The Birth of the Teddy Bear

On 14 November 1902, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States of America was invited to take time out after some hard political bargaining over the disputed boundaries between the states of Mississippi and Louisiana. His hosts took him on a hunting trip to an area near Little Sunflower River in Mississippi.

But after 3 days no bears were found and it was feared the trip would be a failure. On finding an old injured bear, the guides tied it to a tree and invited Mr Roosevelt to shoot it. The President refused, calling it "unsportsmanlike".

Clifford Berryman, a political cartoonist, heard this story and immortalized the incident with a drawing that was published in the Washington Post on 16th November 1902. Berryman pictured Roosevelt, his gun before him with the butt resting on the ground and his back to the animal, gesturing his refusal to take the shot. Written across the lower part of the cartoon were the words "Drawing the line in Mississippi," which coupled the hunting incident to the political dispute which had taken him to the area in the first place.

New York candy shop keeper Morris Michtom used the cartoon as a guide to design a pattern for a toy bear and this cuddly bruin was placed in his store window under the name of "Teddy's Bear". It became such an overnight success that Mr Michtom closed his store and founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company which remains one of the biggest toy companies in the world today.

Almost at the same time in Germany Richard Steiff saw a troup of performing bears which gave him an idea to create a toy bear that was jointed in a similar way in which dolls were. Richard sketched the bears and gave the drawings to his aunt, Margarete Steiff, a renowned toy maker who subsequently designed a toy bear. The new jointed bear appeared for the first time at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. At first, no one seemed interested but then, as the story goes, while Richard was packing up his stand at the end of the fair, an American buyer approached him, and upon seeing the bear, immediately ordered several thousand. This was the beginning of the Steiff teddy bears we now all know and love and hundreds of toy manufactures soon followed suit.

Theodore Roosevelt was a great lover of animals and their natural environments. He was one of the very first to preserve parks and recreational spaces in his country. He made sure these places would be around for his children and everyone’s children to see forever.

Little did he know that, on that day over a hundred years ago, he would also become the inspiration for one of the biggest selling toys of all time – this was the birth of the Teddy Bear!