American Plastic Bricks were a favorite childhood toy of mine.  After collecting several brick sets on eBay and doing lots of research, I was able to piece together the amazing journey of these fine building toys of a bygone era.  I hope this article helps those who collect these sets and those who have them to sell.  Keep in mind that some of the dates mentioned are only estimated guesses based on what I’ve learned from the research.  By the way, this guide is for reference only and copying any part of it is not permitted.

The brick sets were made by The Halsam Products Company of Chicago, and started out as wooden brick sets with no windows or doors.  They were sold in boxes at first, and later (by the 1950’s) in canisters of various sizes. 

First of all, one misconception I’d like to clear up is that Halsam’s American Plastic Bricks (Chicago, USA) were never part of the Lego company (Denmark).  The Lego folks visited the Halsam Company to pave the way to market their products in America and paid Halsam a reported sum of $25,000.00 to do just that.  That is the only connection between the two companies.  American Plastic Bricks should never be referred to as Lego or Pre-Lego.

The Halsam company was formed by two brothers-in-law (Hal Elliott and Sam Goss).  They put their first names together to form the company name.  Up until the early 1940’s, The Halsam Company was known for its wooden checkers, dominoes and alphabet blocks.  The patent papers for the wooden (and later plastic) brick sets are dated June 6, 1939 and were approved on November 11, 1941.  It showed in detail how these various parts would fit together, complete with exact dimensions of the various size pieces, which early on consisted of only 3 variations (the full red brick, the full white brick, and the red half brick).  The gable brick was added soon afterward.  Green roofs of various sizes were also included.

A perforated sheet of stamped paper windows and doors was developed, and made the houses and buildings look more realistic with double and single windows and doors.  There were tabs at the top and bottom that fit snuggly inside each brick.

Next came the advent of injection plastic molding, which enabled Halsam to make their bricks out of plastic.  They created a new division of the company and again used parts of their names (Elliott and Goss) to form Elgo Plastics, Inc.  These sets had plastic bricks and paper windows and doors, soon to be replaced by plastic windows and doors which opened and closed.  It’s my guess that all this went on during the 1940’s even during the war years.  Halsam supported the war effort so wood and plastic were made available.  By 1950, there were new additions to the sets like the garage door and frame.

The earliest manuals for these brick sets (from around 1946) were not exactly manuals.  They were more like tri-fold brochures with only 6 pages, and depicted models built with the early sets in the 60 series.  The 60/P sets indicated plastic.  The models shown were without windows and doors at first.  Those "manuals" were updated later showing the paper windows and doors, then the plastic windows and doors.  After that, the manuals got a makeover with the well-known red brick wall cover before going to a full page vertical format.  The later manuals had a copyright date printed on the inside front page (where the parts lists were found).  This was one sure way of identifying when the manual was printed, but I suspect the same manuals were used for several years at a time - until it was neccessary to update them.  Manuals showing 1953 seem to be most common these days.  There were no parts lists or copyright dates in the earliest manuals, but there were code numbers in small print that seem to indicate a month and year.

Even in sets with plastic windows and doors, the manuals included some examples from the previous booklet still showing the paper windows and doors, but the windows and doors were no longer in full color!  They were blue & white  This was later corrected to show new models with plastic windows & doors.

The earliest plastic windows and doors (1950) can be identified by the fact that they had fewer cross bars (or panes) than the later windows and doors (1956).  A regular sized window, for example, would have one horizontal bar and two window panes.  Later this would become a 4-pane window with one cross bar.  The same design change was applied to the longer windows, first with 3 panes, later with six.  The square picture window had a bar added across the bottom to make the window opening into a rectangle.  The early plastic doors (1950) were two bricks taller than the later diamond door (1956).

About the same time (1953) these American Plastic Bricks were also being sold in Canada.  Eventhough the canisters may have been the same, the parts inside were very different.  First of all, since Canada uses the metric system, the scale of all parts was slightly smaller than their American counterparts, making them incompatible with other American sets.  All plastic parts were more pliable, not rigid.  This made for some rather bent windows.  Designs for the door and the garage door were also different in the Canadian sets.  The other big difference is that all the windows, doors and lintels were made from yellow plastic, not white, although there were other metric sets made with white parts instead of yellow.

The left photo below shows the Canadian parts (yellow) to the left of their American counterparts (white).  The photo on the right shows two houses with the same floor plan.  The house on the left, made with a Canadian set, is slightly smaller than the house on the right, made with an American set of bricks.

