#1059 RONSON - RONSON REPEATER (Around 1922)

Ronson is, in principle, not a toy manufacturing company. They are world-wide known for making cigarette lighters, being one of the most important manufacturers by quality and market share.

My father collects gasoline lighters and he bought this one by mistake, thinking it was actually a lighter, but it is not. It is a toy gun that works with the same powderstrip that some kind of lighters also use. It produces a red flash and a soft sound and it seems to be the predecessor of the guns I knew as a kid which worked with plastic powder caps, and which action figure collectors may know from Thunder Punch He-Man from the masters of the Universe.

It is a very old gun, I have seen marked it in professional auction sites as mid-30s, but I have also found newspapers adds from 1922 or 1926, highlighting that it is completely harmless. The price in 1922 was 25 cents of a dollar, and you could get 1.000 shots for 1 more cent. For some reason, this product (and other similar ones) were broadly advertised on the newspapers, a simple internet search revealed dozens of pages like the following.

I can imagine, it was a great success at the time (the advertising says, they sold 100,000 a week before they started a national advertising campaign for it), there must be millions of them still around that have survived until today. So, it is not a complete rarity, but it is still around 100 years old. This makes it one of the two oldest toys presented in this blog so far. Despite the age, they are not expensive to find today.

Back to the product, the gun is completely made of metal and painted/lacked in black. The metal casting increases the detail level and it is also used to mark it as a Ronson product. My gun is still in a good shape, although the paint has been scratched (and is now partially lost) when playing with it. At the time there were no restrictions on toy guns, and, for example, the tip of it did not have to be painted red, so it really looks like a real gun. Other models I have seen in the Internet are in better shape.

 The body of the gun is marked with patent indications, as you can see in the next picture.

 

I didn´t have the chance so far to test it with the appropriate powder caps, as they are very rare nowadays, but it fits well in my hand. For adults, it looks like one of those lady guns that often appear in detective movies from the 1950s or before, which were much smaller than the male models.

This was one of the original boxes in which it was sold (picture taken from invaluable.com)

FACTS and FIGURES:

• Name: RONSON REPEATER
• Year: Around 1922
• Company: Ronson / The Art Metal Works (U.S.A.)
• Size: Around 14 cm