He built a bizarre faux castle with drawbridge and moat in Bel Air, where he had a dozen college students trading room and board for estate grounds upkeep/party waiters, etc - and so he installed 144 telephones throughout The Castle and grounds.
The entire phone system was switched through a highly sophisticated communications system that he bought as surplus from a U.S. Navy destroyer and reengineered.
For a short while, he held 300 parties a year
He had a 18 car collection, and owned a vintage 1935 REO fire engine that he would load with party guests and drive around town, and to the Playboy Club where their respective social secretaries arranged a meet and greet, resulting in Hefner and Ryan teaming up for charity events around Hollywood/Beverly Hills/LA
Ryan went to Yale College, where he was active in the Pistol Club, and the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He served in the Pacific for a short time during World War II and in 1946 returned to Yale, where he was known as an “engineering genius.”
With a degree from Yale and having studied at Harvard, Jack worked for Raytheon during the early 50s / Cold War, helping to design the ground-to-air Hawk missile and the air-to-air Sparrow III missile, both of which were ordered by the Pentagon.
In 1955, Ryan joined Mattel, by getting a deal where he got 1.5% of the gross on all the toys he designed for them.
Even though he was never an employee of Mattel, he was their head of R&D. Not only did he do the mechanical design of the toys, he studied how children interacted with them. That’s because he was a real engineer, not just a tinkerer, and that means being systematic. He set up play areas with prototypes and had psychologists evaluate them. This became another reason for Mattel’s success.
Jack invented the Hot Wheels car suspension, the bearings, and the plastic wheels. Unlike Matchbox, Ryan put plastic wheels on the cars with a little give for traction and needle bearings for smooth motion
He also came out with the orange track system that let kids build raceways, and invented the battery-powered accelerator (the Supercharger) that would shove the cars along. Mattel sold six billion Hot Wheels cars in their first 50 years, from 1968 to 2018.
He devised a coffee cup that would keep beverages at a constant temperature (probably using a phase change of sodium acetate), and a camera that could develop its own film.
Ryan later engineered the voice mechanism for Chatty Cathy, the first mass-produced talking doll, revolutionizing interactive play for children. He invented the rocking horse with moving legs. He also helped create Hot Wheels, applying automotive and aerospace engineering to design miniature cars with unprecedented speed, style, and performance.
His ideas on blending technical precision with imaginative play were later preserved by Stanford University, where his "Design Philosophy" is archived.
Evidence of his "space-aged savvy" can be seen in the designs of many of the toys he created for the Mattel line. For instance, the V-RROOM! X-15 https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2019/09/did-you-ever-hear-of-this-mattel-x-15.html which was named after the North American X-15 rocket-powered aircraft that were made for the USAF, the NASA, and the USN.
His name also appears on the patent documents of the V-RROOM! bicycles of the 1960s as well as the V-RROOM! toy engines that simulated real motorcycle engine sounds.
He married Zsa Zsa Gabor for a year, 75-76, but near the divorce, disassembled her Rolls-Royce in attempt to make her a custom limousine and, according to court records, refused to put it back together again.
https://www.facebook.com/DreamHouseJackRyan/posts/i-asked-chatgpt-for-help-what-do-you-think/1074045853936982/
Jesse, This is without a doubt the best article that you have ever posted in my opinion! This will be hard to top. Carry On Sir!
ReplyDeletewow! Thank you!
DeleteThis is fabulous. I never knew of the man. What a brilliant mind as his the researcher of this history!
ReplyDeletetom, I didn't either... here's how weird things get before I make a post... I was looking through a gallery a couple days ago, about celebs at airports, in order to see if there were some cool vintage planes.
DeleteOne of the photos was of Zsa Zsa and someone named Jack Ryan, and that made me wonder if he was related to Ryan Airplanes.
Make sense to me, so I looked him up in Chat GPT, and it said, he invented the Supercharger to speed Hot Wheels along the orange track.
That blew my mind!
SO I dug into this, because wow, that's cool to post the name of the guy who created the Hot Wheels booster, then I instantly learn, was the creator and patent holder for Barbie. Damn, that's really top shelf credits for a bio. Plus, Married Zsa Zsa. That's a hoot.
Then, right away, the article said he had a vintage fire truck! Now, that's just cool... and then I learned all the rest.
Bingo, 3 hours of chasing links to find out what kind of fire engine.
I love that he tore apart her Rolls Royce, and wouldn't put it together.
And he helped make the missiles at Raytheon? Amazing.
👍👍
DeleteJesse, this post is brilliant! Well done, Sir! I translated it to Hungarian as most of my audience does not speak English, and posted the translation without the pictures in my blog's Facebook Group with the link to this post. No pictures, so folks will click over to see them, at least I asked them to do that. 8-)
ReplyDeletethank you! I didn't know any of this until I researched this post!
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