The competitive rivalry between toy cars Matchbox and Hotwheels. As car culture cranked up in the early 1950s, young English machinist Jack Odell invented one of the world's most successful toys when he created a toy car small enough to fit inside a matchbox for his daughter to take to school. A decade or so later, in Los Angeles, Elliot Handler created one of the biggest toy rivalries in history when he brought in a former missile designer to make a toy car behemoth of his own.