Carlisle & Finch
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Carlisle & Finch is a producer of nautical equipment and the inventor of the electric toy train, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Founded in 1894 by Robert Finch and Morton Carlisle, the company had two products, an electric toy train and a carbon arc searchlight. The trains, which entered the marketplace in 1897, stood about 5.5 inches tall, were made of metal, colorful, and highly detailed, and ran on metal track with rails two inches apart. They were the first complete electric-powered trains to be introduced to the marketplace.
Three other smaller, short-lived U.S. manufacturers, including Voltamp, adopted Carlisle & Finch's 2-inch track. However, they were all soon overtaken in sales by the Ives Manufacturing Company and Lionel Corporation. Ives was the largest toy manufacturer in the United States and its name carried a great deal of trust among consumers. Ives' reluctance to produce an electric train before 1910 made the buying public wary of electric trains in general. Lionel's rise can be attributed to marketing; in 1910 Lionel began offering a three-rail electric track with its outer rails 2 1/8 inches apart, unlike anything else on the market. Lionel dubbed this non-standard gauge Standard gauge, and it stuck. Suddenly, Carlisle & Finch's offerings were by definition non-standard, its status as the inventor of the electric train notwithstanding.
At the beginning of World War I, the United States Government ordered Carlisle and Finch to cease toy train production in order to concentrate on producing searchlights for the U. S. Navy and Coast Guard. At the end of the war, the company did not resume toy train production, choosing instead to concentrate on its profitable searchlight business. Within a decade, it was the largest producer of military searchlights in the country.
Finch bought out Carlisle's share of the company in 1917. Over the ensuing decades, it began producing equipment for civilian use, with its searchlights being used in lighthouses and on offshore oil rigs.