Spirograph is a geometric drawing toy that produces mathematical roulette curves of the
variety technically known as hypotrochoids and epitrochoids.
It was developed by British engineer Denys Fisher and first sold in 1965.
The name has been a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc., since it bought the Denys Fisher
company.
The Spirograph brand was relaunched with original product configurations in 2013 by Kahootz
Toys.
History The mathematician Bruno Abakanowicz invented
the spirograph between 1881 and 1900.
It was used for calculating an area delimited by curves.
Drawing toys based on gears have been around since at least 1908, when The Marvelous Wondergraph
was advertised in the Sears catalog.
An article describing how to make a Wondergraph drawing machine appeared in the Boys Mechanic
publication in 1913.
The Spirograph itself was developed by the British engineer Denys Fisher, who exhibited
at the 1965 Nuremberg International Toy Fair.
It was subsequently produced by his company.
US distribution rights were acquired by Kenner, Inc., which introduced it to the United States
market in 1966 and promoted it as a creative children's toy.
In 2013 the Spirograph brand was re-launched in the USA by Kahootz Toys and in Europe by
Goldfish and Bison with products that returned to the use of the original gears and wheels.
The modern products use removable putty in place of pins or are held down by hand to
keep the stationery pieces in place on the paper.
The Spirograph was a 2014 Toy of the Year finalist in 2 categories, almost 50 years
after the toy was named Toy of the Year in 1967.
Operation
The original US-released Spirograph consisted of two different-sized plastic rings, with
gear teeth on both the inside and outside of their circumferences.
They were pinned to a cardboard backing with pins, and any of several provided gearwheels,
which had holes provided for a ballpoint pen to extend through them to an underlying paper
writing surface.
It could be spun around to make geometric shapes on the underlying paper medium.
Later, the Super-Spirograph consisted of a set of plastic gears and other interlocking
shape-segments such as rings, triangles, or straight bars.
It has several sizes of gears and shapes, and all edges have teeth to engage any other
piece.
For instance, smaller gears fit inside the larger rings, but also can engage the outside
of the rings in such a fashion that they rotate around the inside or along the outside edge
of the rings.
To use it, a sheet of paper is placed on a heavy cardboard backing, and one of the plastic
pieces—known as a stator—is secured via pins or reusable adhesive to the paper and
cardboard.
Another plastic piece—called the rotor—is placed so that its teeth engage with those
of the pinned piece.
For example, a ring may be pinned to the paper and a small gear placed inside the ring.
The number of arrangements possible by combining different gears is very large.
The point of a pen is placed in one of the holes of the rotor.
As the rotor is moved, the pen traces out a curve.
The pen is used both to draw and to provide locomotive force; some practice is required
before the Spirograph can be operated without disengaging the stator and rotor, particularly
when using the holes close to the edge of the larger rotors.
More intricate and unusual-shaped patterns may be made through the use of both hands,
one to draw and one to guide the pieces.
It is possible to move several pieces in relation to each other, but this requires concentration
or even additional assistance from other artists.
Mathematical basis
Consider a fixed outer circle of radius centered at the origin.
A smaller inner circle of radius is rolling inside and is continuously tangent to it.
will be assumed never to slip on . Now assume that a point lying somewhere inside is located
a distance from 's center.
This point corresponds to the pen-hole in the inner disk of a real Spirograph.
Without loss of generality it can be assumed that at the initial moment the point was on
the -axis.
In order to find the trajectory created by a Spirograph, follow point as the inner circle
is set in motion.
Now mark two points on and on . The point always indicates the location where the two
circles are tangent.
Point however will travel on and its initial location coincides with . After setting in
motion counterclockwise around , has a clockwise rotation with respect to its center.
The distance that point traverses on is the same as that traversed by the tangent point
on , due to the absence of slipping.
Now define the new system of coordinates with its origin at the center of and its axes parallel
to and . Let the parameter be the angle by which the tangent point rotates on and be
the angle by which rotates in the relative system of coordinates.
Because there is no slipping, the distances traveled by and along their respective circles
must be the same, therefore
or equivalently
It is common to assume that a counterclockwise motion corresponds to a positive change of
angle and a clockwise one to a negative change of angle.
A minus sign in the above formula accommodates this convention.
Let be the coordinates of the center of in the absolute system of coordinates.
Then represents the radius of the trajectory of the center of , which undergoes circular
motion thus:
As defined above, is the angle of rotation in the new relative system.
Because point obeys the usual law of circular motion, its coordinates in the new relative
coordinate system obey:
In order to obtain the trajectory of in the absolute system of coordinates, add these
two motions:
where is defined above.
Now, use the relation between and as derived above to obtain equations describing the trajectory
of point in terms of a single parameter :
(using the fact that function is odd).
It is convenient to represent the equation above in terms of the radius of and dimensionless
parameters describing the structure of the Spirograph.
Namely, let
and
The parameter represents how far the point is located from the center of . At the same
time, represents how big the inner circle is with respect to the outer one .
It is now observed that
and therefore the trajectory equations take the form
Parameter is a scaling parameter and does not affect the structure of the Spirograph.
Different values of would yield similar Spirograph drawings.
It is interesting to note that the two extreme cases and result in degenerate trajectories
of the Spirograph.
In the first extreme case when we have a simple circle of radius , corresponding to the case
where has been shrunk into a point..
The other extreme case corresponds to the inner circle 's radius matching the radius
of the outer circle , ie . In this case the trajectory is a single point.
Intuitively, is too large to roll inside the same-sized without slipping.
If then the point is on the circumference of . In this case the trajectories are called
hypocycloids and the equations above reduce to those for a hypocycloid.
See also Cyclograph
Guilloché Harmonograph
List of periodic functions Pantograph
Spirograph Nebula, a planetary nebula that displays delicate, spirograph-like filigree.
References
External links Official Website
Inspirograph: A web-based, interactive Spirograph replica
HTML5 Interactive Spirograph Creator A Spirograph software for MS Windows
Kahootz Toys super spirograph manual in French, German,
1979