Etch A Sketch
It's from 1960, before you were born.
- Maker
- Ohio Art Company
- Type
- Drawing toy
- Debuted
- 1960
- Note
- Two knobs, infinite frustration
As an Amazon Associate, OlderThan earns from qualifying purchases.
About
As of 2026, it's 66 years old.
The Etch A Sketch arrived in 1960 as a magic red screen you 'drew' on by twisting two knobs to drag a stylus through aluminum powder — straight lines easy, anything curved nearly impossible, and erasing as simple as shaking the whole thing upside down. It was minimalism before minimalism was cool.
Generations have produced exactly one recognizable shape (a staircase) before giving up and shaking it clean. A handful of artists make genuinely stunning Etch A Sketch masterpieces; the rest of us made a wobbly box and called it a house.
Knob-twisting, shake-to-erase, and gloriously limited, the Etch A Sketch is the toy that turned not being able to draw a circle into a national pastime.
