"Who…would imagine for a moment that a wooden horse, elephant, or tiger, or any other member of the Noah's Ark family, could be turned in a lathe, like a ball, bowl, or bedpost?" wrote Charles Dickens in an 1865 issue of All the Year Round, the magazine he founded in Victorian England.

The article, uncovered by writer Jeff Burks and republished on the Lost Art Press blog, details the ingenuity of traditional German toymakers in the Tyrol (which is located in present-day Austria). Dickens describes the clever trick they came up with in great detail, but the accompanying images Burks adds from an 1869 issue of The Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette sums it up nicely:

Here's a shot of the real thing from the UK's Horniman Museum & Gardens:

What's even more interesting is that the animals aren't sawed out of the piece, but are individually split, which seems a good deal faster:

Full production video below.

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via TYWKIWDBI