Long before there were Happy Meals or super hero trading cards, many merchants gave away educational materials along with their products, and kids like me were happy to collect them. You didn’t win anything, and most of these items did nothing but inform. Nonetheless, it was exciting to try and collect them all and fill up whatever book, card, or game board that housed them.
Our local dairy printed the lives of famous inventors on the cardboard plugs that sealed the glass milk bottles. And each time my mom filled up her gas tank at the local Shell station, we received a cheap metal coin featuring one of the United States Presidents. I never did get Calvin Coolidge, but I think I had everyone else. Even some cigarette companies produced educational cards and inserted them with each pack.
However, the images in this installment of Scanning Around with Gene are all from the Swiss company Nestle, who produced a popular series of colorful stamps featuring “The Wonders of the World.” Inserted into chocolate bars were small stamps featuring an image of a famous inventor, location, insect, animal, or natural wonder. Here are several images featuring the building of the Eiffel Tower and the history of man.
From what I can gather, Nestle gave out these stamps from about 1929 through the early 1950s and produced thousands of different images. Hardbound books were available to kids (or interested adults) so they could paste the stamps into the appropriate page and read about the inventions, places, and history the stamps represented. Here are several images celebrating the invention of cinema.
The images here are all from Volume 6, which appeared in 1950 and included series 126 through 149. Each series had 12 stamps, so this book alone contained 228 separate stamps, and the series to that date would have contained 1,788 unique stamps. That’s a lot of chocolate bars. If you wanted to have all the world’s great waterfalls, or the stamp showing the famous Niagara Falls barrel ride by William Hill (pictured here), you had to keep eating.
All of the text is in French, so I’m not sure what Nestle had to say about these images, but I can pretty much guess. Stamps are arranged around common themes, such as famous waterfalls, the invention of television, and the history of X-Rays.
Some of the images are pretty straightforward, like these in the history of printing series.
But others are a little strange to me. These three are from the medicine page; I suppose in 1950 they may have seemed appropriate.
And in the history of radio series, I can understand this odd image of Marconi, but only the French translation could explain why Nestle also included Ali Baba saying “open sesame” in front of a cave.
My favorite stamps seem to indicate the migration of major pests throughout the world. Apparently, we have those pesky Europeans to blame for our rodents, flatworms, and some sort of eel or snake. Probably came over in the shipments of chocolate!
I’m sure lots of Swiss kids learned about the world from the many volumes of Les Merveilles du Monde. But if you ask me, they must have been pretty frightened, too. Maybe that’s why, in addition to producing some of the world’s best chocolate, the Swiss also gave us LSD and Valium.
This article was last modified on May 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 4, 2008
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