LeapPad
The talking book that read along as you touched the page with a magic pen — and somehow made phonics feel like a toy. For a few Christmases in the early 2000s, the LeapPad was the present under every tree.
The LeapPad grew out of a parent's frustration: LeapFrog was founded in 1994 by Michael Wood and Robert Lally after Wood had difficulty teaching his son to read and went deep on phonics research — the company's first product, the Phonics Desk, was prototyped with a Texas Instruments chip previously used for talking greeting cards. The LeapPad itself was invented by Jim Marggraff, whose Explore Technologies (acquired by LeapFrog in July 1998) developed the core trick: a patented "NearTouch" electrographic system that could tell exactly where a stylus touched a paper page, so a physical book laid into the pad became fully interactive. Touch a word, hear it read aloud; touch a picture, get a sound effect. It took three years to develop and launched in 1999.
The result was that rarest of objects — an educational toy kids actually begged for. The LeapPad won the first-ever People's Choice Toy of the Year award along with the Educational Toy of the Year in 2000, topped US toy best-seller lists in 2001 and 2002 — the line did $160 million in sales in 2001 — and by 2003 the platform's library of book-and-cartridge titles had become a best-seller in its own right. LeapFrog rode the wave onto the New York Stock Exchange in July 2002 under the ticker LF.
The brand outlived the pen-and-paper original: My First LeapPad served the preschool crowd, and in 2011 the name was reborn as the LeapPad Explorer, a touchscreen kids' tablet with little beyond the logo in common with the talking books. LeapFrog itself was acquired by VTech in 2016 — but for the kids who learned to sound out words with a plastic stylus, the LeapPad-shaped memory is permanent: the toy that tricked a whole generation into doing their reading homework.
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