Wobbly figure
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Wackelfigur or pushing figure (Engl. Push Puppet) is a toy that was invented by the Swiss Walter Kourt Walss. He gave it the brand name Wakouwa - after his initials .
The wobbly figures often represent animals or people, sometimes plants or buildings, and are mostly made of wood, rarely plastic. The vertically or slightly inclined legs and other support structures are made of beads, which, like the other parts of the body, are held in position by spring-tensioned cords on which they are threaded. By pressing the small plate at the bottom of the pedestal with your thumb against the pressure of the built-in spring, the cords can be slackened, whereby the force of gravity causes the figure to buckle, lie down or fall over. If you let the spring tighten the threads again, the object straightens up again.
Layout and function
The entire toy is typically about 10 cm high. Versions up to twice as large are rarer.
The base is cubic or cylindrical and hardly more than 3 cm wide. At the bottom it has a largely hollowing hole that accommodates the large but delicate, somewhat pretensioned compression coil spring with some play. At the top, the base of the number of legs (up to and usually 4) has correspondingly many fine holes for the smooth threads with a thickness of barely 1 mm. These run down through the inside of the spring and are fastened all around in the upper side of the pressure plate which is adjacent to the spring.
The figure actually represented stands on the plinth, often with legs slightly inclined. This is typically an animal with 4 rather high legs, a compact body above and a short sloping or long vertical neck. A leg or neck is formed from about 3 to 6 threaded cylindrical to spherical pearls, the flat end surfaces of which under the cord cause a linear stretching of the body element.
If the pressing thumb does not catch the pressure plate exactly in the middle, the pressure plate is tilted a little, thus allowing the cords to be raised differently and thus giving the limbs of the figure different degrees of freedom to bend, etc. The toy is usually held diagonally against the direction of gravity during operation, which allows you to control the direction of tilting and tilting the figure.
If you let go of the finger pressure at the bottom, the cords are pulled back under spring force and the cords, which are barely visible because they run in the pearls, straighten the figure up again, giving the impression that the figure "stands up by itself".
history
The first wobbly figures were created by Walther Kourt Walss in 1926. From 1928 to 1932 the figures were made in Losone , Switzerland . Wakouwa then relocated production to the Czech Republic . At the same time he sent samples to a toy dealer in England, who sold the figures until the outbreak of World War II. Walther Kourt Walss also invented other games, including a type of dice game. "Wakouwa" is a registered trademark in France (marque et modèle déposé, SGDG = Sans Garantie du Gouvernement).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Information on a collector's blog (wakouwa.skyrock.com) , accessed December 2, 2007