 Making
Kaleidoscopes
By 1988 I had my own small software business in
Clarion, Pennsylvania, a small town in the northwestern woods of the
state and home to Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where I ran the
computer center in the early 1980's. Pam and I had married and our son
Pete was just 5 years old. One evening I showed him two treasures left
over from my boyhood ¾ The Boy Mechanic and The American Boy's Handy
Book.
We leafed through these ancient, broken volumes learning how to do
things the way they were done 50 and 100 years ago. In our imaginations
we built snowshoes to help us get through the deep snow to our traps,
mechanical tanks that fired wooden bullets as they trundled across the
floor, and fire balloons to send skyward at sunset. Horrible things to
some but interesting to think about nonetheless. In the Handy Book we
came across a piece explaining how to construct a kaleidoscope, and we
decided to go further than just imagining. The next day we bought a
mirror and had it sliced into three long skinny strips. Back home, we
used duct tape to construct a long triangular tube from the three
pieces. That was all there was to it. Now we had a big kaleidoscope and
we proceeded to examine everything in sight through it.
A kaleidoscope uses mirrors to create a symmetric six sided image. I dug
around in my junk drawers and found two other symmetric image makers for
Pete to look at. One distorts the image with a strong lens, and the
other uses a faceted lens to give a dragon's eye view of the world. Pete
loved all three toys for twenty minutes and then lost interest. I can't
blame him, I did myself. How much standing around looking through a tube
can anyone take ("Lots!" would say Tycho Brahe). Pete had to take a
shower about then and so I was left alone to think about making a better
kaleidoscope. What I really needed was a computer program which would
allow me to draw an image just like a kaleidoscope. Then Pete could draw
kaleidoscopic art, which might hold his interest for a longer time
because he could experiment endlessly and print out his best results to
show to others. At that time I had the hottest micro computer on the
market, and I knew I could write a decent version of the program. The
only problem was I needed to make a living. I had my plate full with
writing a 3D CAD program called ROOMER3. The kaleidoscope program would
just have to wait, but only until ROOMER3 was finished and a success.
* * * * *
So the years passed again and each year computers evolved and ROOMER3
demanded improvement. But each year at Christmas I thought about all the
small programs I wanted to write someday. A pattern painting program, a
polyhedron pattern drawer, my version of ESCHER and a kaleidoscope
program. In 1993 the waiting ended and I spent a wonderful year
combining the four ideas into a single program called SymmeToy.
|
 
 |
|
Books:
Making Scientific Toys, Carson I. A. Ritchie, New York
Cornerstone Library, Simon & Schuster, 1976.
A great little book if you like to build toys, includes
a nice kaleidoscope.
The Boy Mechanic, 5 vols. Chicago: Popular Mechanics
Press, 1929
The American Boy's Handy Book, D. C. Beard, New York
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1882. Reprint. Boston: David
R. Godine
Secondary Mathematics Catalog, Palo Alto: Dale Seymour
Publications. Phone: (800) 812-1100.
This excellent catalog offers dozens of interesting
books, models and other items relating to symmetry.
|
