The Magic Toy
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As a kid in elementary school I was a discoverer and tinkerer, and a hoarder as well. Growing up in the post-War time in Germany, I hoarded tin boxes, wires, screws, and many parts made of metal and plastic that I found on the street, all with the idea to put them to good use in some kind of construction later on. Once I found a little magnet on the sidewalk, and that made me very happy and excited for days. I dragged the magnet through dirt and discovered a lot of tiny grains got stuck to it, forming a little beard around it. I had never thought before that there was iron in plain dirt.
For Christmas I would always make a present for my younger sister. My weekly allowance was so small I couldn’t afford to buy anything. So I worked in the attic for weeks with scraps of found material, keeping it a secret. Two of these presents I remember very well. When I was eight and she was five years old, I constructed a magic toy from a short cardboard tub, with lids on both sides. When you would put it on the floor and give it a push, it rolled away from you but it would always come back. This was because it had a weight inside suspended on two rubber strings that were fastened to the lids on either end, so when you rolled the tube one way the rubber strings would get twisted around each other, up to a certain point when the tension became too strong, and they would then untwist, forcing the tube to roll back. When I was finished putting the inside mechanism together I decorated the tube by gluing blue- and red-colored paper to it, to give it a real magic look.
On Christmas Eve when we exchanged presents my sister gave me a picture she had drawn and I gave her the magic toy. But I told her that in order to make it come back you had to beckon it by curling your forefinger, and showed her how to do it. A few times she followed my instructions and sat on the floor sending the magic toy rolling away with a kick and then curling her little finger, and she was thrilled to discover that she had the power to make it come back to her. But then once she left out the beckoning gesture and the toy still came back to her, so she got very disappointed and lost interest since for her the real magic was gone.
The other toy, which I still have in my possession, was a little flipper machine that I built from scratch. I had found a hilarious cartoon that had a father sitting on an easy chair with his forehead furrowed. His little son was sitting above him on the back of the chair, swinging a hammer around close to his head. The mother, standing next to the two, had her forefinger raised wiggling it, warning her son with a blurb coming out of her mouth that said “Not today; your daddy has headaches!” I pasted the cartoon behind a square piece of plexiglass, and drilled holes through it at three points, through the mouths of the father, the mother and the little son. The holes were a little larger than steel balls from a ball-bearing that I had taken apart, and the objective of the play was to tilt the piece of plexiglass in different directions so that the balls would go through the holes, scoring points. The plexiglass was mounted on three thin elastic rubber foils, and had three German pennies glued on the back. German pennies, at least at the time, were made of copper-plated iron. The tilting was accomplished by three battery-operated electromagnets pulling on the pennies from below. To activate the magnets and tilt the plexiglass to navigate the balls into the holes, one had to push three buttons either singly or in some combination.
Today I think that making these contraptions were a way for my mind to wander; it was a way of speaking without talking. It was Right Brain asserting itself, if you will. Ever since I realized that for me, the use of analytical skills, of reasoning in the pursuit of science had to be counter-balanced by expressing myself in art.
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