play back to 1588. Tradition held that the season ran from Ash Wednesday to midday on Good Friday, and playing later brought bad luck. More than 20 teams now enter, and German sides have won several times since 2000. In northern England marbles are taws, and big ones are bottle washers after the marble stoppers of Codd-neck bottles.
Source: Marble (toy)
