I’ve always
loved to construct things. I had some
Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs to build with when I was really little. Lincoln Logs are fun, but there is not much
you can build with notched logs other than a building of some sort. Tinker Toys allow for more creativity. But still – there are just some round hubs
and some struts of different colors – after a while, you tire of them a bit. After you’ve built the biggest tower you can
make, then what?
I’m not sure
when I got my first Lego kit, but it must have been around grade school
time. The basic brick, though, isn’t
much more useful than a Lincoln Log – it still is pretty much for
buildings. What really excited me about
Legos was that they had gears. Gears
were, to me, the greatest things ever. They
are kind of magical. You move one gear
and that can cause a whole bunch of gears to move. You can slow things down or speed things up. There was nothing more exciting to me than a
gear. Well, that is, until I got my
first motor! Motors are even
better. You plug them in and they generate
movement all by themselves! No more need
to crank things. You can put together a
creation, turn the motor on, and watch the whole thing come to life. The excitement of creating something that can
do “something on its own” still fascinates me to this day. If I could build these things all day, I
would.
There was a
great toy store in the town where I grew up that I loved to visit. I would immediately go to the “construction
toy” and “science toy” section. On one
such visit when I was in Junior High, I came across the greatest construction toy ever.
It was the ultimate – the Holy Grail of construction toys – and I
immediately became obsessed with them.
These were the Fischertechnik kits.
Most kids in the U.S. have never heard of them probably. They are made in Germany – in fact all of the
instructions were in German for most of the kits. But they are superior in every way to Legos –
especially if you really like gears and motors and robotics. They are superior…and more expensive…which
was a problem. I think my parents must
have bought me one of the basic kits as a gift. Here is the first kit I got: http://www.fischertechnik-museum.ch/museum/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=21.
Gears.
Pulleys. Wheels. They are interesting because it takes a
little bit of learning to get the hang of how to assemble them together. They are inherently three dimensional, unlike
Legos which are inherently two dimensional.
They interlock in a manner that is solid (also unlike Legos, which
always fall apart). And the basic block
looks just as boring as the basic Lego block:
a plastic rectangle with a knob on one end.
Once I got
the hang of putting the Fischertechnik parts together and could build all of
the example models in the first book, I was totally hooked. I spent my time outside of school either
trying to create new things with the parts I had, or else staring – meditating
– at the back pages of the instruction booklet where it pictured all of the
other kits available. Whenever I worked
mowing lawns or did other odd jobs, I spent that time calculating which kits I
could buy with the money I was going to make.
Eventually I worked my way to getting the Hobby 3 kit (http://www.fischertechnik-museum.ch/museum/displayimage.php?album=13&pos=3
), but I could never save enough money to get the famous (to me) Hobby 4 kit (http://www.fischertechnik-museum.ch/museum/displayimage.php?album=13&pos=4
)...something I surely dreamed about while in high school. Oddly enough, I still don’t have that kit,
though it does occasionally show up on ebay.
One thing
that made Fischertechnik kits so fascinating for me was the ability to bring
motion into the things you constructed.
Motors of different kinds. Then
sensors. Gears of all different styles –
worm gears, gear track, planetary gears, conveyor belts…great stuff as far as I
was concerned. I’m old now, but I still have these kits. Some days I think I’m more of a collector of
these kits than someone who actually uses them.
Just don’t have time to “play” with them anymore.
Because of my
fascination with these types of kits, I began evaluating what made a “great”
construction toy design. One of my
personal criteria is that a really well-designed construction toy should only
require a limited number of parts. What
I mean is that you should be able to create other things by assembling the
basic components together into a new component.
This is hard to do, and also very much against what the marketing arm of
any company would suggest! Thus, for
example, most new Lego kits are themed and each kit is composed of many new and
often unique parts in order to create, for example, a castle or a Star Wars
scene or an excavator. The fact that you
have to have unique parts to create new things seems like somewhat of a “failure”
to me. If you had really well-designed
basic parts, you should be able to create anything, right? One construction toy that seems to follow
this principle pretty well are K’nex.
Those toys came along when I was in college (and perpetually broke) so I
never played with them until my kids had some.
But they tend to have a limited set of parts – connectors and rods of
different lengths – that are used to make a lot of interesting things.
What’s the
point of this bit of rambling? It is
just to think about the ultimate construction toy, and it meets my “limited
number of parts” criteria in spades. I’m
talking about matter. What are the parts
you need? There are only three: electrons, protons, and neutrons.[1] I find that incredibly fascinating. If you’ve read anything on this blog, you
know that I am a supernaturalist, so obviously I attribute the creative genius
behind this “construction toy” to God.
But even if you are a complete naturalist, you can surely appreciate
that, despite the incredible complexity and diversity in nature and in the
universe, it can all be constructed with these three parts. However, just for a second, imagine God,
sitting at a big desk, getting ready to create the universe. Personally, I kind of imagine it in the form
of a Far Side cartoon. God reaches over
to his cabinet in which all of his parts are stored and – guess what? – the
cabinet has only three big drawers labelled “electrons”, “protons”, and
“neutrons!!” I find that funny and
amazing and completely fascinating all at once!
As a Far Side cartoon, I can just imagine the cartoon including God’s
wife off to the side saying “Be careful with that – remember what happened last
time when you starting pushing neutrons into that uranium molecule you
made!”
As a
supernaturalist, I believe there is at least one more part required to turn
those three components into living things, and maybe at least one more part
further still to turn those components into human beings, but that is for
another story. I just think it would be
a lot of fun to sit down at a table and start assembling three little pieces
into anything anyone could imagine. That
would be the greatest!
[1]
I’m ignoring quantum physics here. And
why shouldn’t I? Why should I listen to
people who don’t know how to comb their hair and who can’t come up with better
names for things than “quark” and “charm”???
