Whirligig
Whirligig is the American name for a wind turbine that uses a mechanism to set figures or objects in motion using wind power and serves as a work of art, for ornamentation and decoration or as a figurehead. Whirligigs can be seen in gardens, on house roofs and also in parks or in open spaces in exposed places, wherever they can be set in motion by the wind. As an art object or decorative object, the Whirligig does not otherwise do any useful work and does not generate any energy in the sense of a windmill or wind turbine . A whirligig is an object that rotates or at least part of which rotates in the wind.
history
The word whirligig, which is derived from the English verb to whirl , has been used since 1440; it has been used for different types of spinning toys. Thereafter, the term Whirligig for wind chimes rotating in and with the wind was adopted unchanged from the general name of the same word for rotating toys.
In 1866, for example, the United States of America granted a patent for a toy similar to the yo-yo , which was called a whirligig in the patent specification.
Manufacturing
Whirligigs are usually made in the handicraft workshop, but there are also some artisans who have specialized in such work or who also make them on the side. This is done by hand, can always produce new variations with inventive creativity, but there are also templates for replica, which are then copied. Artists have also taken up the topic and created objects that are set in rotating motion by the wind.
Areas of application
Whirligigs are often used as a figurehead for professions or other affiliations, whereby a typical action and corresponding objects are then combined in the pictorial composition of such a movement game. For example, a blacksmith can swing a hammer on the anvil or ships sail around in a circle on the roof of the captain's house.
decoration
A whirligig is also used as a mere ornament without advertising a profession, a guild or a business activity, for example to beautify the home or a garden. You can see wild geese flapping their wings up and down, giving the impression that they are really flying. This is done by a small wind turbine and an almost invisible mechanism that moves the blades. It can also be a figure pumping air into a bicycle tire or a gardener cranking a grindstone while his wife grinds the spade. Although it looks as if the man is turning the grindstone on the crank or - depending on the case - as if he is busily operating the pump on the bicycle, in reality the wind gives the angular momentum for these moving scenes via a small pinwheel and the linear movement is then over transfer a connecting rod with a connecting rod to the figure.
Use as a weather vane
In addition to purely decorative purposes, a whirligig can also be used as a weather vane by designing it to be able to track the wind direction through a guide surface on a vertical axis of rotation. This can be a weathercock with a wind turbine where its wings are. When it rotates quickly, you can't see whether it's the blades or whether it's just a wind turbine whirring in the wind. An airplane, rotatably mounted on a pole, can also display the wind direction in this way. This is done with the tail fin as a guide surface that aligns the model to the wind. At the same time, you can also give the impression that with its propellers running in the wind, it flies like a real airplane, only on the spot. When it comes to the design of whirligigs, there are hardly any thematic limits to the imagination and there are many ways to use special mechanics to bring movement into a scene.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the Promtorium Parvulorum , the first English-Latin dictionary in which the definition is written: "Whyrlegyge, chyldys game, giraculum ."
- ^ Ohio Historical Society, 200 "Whirligig," Ohio History Central: An Online Encyclopedia of Ohio History.