Around 1956, Halsam added the word NEW to the blue canisters and introduced the diamond windows and doors.  Other new parts were added around this time, namely flag poles, cupolas, a 7-pane picture window, 2 sizes of glass block windows, and chimney caps in two sizes.  The later manuals had wrap-around flags printed on the inside back page to be cut out and used with the flag poles. After collecting so many sets, I also discovered that there were two versions of the jalousie windows as well.  The first jalousies had 8 window panels, but there were later jalousies with 12 window panels.  Although I can’t place them anywhere specific in the timeline, I do know they were available by 1964.  One more change was the roof design, going from a solid green hexagon embossed roof to a flat, speckled bluish-green shingle roof design.

In 1962, Halsam was bought by Playskool, and the canisters changed from the blue background and an artist rendering of a boy on one side and a girl on the other, to a photograph of two boys playing side by side on a canister with a red background and new lettering.

The next big change was in 1964 when Playskool released American Army Bricks, which were the same parts as before, but with bricks made from green plastic, not red.  The roofs were a cheesy camouflage, no longer a solid color.  I thought it looked odd to have the fancier diamond windows and doors and the 7-pane picture windows in an Army set.  To me the older, simpler window and door designs would have looked more appropriate for barracks, mess halls and towers.  Side Note: 1964 was also the year that Hasbro introduced the world’s first action figure, G.I. Joe.

As the 1960’s ended, so did the simple look of the American Plastic Bricks sets.  The first Playskool sets without the Halsam name came in a canister with a gray background and a red plastic lid.  There were no double-sided illustrations anymore.  The new canisters had definite front and back sides.   There were several variations of the graphics on each Playskool canister. After the gray and white combination, came the red background and white plastic lid and a new numbering scheme (the 500 series).  This change must have been due to the Milton-Bradley Company's purchase of Playskool in 1970.  The name for the Playskool bricks was changed slightly to read American Building Bricks, rather than American Plastic Bricks, and "a Milton-Bradley Company" also appeared on the canisters when the Milton-Bradley Company acquired Playskool.  The last known canisters were printed with a shaded blue background and had lids made from blue plastic. 

Playskool and Milton-Bradley must have been trying to gear the brick sets to younger builders because the added shapes and colors made anything built with them, look less authentic, and more like a toy.  In fact, the models shown in the manuals hardly used lintels or foundations in their designs, often preferring to use jalousie windows or picture windows with no support underneath.  Walls seemed to be a random color palette and didn’t make real sense.  The manuals also showed more and more models of things other than buildings.  There were soldiers, airplanes, animals, tractors, and various other items.  The sets also featured wheels, pulleys and gears.  There was even a new accessory kit available which contained nothing but wheels, pulleys, and gears - unlike the earlier Accessory Kits with an extra garage door and frame, coping bricks and a few windows and doors.

 
The later sets also featured a new roof design of yellow squares, which hardly looked like a "real" roof.  All in all, these brick sets went through four variations of roof patterns over the years - first the green embossed hexagon roof (1940's & 1950's), to the bluish-green shingle roof (1962), to the camouflage roof of the Army sets (1964), to the new "yellow squares" design with white lines (1967).

The last known sets of American Plastic Bricks were made in 1977.  By this time Milton-Bradley had been sold to Hasbro (the Hassenfeld brothers of Rhode Island) and the toy market was changing.  Hasbro discontinued the American Plastic Bricks, and an era had ended.

PARTS LIST

Company & Year
(Set #) Number of Parts (if known)

Halsam 1941
  1 (60/1) 200
  2 (60/2) 400
  3 (60/3) 600
  4 (60/5) 992
Halsam 1942
  5 (60/1P) 200
  6 (60/2P)
  7 (60/3P)
Halsam 1948
  8  (70) 115
  9  (71) 200
10  (72) 290
11  (73) 459
12  (74) 591
13  (75) 902
Halsam 1953
14    (7)   31 - Accessory Set
15  (70) 115
16  (71) 208
17  (72) 290
18  (73) 459
19  (74) 592
20  (75) 902
21 (705) 115
22 (715) 208
23 (725) 290
24 (735) 459
Halsam 1956
25 (745) 592
26 (755) 902
div Playskool 1962
27    (7)  39 - Accessory Set
28 (703) 69
29 (705) 119
30 (715) 173
31 (725) 291
32 (735) 455
33 (745) 585
34 (755) 909
div Playskool 1964
35 (1103) 173 - Army Set
36 (1105) 291 - Army Set
div Playskool 1967
37 (715) 197
38 (725) 329
39 (735) 510
40 (745) 661
div Playskool 1967
41 (748) 109 - Wheels, Pulleys & Gears
42 (750) 208 - Mechanical Accessory Kit
Milton Bradley 1970
43 (540) 402
Hasbro 1977 - Discontinued