Fernand Martin the rope-jumping girl La Sauteuse De Corde

Produced from 1890
Product number unknown (In the books known to us, this toy has the Martin product number 31 which is not correct, but the correct number has not yet been found)
Hand lacquered
Mechanism: Flywheel
Height approx. 15 cm / 5,9 inches

It is a very ingenious mechanism to create the illusion that she is a Rope-jumping girl.

Here the translation from the French tekst on page 223 from the magazine La Nature 1890 :

SCIENTIFIC TOY the ROPE JUMPER
Here is a toy that we think we will have to present to our readers because of the special skill of the inventors in overcoming the difficulties presented by the problems they had posed.
This toy is a jumper rope whose figure is almost enough to understand the mechanism.
As in most toys of this kind, the amount of work required to operate the toy is borrowed from the vivid power of a steering wheel concealed in the young person’s body, flying at which a high angular velocity is imparted. rolling two turns of string on the button shown at the bottom of the skirt in the figure on the left, and pulling strongly on this string which one lets slip the other end between a finger and the body of the toy, to ensure a tension initial requirement for driving the steering wheel.
The flywheel thus launched friction control two pairs of wheels that come to lean on its axis.
The first pair of wheels, the pair of wheels, infers the toy, whose equilibrium forwards and backwards is ensured by a pair of small gatets.
One of these pebbles can be seen, the one before, in the figure on the right.
The second pair of wheels, placed at the top, has the effect of printing a rotational movement about a horizontal axis to a small tree at the ends of which are fixed the ends of the rope.
This rope, very flexible and very thin, flattens each time it passes in front of the driving wheels that roll over it without their movement being the least bit entangled.
This was the great practical difficulty cleverly solved by Mr. Martin, the inventor and constructor of this interesting and ingenious little apparatus.

This toy is not very big, it has a total height of approximately 15cm / 6 inch
It is hand painted, like the most toys in that period.

During my collection years, I only came across this toy in five different color versions.

• dress in yellow with the details in red
• dress in blue with the details in red
• dress in green with the details in red
• dress in red with the details in blue
• dress in light blue with the details in gold-colored

This light blue with the details in gold-colored was included in the gift that was donated through Fernand Martin in 1908 to the Musée des arts and Métiers in Paris (see my earlier blog :Two Fernand Martin variants of the Pousse-Pousse Annamite )

It is marked on the bottom, see photo above.
I think this is one of the nicest pieces from the first period of Fernand Martin.
Nice action and a very ingenious design.
It is only rarely offered so very rare.