![]() A stylus is mounted where the two bars cross, so when you turn a knob, it moves its bar and the bar moves the stylus. When you turn the Etch A Sketch upside down and shake it, the inside surface of the screen gets coated with aluminum powder, which will stick to almost anything (mixed in with the powder are small polystyrene beads, which help it flow evenly and keep it from caking).Īlso inside are horizontal and vertical bars connected by thin steel wires to the knobs on the face of the toy. “I thought, 'How the heck is this working?' I was turning the knobs and just couldn't figure it out.”Īnd that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Not knowing how it works? The idea – in a young, fertile imagination – that it might actually be magic? If you prefer to think of it that way, I can’t blame you, but you should stop reading, because here’s what’s going on under the screen: ![]() “I was just fascinated,” he told the Toledo Blade in 2010. executive William Casley Killgallon brought the toy back from Germany, his 21-year-old son Bill was mesmerized by it. The company launched the toy in the United States under the name “Etch A Sketch” the following year, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Ohio Art paid $25,000 for the rights to the toy and had their chief engineer, Jerry Burger, collaborate with Cassagnes to perfect it. But they decided to take a chance on the product. Executives from the Ohio Art Company saw it at the 1959 International Toy Fair in Nuremburg, Germany, and didn’t think much of it at first, either. (The assistant’s name ended up on the patent, and he has often been wrongly credited with the invention of the toy in the decades since.)Ĭassagnes’ investor, Paul Chaze, took the toy to several European toy fairs, but it drew little interest. Cassagnes sought a patent, put couldn’t pull the money together to get one, so he borrowed from an investor, who sent an employee to pay the fee at the patent office. He worked up a prototype for the toy-based on the design of a television screen-in his basement workshop and called it “ L'Ecran Magique,” or “the magic screen.” Its joystick, glass and aluminum powder allowed users to draw and erase images and letters with no ink and no mess. In 1955, a French electrician named André Cassagnes got an idea for a new toy after seeing how an electrostatic charge could hold aluminum powder to glass. The piece is then heated in an oven to melt the particles, completing the coating.We learned on February 2, 2013, that Etch A Sketch inventor André Cassagnes died last month in France. The science behind an Etch a Sketch is similar to powder coating, in which charged particles of plastic powder are applied to a metal object of opposite charge. Labowitch’s copy took eight hours to complete. Additionally, mistakes can’t be isolated and need to either be used/masked or erased at the expense of the rest of the drawing. Unlike most other media, the Etch a Sketch has a significant constraint- the stylus can’t be lifted off the glass, so everything drawn amounts to one continuous line. For example, Chicago resident Jane Labowitch copied “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” using an Etch a Sketch. Shaking the Etch a Sketch causes powder to recoat the surface of the glass, effectively erasing the drawing.Ī common pastime of the Etch a Sketch is to create complex, albeit ephemeral, drawings and copies. The aluminum powder contains small beads that prevent it from clumping or sticking. ![]() The stylus scrapes powder away from the glass as it moves, creating a line. Their combined motion allows the stylus to move anywhere within its plane. The rods are each connected to a knob via steel wire. The Etch a Sketch has a stylus mounted on a pair of orthogonal rods, one horizontal and the other vertical. In an Etch a Sketch, the charged powder is attracted to the glass. The product of the oxidation reaction, aluminum oxide, sticks to the original aluminum piece and protects the surface from further decay. The outer surface of aluminum oxidizes easily, meaning it becomes ionic by losing electrons (think redox from chemistry). He produced L’Ecran Magique (The Magic Screen) in 1955, known today as the Etch a Sketch. First off, welcome to another semester! Etch-a-Sketch copy of “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Photo by Jane Labowitch via Google Images.Inspired by the ability of aluminum powder to stick to glass, French electrician André Cassagnes had an idea for a new toy.
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