One day in 1884, seven-year-old Joshua
Lionel Cowen attached a small steam engine to a wooden locomotive he had
carved. Moments later, the precocious youngster watched in 
amazement as the world's first Lionel
train exploded, taking most of the kitchen wallpaper with it and earning
the boy a good paddling from his father, a New York City businessman. The
locomotive incident was one of the several ill-fated experiments conducted
by Joshua Cowen (born Cohen), a small dark-haired boy who was fascinated
with mechanical devices of all kinds.
Another of young Cowen's inventions, "the electric flowerpot," resulted in an even more ironic twist. The gadget consisted of a thin tube with a battery fitted into one end and a small light bulb in the other. When attached to a flowerpot, the tube illuminated the plant inside. Cowen sold the rights to his invention to a restaurateur named Conrad Hubert, who tried marketing it as a decorative object. After failing to generate much interest in the unusual flowerpot, Hubert decided to detach the tubes and sell them on their own illuminatory merit. Calling his revised product the Eveready Flashlight, he became a millionaire.
Joshua Cowen's early mechanical genius was what got his famous model train business started. But it was his talent for marketing in his middle years that built the Lionel name into a national institution.