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I first encountered a Bontempi Air Organ when I went to visit some relatives at Christmas. It would have been the late seventies or very early eighties, I forget exactly how old I was. My cousin had been given one as a present and we spent part of the afternoon fiddling about with it.
It was a big orange plastic affair, with a decent sized main keyboard and a bank of big chunky buttons on the left hand side. Pressing the keys on the keyboard made a strange humming sound at the desired pitch, whilst pressing the chunky buttons produced a chord, although at the time I thought a chord was a piece of thick string so what relevance these buttons had was completely lost on me.
The keys on the keyboard were all labelled, though with numbers rather than letters as you might have expected. The organ came with a song book that used these numbers to tell you how to play a tune. Whilst perhaps a simpler way of learning to play, ultimately the numbers were probably a bad idea as you’d only need to relearn the proper musical notation when you progressed on to a “proper” instrument.
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Now, I’m by no means claiming that the Yo-yo was solely a toy of the 1980s. Indeed, in it’s current form as a toy it dates back until at least the 1920s, and records date it back to being a hunters weapon in the Phillipines during the 16th century, and there are even examples of Yo-yo like objects being used in ancient Greece, dating back to 500BC!
Major Morgan was a toy that my sister received for Christmas one year, but which both she, myself and my Mum and Dad all really enjoyed playing with.
If, like me, you desperately, desperately wanted a 
For a long time as a child I was quite puzzled by exactly what Top Trumps was. Apart from the slightly giggle worthy name (trump being a childish word for the passing of wind) I wasn’t sure why I had what appeared to be a pack of playing cards that just had a lot of different pictures and a load of numbers on.
Here’s another entry into my list of toys that I asked Santa for, but he sadly didn’t bring. Tin Can Alley was a little shooting gallery toy, where you had a plastic rifle that fired a beam of light at a target, which when hit flipped a little imitation plastic drinks can off a wooden wall, made of plastic of course.
, which ditches the light rifle in favour of a capital Y shaped stick and a piece of elastic. Not quite the same, is it.
It isn’t certain when the Newton’s Cradle was actually invented, but it was probably in the late 1960’s. Whilst named after Sir Isaac Newton, he certainly had nothing to do with its actual creation, other than through discovering gravity and his work on understanding the laws of physics of course.
I’ve spoken previously about my love for 
