Etch A Sketch

Turn the knobs and start drawing! Make a mistake? Just turn it over, give your Etch A Sketch a shake, and start again.

Two knobs, a gray screen, and a lot of patience. It looks like a little TV screen, with two knobs at the bottom. One knob moves the line up and down, the other moves it side to side. Turn both at the same time and, if you're patient and have good control, you can even make curves and diagonal lines.

Make a mistake? Too bad - there’s no undo button. You can either work the mistake into your artwork or turn the Etch A Sketch over, give it a good shake, and start again.

Etch A Sketch was introduced in the United States in 1960 and quickly became a popular Christmas toy. TV advertising helped demand take off so fast that the Ohio Art factory reportedly kept making them until noon on Christmas Eve trying to keep up.

Inside the screen is some aluminum powder and a little movable pointer/stylus controlled by the two white knobs. As you turn the knobs, the stylus moves through the powder and creates the familiar dark line. Shake it and the powder covers the drawing surface so you can start over.

Etch A Sketch is still a lot of fun, but requires quite a bit of skill (and patience) to get good results. I remember making lines around the edges and a couple of “entry” lines that I could return to and retrace so that I could get the stylus moved to a new location without creating a new line or overwriting part of the drawing. And diagonal lines are possible, but they usually end up looking like tiny little stair-step lines since you had to incrementally move slightly up or down and slightly left or right simultaneously. You could even fashion some block letter signs if you were really good.

The classic red Etch A Sketch is still around, along with different sizes and variations. There’s even a miniature, fully functional version that fits easily in the palm of your hand. But the basic challenge hasn't changed much: two knobs, one continuous line, and no easy way to fix a mistake.

If you are looking for something similar, but easier to use and less frustrating for kids, the Magna Doodle uses a handheld pencil-like stylus that is much easier to write and draw with, with a similar type of black-and-white writing surface. And of course, nowadays there are a multitude of LCD writing tablets that work similarly to the Magna Doodle, but allow full color drawings.