Remembering Spirograph: The Toy that Made Artists of Us All

NOTE: I wrote this article for the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles in January 2007.  I hope you enjoy it.

The most wondrous of toys are those that help us fulfill an accomplishment. We may not be able to take on Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai in a battle of bouillabaisse, but we can at least make a tasty little cupcake in an Easy-Bake oven. We could never compete against the brilliant neon displays in New York City, but at least with a Lite-Brite we could build our own faux neon illuminations.

Thus is the case with the Spirograph. I don’t know about your artistic talent, but I can barely draw stick figures. But with the Spirograph, there were millions of artistic possibilities and geometric impressions, all created by rotating a plastic wheel inside ANOTHER plastic wheel, and tracing the wheel’s path with a ballpoint pen.

The magical device has remained in toy stores for over 40 years, and has been used for everything from explaining trigonometric functions to gallery artwork. While its goals have been both egalitarian and artistic, its original use was for a more serious function.

In 1962, Englishman Denys Fisher was a mechanical engineer, using his expertise with NATO to design improvements in bomb detonation equipment. Using interlocking gears and the point of a pen, Fisher hoped to trace sine and cosine waves by using the gears as a moving stencil. Originally Fisher wanted to market his spiral graphing product to industrial companies, but could find no takers. His family, however, found another use for Fisher’s invention – as an educational toy.

Eventually Fisher’s gear-inspired doodles became the “Spirograph” kit, and when Fisher introduced the kit at the 1965 Nuremburg International Toy Fair, toy industry officials came calling. Kenner Toys purchased the rights to Spirograph for American consumers, with Fisher receiving U.S. Patent No. 3230624 in January 1966.

Spirograph was an immediate success – in two years, over 5.5 million kits were sold, making it one of Kenner’s top toys of the late 1960’s. Various other Spirograph-related products were sold, including a “Spirotot” (a Spirograph for younger artists), a “Super Spirograph” (with geared squares and triangles), and various refill packages. Other Spirograph products included the Spiroscope, with a kaleidoscope capable of bringing new depth and view to your Spirograph drawings; a Sparkle Spirograph, featuring glitter pens; and a kinetic art Spirograph in which the pen swings on a pendulum, drawing the pattern with the power of physics.

What Fisher actually invented was a device for drawing accurate and flawless hypocycloid curves. The hypocycloid, the path of the point on a wheel rolling inside a circle, is one of several parametric equations that a Spirograph can create. If the wheel rotates on a flat surface, the curve traced is a cycloid. If the wheel rolls outside another wheel, that path traces out an epicycloid.

In 1999, Dennis Ippolito, a teacher in Stamford, Ct., used a Spirograph and several graphing calculators to teach students about parametric equations. Eventually the students discovered the mathematical formulas inherent in Spirographs to create both artwork and function, then wrote programs on their graphing calculators to recreate the Spirograph patterns on a TI-83 calculator. Ippolito later wrote about the experience in several magazines and journals, including School Science and Mathematics (November 1998) and The Mathematics Teacher (April 1999).

Even in their instruction manuals, Kenner anticipated the rise of the scrapbooking hobby by suggesting that Spirograph users create their own collection of Spirograph-generated art. “Use Spirograph to create designs on materials for embroidering, to decorate stationery, greeting cards, trading cards, lampshades, textiles and many more. Make your own album of ‘Spirographics.’ Show it to your family and friends … compare theirs with yours.”

In fact, several commercial artists, including New York’s Judy Pfaff, Seattle’s Jeffrey Simmons and the United Kingdom’s Ian Dawson, have exhibited Spirograph or Spirograph-influenced art in gallery shows. “Using the popular children’s toy, Dawson makes fresh and clean drawings in blue ballpoint pen on meticulously prepared panels,” said artist-reviewer Jeff Crane of Dawson’s 2000 New York gallery show. “The regularly spiraling shapes are as fascinating now as they ever were.”

Scrapbookers also love Spirograph, as the decorative finished patterns lend themselves to fascinating and attractive background art and borders. In some cases, scrapbookers replace the tracing paper with tinfoil, tracing the patterns with a ballpoint pen or pointed stylus. The resulting image, on the tinfoil’s reverse side, will show a raised Spirograph pattern.

The original U.S. Spirograph set, marked U.S. 401, comes with 22 gears, a tablet of paper, an easel upon which the paper and gears can be safely pinned, several green-capped pins, and four colored markers. While replacement gears, pins and boards can be found by cannibalizing any Spirograph set, the kit’s ballpoint pens seldom survive. After 35 years of inactivity, the pen’ ink coagulates. In a pinch, one can use a needle-nosed ballpoint pen; if you’re looking for a replica of the original pens, Stylus Writing Instruments sells replacement pens, as well as other parts for various board games. Contact them at: STYLUS WRITING INSTRUMENTS, 25800 Sherwood, Warren, MI 48091, Phone: 800-968-7882.

As for Spirograph’s creator, Denys Fisher, he used the Spirograph invention to create his own toy company in England, The Denys Fisher Toys Group in 1965. In its first year of operation, the company made £30,000 in profit. By 1967, thanks to licensing Spirograph to Kenner and to other companies, Fisher realized over £337,000 in profits. Three years later, the Denys Fisher Toys Group was sold to General Mills, and Fisher was a wealthy man. In 2002, the inventor of the Spirograph passed away at the age of 84, but his design toy still lives on in the imaginations and conceptualizations of millions of artists, mathematicians and designers.