(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me

Top Fifties & Sixties Gadgets

• The TV Remote Control: Yes, it's a product of the 1950s, however much we may associate it with 1980s videos and the image of Homer Simpson sprawled in his armchair knocking back a can of Duff beer. No longer would you have to rouse yourself from your sedentary position to switch between the two available channels. The 'Lazy Bones' remote was connected by a wire to the TV, but the first ever wireless remote-control was designed by Eugene Polley and known as the 'Flashmatic' – it operated by means of light aimed at photocells. Ultrasonic units took over from 1956 until 1982, when infra-red became the norm

• The Microwave Oven: Percy Spencer, working on active radar sets for defence contractor Raytheon, noticed that a candy-bar in his pocket had started to melt – and saw the application. The patent was filed in 1945, and by the 1950s the Tappan Stove Company introduced the first home microwave oven

• The Cordless Drill: The first Black and Decker cordless drill was brought out in 1961, but it wasn't terribly powerful – only the arrival of nickel-cadmium batteries 20 years later made it a viable proposition at last

• The computer mouse: The first prototype was invented by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English in 1963 at the Stanford Research Institute

• The Moog Synthesiser: Robert Moog's revolutionary analogue sound-manipulator came out in 1964, just a year after BBC Radiophonic Workshop sorceress Delia Derbyshire had worked her magic on the Doctor Who theme tune with old-fashioned tape-splicing methods. The 1967 Monterey Pop festival helped to raise the profile of what would arguably be the most defining and revolutionary instrument of the next 25 years in popular music. A 1960s Moog can sell for over £1,500 in good condition

• The Arpanet: The connection of four separate computers in 1969, which would eventually lead to the Internet revolution of the 1990s and 2000s

Monopoly

The essential: Capitalism for beginners

The empire began: 1934

Current value: Brand new sets for around £13, £40 for a 'nostalgia edition' reproducing the look of the 1930s game. Vintage 1970s editions can be found in reasonable condition for under £6. The Landlord's Game, the forerunner of Monopoly, can sell for £10,000+

Whether you see it as an essential primer in city geography and relative property values, an introduction to a capitalist economy or a way of making a long Sunday afternoon go by more quickly – or, indeed, tiresomely tedious – there is no doubting Monopoly's dominance of the board game arena. Cited by many sources as the bestselling board game ever (the game has sold over 250 million sets worldwide), its appeal lies in its essential simplicity coupled with its versatility, and its ability to produce long, involved, cutthroat contests and bravura displays of ruthlessness.

The game was purportedly invented by salesman Charles Darrow, but it is now accepted that his place in history should be that of one of the game's developers. It is based on The Landlord's Game patented by one Elizabeth Magie as early as 1904. Darrow obtained a copyright for the game in 1933, and this early version featured many of the icons still associated with the game today, such as the big red GO arrow.

The rules of Monopoly are very simple to grasp – essentially, players, represented by metal icons (a car, a hat, a battleship and others) are given a set amount of toy money. They then move round the board in a clockwise direction beginning (in the main UK version) in London's impoverished districts, Old Kent Road and Whitechapel, coloured mud-brown, and ending up in the leafy boulevards of Park Lane and Mayfair, coloured a rich purple, then back to the start – aiming, on the way, to buy properties, represented by cards. Each time a player gets back to the start, he or she acquires another £200 in their personal fortune. Once a player owns a property, he or she can start being a filthy capitalist landlord, ignoring brownfield site regulations and building houses and hotels on the relevant street. And woe betide any other player who lands on a built-up space – because, even though they are just visiting, they are then charged with a whacking great amount of rent.

The aim, a rather callous one in this post-credit-crunch age, is to make your opponent(s) bankrupt. Variations involving sub-prime mortgages and runs on banks have, sadly, not yet made it into the Monopoly canon.

RetroFax

• Fans of Monopoly have played the game in all sorts of weird and wonderful places – including underwater (a diving club in Buffalo, USA in 1983) and inside a lift

• The most expensive Monopoly game was made by Alfred Dunhill. It sold for $25,000 and included gold and silver houses and hotels

• The moustached, cane-wielding, top-hatted icon of the game was originally called Rich Uncle Pennybags – his name was changed to 'Mr Monopoly' in 1998

• Some of the American streets in the original Monopoly no longer exist. Illinois Avenue, for example, was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the 1980s

• Believe it or not, you can also analyse your personality based on your choice of Monopoly counter. Those who favour the Car are supposedly confident and drive a hard bargain. Battleship players are aggressive and see everything as a challenge. The Dog is chosen by players of tenacity and courage. The Boot – experienced and wise. The Iron – neat, tidy and smooth. And the player who chooses the Top Hat aspires to the finer things in life. One has to ask – do people actually get paid to come up with this stuff?

