Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

  (#1)

The Thinker meets the Tinkertoy.

Rodin’s The Thinker, shown in roughly the same view as the Tinkertoy version:

  (#2)

On the toy, from Wikipedia:

The Tinkertoy Construction Set is a toy construction set for children. It was created in 1914 — six years after the Frank Hornby’s Meccano sets — by Charles H. Pajeau and Robert Pettit and Gordon Tinker in Evanston, Illinois. Pajeau, a stonemason, designed the toy after seeing children play with sticks and empty spools of thread. He and Pettit set out to market a toy that would allow and inspire children to use their imaginations. At first, this did not go well, but after a year or two over a million were sold.

The cornerstone of the set is a wooden spool roughly two inches (5 cm) in diameter with holes drilled every 45 degrees around the perimeter and one through the center. Unlike the center, the perimeter holes do not go all the way through. With the differing-length sticks, the set was intended to be based on the Pythagorean progressive right triangle.

… The earlier sets had natural wood sticks, but changed to colored sticks in the late 1950s.

This entry was posted on March 13, 2015 at 3:52 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.