Charles Plimpton
English toy inventor, businessman
Charles Bird Plimpton (31 October 1894 – 29 December 1948) was an English inventor and businessman. He invented Bayko in 1933, a plastic building model construction toy, and one of the earliest plastic toys to be marketed. He established Plimpton Engineering in Liverpool, England, to manufacture the toy, which was sold across the world for over 30 years.
Biography
Charles Plimpton was born in 1893 in Peckham, London, to John Calvin Plimpton, an American citizen, and Caroline Augusta Plimpton (née Bird). Plimpton's father later moved his family to Liverpool where he established his own company, J.C. Plimpton & Co – Import & Export American Merchants.
Charles Plimpton attended school at Liverpool College. In 1911 he went to the University of Birmingham to study Engineering, but only completed two years and dropped out in 1913. During World War I, Plimpton enlisted as a wireless operator with the Royal Navy and served much of his time on minesweepers.
In 1922 Plimpton married Margaret Audrey, with whom he had two daughters, Anne and Jean. They lived in Wallasey, which was then a part of Cheshire.
“Charles Plimpton” enters the record as english toy inventor, businessman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Charles, Plimpton and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q15053886. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1948, 1933 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Plimpton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.