Lite-Brite

Push in the colored pegs, turn down the lights and watch your picture glow!

Start with a black sheet of paper attached to a light box and a supply of little colored plastic pegs. Push the pegs through the paper into the light box and suddenly those pegs light up. Follow one of the patterns that came with the set, or forget the pattern and make your own picture.

Lite-Brite was introduced in the 1960s and originally used an ordinary incandescent light bulb inside the box to illuminate the colored pegs. The original set also came with hundreds of pegs in eight different colors and templates and patterns for making pictures like boats, flowers, animals and people.

Part of the challenge was figuring out where all those little pegs belonged. Put the right colors in the right holes and, one dot at a time, the picture started appearing. Then turn off the room lights and see what you made.

Modern Lite-Brites use LEDs instead of the hot light bulb inside the old version, but the effect is very familiar - lots of little colored points of light coming together to make a picture.