Spirograph

Pick a gear, choose a pen hole and roll it around the ring. Spirograph turned a few loops into an elaborate design.

Put a pen into one of the holes on the gear, roll the gear around inside a toothed ring, and watch the loops turn into a design. Spirograph made drawing elaborate designs possible even if your usual artistic specialty (like mine) was limited to drawing stick figures.

British engineer Denys Fisher first showed the Spirograph at the Nuremberg toy fair in 1965, and Kenner introduced it to the United States market in 1966. Gear-based drawing devices weren’t entirely new, but the interlocking wheels, rings, and colored pens made the Spirograph a self-contained drawing kit that was fairly easy to use and one that was interesting to experiment with.

Change to a different wheel, choose another pen hole, or add a second color, and you could get a completely different pattern. You could follow the examples or keep trying combinations to see what happened. Of course, I could always count on a gear slipping somewhere in the process (maybe I was a little impatient) and I would inevitably get an unwanted line right across my nearly-complete design. But you could always start again with a fresh sheet of paper. So it is easy to use, but it does take a little bit of skill to keep the gear teeth aligned and generate actual designs, so this is probably not ideal for younger kids (and it’s recommended for ages 8 and up).

While there are a few new variations, the original Spirograph is still pretty much just as you remember it: multiple interlocking gears and colored pens and your imagination is the limit to what you can create.