Sometimes the biggest inspirations comes from the smallest of us. Ruth Handler and her husband Elliot ran a small company called Mattel that manufactured dolls and dollhouses. Ruth noticed one day her pre-teen daughter was giving her child dolls adult roles. Thinking there might be a market for dolls that looked like adults, Ruth began forming a new type, based on a German Bild Lilli doll that she purchased during a trip to Switzerland. Ruth struck out on her own, hiring a fashion designer to produce the many doll outfits, and premiering “Barbie,” after her daughter Barbara, at the American International Toy Fair.

On this day, February 13, in 1959, the first Barbie doll went on sale. It did not take long after the toy for Mattel to realize they had a hit on their hands. They bought out the rights to Bild Lilli, discontinued production, and launched the first of many series of Barbies.

Barbie proved enormously popular – some 350,000 were sold in the first year alone – but also controversial. Feminists decried the dolls’ proportions as unrealistic in human terms and they were also unhappy because of the inherent subservience to men that Barbie seemed to represent. A Teen Talk Barbie that went on sale had a line “Math is hard,” igniting even more controversy.