• The shortest possible game of Monopoly (based on the US version) can last just two turns per player. It presumes a great deal of luck on one side and misfortune with the dice and the cards on the other, but it's theoretically possible to be done and dusted in half a minute

• In the 1930s, Waddingtons attempted to cash in on the success of Monopoly with a horse-racing version called Totopoly. Surviving sets can sell for £70

• A handmade Monopoly game by Charles Darrow sold for £40,218 at a US auction in 1992

They Said What?

'I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.' Steven Wright, comedian.

View-Master

The essential: a mini-world in visual stereo!

Viewing began: since 1939, but peak period 1950s–70s

Current value: £10–£15 for a vintage Sawyer's View-Master from the 1960s

Three-dimensional images! We may think of them now as part of a world where James Cameron's Avatar leaps out of a cinema screen at a crowd bedecked in glasses with red-and-blue lenses, but it's perhaps surprising to learn that the principle dates back over 70 years. And it wasn't initially designed as a toy – it was an educational device, and a means of viewing images aimed at tourists.

When Harold Graves, president of Sawyer's Photo Services (a company which had already been established for a couple of decades) met photographer William Gruber, together they came up with an idea for adapting stereoscopic imaging (invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838), which gives the illusion of depth to a 2-D image. The key new element was Kodachrome film, which had just been developed by Eastman Kodak in 1935. After being unveiled at the New York World's Fair in 1939, the View-Master was marketed as an alternative to the postcard. And soon the appeal grew. The model was refined throughout the 1950s, with the Bakelite casing being replaced with plastic in 1962. It was purchased and popularised in the 1960s by the General Aniline and Film Corporation, and the marketing became more focused on a young audience, with images featuring toys and cartoons. The device was subsequently produced by Tyco Toys and is now produced as part of Mattel's Fisher-Price range.

RetroFax

• The United States military found the View-Master very useful, and commissioned viewing reels to help with aircraft identification • View-Master slides have been produced to tie in with many TV shows and films, such as Jurassic Park and Doctor Who. Among the rarest are sets based around the 1966 TV show The Munsters, worth £60–£70, and 1967's Lost in Space, worth £40–£50

• View-Master features in America's National Toy Hall of Fame, which honours toys with longevity

Slinky

The essential: Stair-climbing spring

Slunk into view: 1945

Current value: Most collectable version is the Toy Story Slinky Dog, which can fetch over £40 in excellent condition and boxed. A standard pre-1990s Slinky is hard to find; imitations such as the Magic Spring abound

Another of those toys which have been around for longer than you might think, and whose essential simplicity is its key feature. Invented in wartime by naval engineer Richard James, the Slinky is a helical spring designed to work with gravity which, in a rather beautiful way, can appear to move and re-form itself as it unfurls and descends a flight of stairs with alarming precision. James was apparently inspired by the way a torsion spring fell off a ship's deck and flipped over.

Despite the Slinky being developed in the middle of the Second World War – when one would have thought the need for steel wire was rather pressing elsewhere – military applications were not immediately apparent. However, the US Army apparently used them as radio antennae in the Vietnam War.

RetroFax

• When first unveiled at Gimbel's department store in Philadelphia, USA, Slinky sold out of its entire stock of 400 in just over an hour

• Slinky is made of 80 feet of compressed steel wire, wound into 98 coils

• Richard James departed for Bolivia to work for a religious group in the early 1960s, and died in 1974

• The toy declined in popularity at the start of the 1960s, but has had resurgences since

• In 1985, the Slinky was one of several toys whose behaviour in weightless conditions was studied by the crew of the Discovery shuttle. Astronaut Dr Margaret Rhea Seddon reported that the Slinky lost its 'slinkiness' and instead 'sort of drooped'

• Slinky was named by Betty James, toymaker and Richard's wife, who decided that the word best described the sound of the spring unfurling. Betty James died at the age of 90 in 2008

• In the 1990s, the Slinky Dog gave the toy another lease of life, its popularity boosted further by the film Toy Story. By this time over 200 million Slinkys had been made and distributed worldwide

They Said What?

'So many children can't have expensive toys, and I feel a real obligation to them. I'm appalled when I go Christmas shopping and $60 to $80 for a toy is nothing. With 16 grandchildren you can go into the national debt.' Betty James in 1996, on her desire to create an affordable toy.

Scrabble

The essential: Ultimate strategic word-game

First tile played: 1948

Current value: Some vintage 1970s sets in excellent condition and boxed, upwards of £40. A battered 1950s edition can be picked up for as little as £5. The 50th anniversary edition, £35. A rarity is the red-and-gold-boxed Television Scrabble, specially produced for the contestants on the Television Scrabble TV show hosted by Alan Coren in the 1980s – boxed and unopened, this can be worth £35–£40

The classic word game – contributor to family education and improvement, provider of hours of lexical entertainment and vocabulary-expanding fun. Actually, who are we trying to kid? Along with Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble is probably a major contributor to family rows and disagreements. Stories abound of 'Scrabble moments' when Auntie Vera insisted on pluralising WHEAT, or squabbles over JOE being a proper noun, or AWOL being an acronym acceptable as a word in its own right.

