No one knows where marbles originated.
They were found in the ashes of Pompeii, the tombs of ancient Egypt, and they were played with by Native American tribes. Earliest examples were stones, polished smooth by a running river or made by hand from clay, stone, or glass by artisans.
Mass production became possible in 1884, when Sam Dyke of Akron, Ohio, created a wooden block with six grooves, each of which held a lump of clay. An operator rolled a wooden paddle over the clay balls with a back-and-forth and lateral motion, creating six marbles. With 350 employees, Dyke’s factory cranked out five train cars of a million marbles per day. Mass production made marbles cheaper to make, dropping the price from a penny each to a bag of 30 marbles for the same price. Other businessmen joined in and Akron soon became the marble capital of late-19th century America.
In 1915, mass production of glass marbles began on a machine invented by Akron’s M.F. Christensen. The machine, of a screw conveyor with two grooved cylinders spun together as a “slug” of molten glass was placed between the cylinders on one end and moved gradually to the opposite side, simultaneously cooling and shaping them into a sphere by the rolling grooves. The design worked well and has remained essentially unchanged and is the most common way to make marbles today.
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