On March 9, 1959, a brand-new doll with a blonde ponytail, a black-and-white striped swimsuit, and a slightly skeptical expression made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York City. Her name was Barbie Millicent Roberts, and she was the brainchild of a businesswoman named Ruth Handler who'd watched her own daughter Barbara play with paper dolls and wished there was a three-dimensional version. Toy buyers at the fair were not impressed. They thought parents would never buy a doll that looked like a grown-up.
Ruth's husband Elliot was a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, and they pushed forward anyway. Within the first year, Mattel sold 300,000 Barbies at $3 each. Ken arrived in 1961, named after the Handlers' son. Over the decades, Barbie became an astronaut in 1965 (four years before humans landed on the Moon), a presidential candidate in 1992, a paleontologist, a firefighter, a coder, and a Paralympic athlete in a wheelchair. More than 200 careers in total.
More than a billion Barbies have been sold in over 150 countries, and a new one is bought somewhere on Earth roughly every three seconds. In 2023, a movie about her became one of the highest-grossing films of the year, painting the world hot pink for an entire summer. Not bad for a doll the toy buyers at that 1959 fair almost rejected. Ruth Handler's wild idea - that a kid's doll could be anything she dreamed of being - has been changing playrooms ever since.
