Christmas Gifts
Speaking of childhood memories, I got the ball clock pictured below for Christmas one year. A nice man at work brought in a catalog that had all kinds of crazy gifts in it.
I’m surprised that it cost so much. I still remember putting it together, which I’m sure I had to do with my dad’s help. There are about 1,000 plastic parts, some with little fragile tabs sticking out. The numbers were applied by rubbing a white crayon over indentations in the plastic and wiping off the excess.
Fig 1. Ball clock
But the main point is that this thing was LOUD. Every hour the new marble would make four marbles clatter back down to the bottom then the new marble would fall and release eleven more marbles then finally the new marble would come to rest marking a new hour. But at 1 a.m. the twelve hour marbles would also clatter down to the bottom.
I had to unplug it at night because it could be heard throughout our house. So that meant I had to reset the clock every morning by loading in marbles or taking marbles out.
I would lie awake at night thinking about how one marble would travel through the clock (if I were allowed to keep it on all night). Would it always mark the same hour or minute? Or would it cycle through all positions in the clock? What if an extra marble was put in the clock? I would usually fall asleep before thinking it all the way through.
Fig 2. The actual cosmos doesn’t look like this
I’m against pseudo-scientific toys like this. On the off chance that a kid actually gets interested in science, they will have these weird misconceptions to overcome. Even Ptolemy had a better conception of the cosmos than this.