The idea is very simple. Tiles marked with letters are placed on a board, crossword-style, to make words – the letters score according to how rare they are, so the various Es and Os are worth one point each while the Z, for example, nets a whole 10 points and the Holy Grail of Scrabble is to try and find a Triple Letter Score on which to put what Shakespeare called the 'unnecessary letter', especially if it can be made to work both vertically and horizontally and therefore score twice.

The game was invented by a young architect called Alfred Mosher Butts. Originally called Lexico, then Criss-Cross Words, Scrabble was conceived with the idea of combining the skills from various types of entertainment: dice-rolling games, number games, crossword puzzles and other word games, and 'move' games like chess. It incorporates elements of all of these, yet still manages to maintain its own unique character. Alfred Butts assigned values to the letters in the alphabet, and determined their availability in the box, by making a study of the front page of the New York Times. He didn't automatically provide more of the most popular letters, though. The S, one of the most common letters in the English language, was restricted to four tiles to make the formation of plurals more difficult. The pluralisation of a singular noun is still one of Scrabble players' most popular and cunning ways of forming a vertical word against a horizontal.

Staple of rainy days and Mondays in the decades before home computing, Scrabble has taken on a new lease of life online, proving especially popular with Facebook users. The transition wasn't easy, though, as Hasbro, owners of the trademark in the US and Canada, suppressed the use of Scrabble imitation Scrabulous, which was the first Facebook version of the game to take off – even though it was re-igniting interest in the game and helping sales.

RetroFax

• Scrabble is taken very seriously throughout the world, with an annual World Scrabble Championship held every second year since 1991. Players are not penalised for scoring with swear words and 'inappropriate' language – any word in the Scrabble Dictionary is allowed

• The youngest National Champion was Allan Saldanha, who was just 15 in 1993 when he won the title – a few years previously, Allan had been the youngest contestant on Channel 4's words-and-numbers game show Countdown

• Several attempts have been made to bring the game to the small screen, most notably the oddly slow-moving 1980s version on Channel 4, hosted by Alan Coren, and the more upbeat Challenge TV incarnation presented by Toby Anstis and Eamonn Holmes. An American TV version ran from 1984 to 1990

• Various editions of Scrabble exist throughout the world – to date, in over 30 languages. There is no X, Q or Z in the Welsh version, Scrabble yn Gymraeg, as they are not needed. However, it does have a double L and double F

• The Z, highest scoring letter in the English version, is worth only one point in the Polish edition ... as one might expect

• ETAERIO is the seven-letter word you're most likely to get on the rack (and using all seven letters scores you a 50-point bonus or 'bingo'). It means 'an aggregate cluster of fruit derived from a single flower'

• The game, first trademarked as Scrabble in 1948, celebrated its 50th birthday in 1998 by staging the world's biggest game – literally – at Wembley Stadium, on a board measuring 900 square metres and with tiles the size of small patios

• In the United States, Scrabble is not the most popular board game of all. The joys of its weasly wordplay are still second fiddle to the capitalist cut-and-thrust of the other rainy Sunday standby, Monopoly.

The Transistor Radio

The essential: Cheap and portable, the original iPod

Patent and prototype: 1948

Current value: hugely variable – see below! An original Regency model in good condition can fetch $1,000 (around £650)

Anyone studying the 1950s and looking for a symbol of that new invention, the 'teenager', could do worse than choose the transistor radio. Hip, compact and beautiful, the 1950s transistor radio sports, it has been noted, many design features in common with today's iPods – similar size, sci-fi-influenced design, portability, with the central wheel a prominent feature. Of course, in the transistor the wheel was a tuning knob, and a gateway to the many radio stations out there playing the hit songs of the day.

The first ever radios, made with valve receivers and popularised from the 1920s onwards, were seen as expensive. But transistors democratised the technology by making it cheap, just as other technical innovations have done over the years. The first commercial transistor radio appeared in 1954, six years after the patent, and it was called the Regency TR-1 – it was a collaboration between Texas Instruments, who made the prototype, and a small Indianapolis-based company called Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA Corporation, later Regency Electronics) who developed and marketed it. The visionary Executive Vice-President of Texas instruments, Pat Haggerty, aimed to produce hundreds of thousands of transistor radios. The revolutionary invention was launched in New York and Los Angeles by on October 18th 1954, in time to take advantage of Christmas sales.