Merkur Construction Set

The Merkur set is a box of flat steel parts: strips, angle girders, plates and brackets, each painted red, blue, green or yellow and punched with round holes exactly one centimetre apart. The parts are joined with small M3.5 screws and nuts, and the larger sets add axles, gears, pulleys and wheels. With a screwdriver and a spanner a child can build a crane, a lorry or a bridge, take it apart and build something else.

It comes from Police nad Metují, a small town in north-east Bohemia. In 1920 Jaroslav Vancl founded a firm there called Inventor and made a metal construction set of the same name, its pieces held together with hooks. Screws and nuts arrived about 1925, and the maker dates the name Merkur, and the painted parts, to 1930. Unlike Meccano, which used inch measurements, Merkur was metric from the start.

The firm survived the war and then lost its owner: in 1950 it was forced into liquidation, and Vancl worked as a labourer in his own factory until he was eighty. The set did not stop. Under state enterprises it was exported across Europe, sold as Constructo or Build-O in English-speaking countries and as Tecc in the Netherlands. In 1961 the chemist Otto Wichterle used Merkur parts, with a bicycle dynamo, to build the machine that cast the first soft contact lenses.

The hard years came after 1989. The privatised firm stalled, its machines stood idle and it was declared bankrupt in 1994; production restarted under Jaromír Kříž, whose company became Merkur Toys in 2003. The town now has a Merkur museum within sight of the factory. The sets sold today, such as Merkur 5, use the same centimetre grid and the same screws and nuts, so that a part made decades ago still fits a model built from a new box.