When fun and geometry collide

An awful hybrid toy/drawing implement, with the flimsiness of construction putting the emphasis firmly on “toy”. Spirograph was a junior engineer’s wet dream, comprising many plastic gear shapes, each with tiny teeth round the edge and tiny holes round the centre, and a whole load of rings, teeth again protruding from the outside and inside edges. The idea was to lay the gears onto a piece of paper pinned to a board (or, indeed, mum’s fine oak dining room table). and then roll your chosen ring around it, pushing a pen through one of the holes. Thus, with no artistic talent beyond the bare minimum of coordination, anyone could “draw”.

Once the artist-powered cog system was mastered, the resulting unimpressive spiral on the paper could be reproduced to create more unimpressive spirals on top. This carried on and on with different-sized plastic pieces - eventually producing something akin to a knackered Slinky. Every. Single. Bloody. Time. In point of fact, the name “Spirograph” is a portmanteau of the Greek words “graph”, meaning drawing and “speira”, meaning knackered Slinky.

You may also be surprised to learn that such spiral-graphs have a basis in maths, being used to solve polynomial equations of a higher degree. Their application as a toy, however, whilst perhaps giving kids a tiny bit of insight into advanced mathematics, has to be called into question. For instance, no one ever explained what you should do about the little holes left in the paper by the drawing pins. Of course, you could try to hold the various rings in position manually, but only the slightest movement meant that the spiral effect was ruined completely.

That didn’t stop the copycat toys, mind you. Dial-A-Design attempted to solve the slipping paper problem by including a loading cartridge, although the paper used had to be of a fixed size and entirely circular. So, handy for making those oh-so-desirable geometric paper coasters then. Even more obscure was the confusing Rotadraw. These red plastic discs contained stencil-like holes in a dot-to-dot style. When you’d rotated the wheel and filled each one of them in - bingo! – lo, there was an almost-joined-up picture of Goofy (or whoever). We can’t even begin to imagine what this may have looked like.