A small inventor/toymaker Foucault, presented a toy at Le Concours LEPINE in 1901 a toy called “Mr. Chopinard”.
Picture from the magazin: lectures Modernes 1902. (magazine is from my own collection)
As you can see is this toy the adaptation of Fernand Martin’s “Le Pochard” mounted on a barrel.
Which shows that the recycling of existing toys was easily doable even by outsiders of the company…
If one would find now an model of this Chopinard toy, would it be called a Foucault or a Martin toy?
Most certainly Martin…
Le Pochard on a wine barrel, the picture above is part of a larger image with more toys and technical attributes and found in an old French magazine La Nature from 1902 page 13 with the name: Monsieur Chopinard (a comic French gentleman who appears in a chanson from that time.) This article was about the Concours de Jouets 1901.
Martin probably sold parts and also (almost) complete models to small toy makers / inventors who then made “new” models and produced it in small numbers or offered the production rights for sale at the Lepine competition to the major manufacturers because they themselves had no or little production capacity and no money to produce these toys on a large scale, these were hard times for the little toy makers / inventors.