The history of the Tippe Top

[ta0]

The phenomena behind the tippe top was already studied in the 1800s, and appears on Perry's lecture from 1890, where he describes that a ball with a weight that is rotated will move so the weight rises:



But inventing an inverting top based on this was not obvious.
The first person to patent a Tippe Top (Wenderkreisel) was a German nurse, Helen Sperl, in 1892 (applied October 7, 1891, DE63261)





Unfortunately for her, she let it expire a year later (fysikbasen.au.dk).

Danish engineer, Werner Østberg (1920-1999) from Hjørring popularized the tippe top, applying for patents in many countries (I found from England, France, Switzerland, Greece and US), starting in 1950. Apparently the toy became a big fad in Denmark.

The US Patent #2,700,246 was applied in 1950 and published in 1955:



Here is Østberg (with white coat) in 1997 in front of an exhibition about the tippe top:



The title of the poster is: "From the diary of the tippe top". I wish I could read it, because he said his inspiration was during a visit to "South America" when he saw some people sitting in front of their cabin playing with a round fruit. They turned the stem like you would turn an old-fashioned top, and when the fruit had spun for a moment, it suddenly turned around and continued on the stem. But South America is a big continent . . .

There are also contemporary patents by a German inventor, Oskar Hummel. He applied for DE 889,574 in 1949 and it was published in 1953




As you can see from the image, not only it's a tippe top, but also has a movable shaft so a little tip can protrude making it spin as a normal top.
It seems like a great coincidence that Hummel and Østberg came up with the idea simultaneously.

[ta0]

I found a French patent applied in 1951 and published in 1953 by Jacques Valabregue, FR1119682A for a tippe top with changeable behavior (Toupie à mouvement transformable):



Another French patent FR1119682A applied in 1954 and published in 1955, patents the tippe top again, also including the movable center shaft!



Finally, this idea of a retractable mini-tip for a tippe top was patented in the US by Miles V. Sullivan in 1959 (applied in 1956), US2906057. While the other patents only said that the top behavior could be changed, he explicitly says that it can be used to trick the unsuspecting people.

[ortwin]

Thank you for writing that up!
I think the photograph of Bohr and Pauli playing with the Tippe Top (1925 ) should also be included in this topic.
https://www.wissenschaft-shop.de/spielw ... inium.html

Edit: I found sources now that say the photo is from 1954

[ta0]

Yes, that famous photo:



The occasion was the inauguration of the Institute of Physics in Lund, Sweden, in 1954.
Bohr was Danish and the date coincides perfectly with the tippe top fad created by Østberg in Denmark.
It makes me smile that photo of two Nobel Prize winners in physics, bending over a tippe top. So much that I wrote a short story based on that.

[ta0]

I would like to know what fruit did Østberg see in South America that spun like a tippe top. But my feeling is that the story is apocryphal. I have absolutely no proof, just my intuition. There are archived interviews of him, so perhaps there is more information there. It sounds to me like the story you would make up if you didn't really invent the top. My guess is that he got the idea from somewhere else. Also, I don't think it's a coincidence that Hummel patented the same idea. Did they know each other? Did they get the inspiration from the same source?

Interestingly, according to a 1994 little German paper (https://ucke.de/christian/physik/ftp/le ... TIPTOP.PDF) they constructed the tops described in the 1890 Wendekreisel patent by Sperl and they didn't actually flip. If you look at figure 3 on the paper, the top 6 fulfills the stability conditions and it looks identical to the top on figure 7 on the patent. But they claim that the ones they built couldn't stand up when the stem touched the surface. However, the flipping action is described in the patent, so Sperl must have had a top that flipped

[ta0]

Reading Helene Sperl's patent, there is no doubt she had a tippe top. She describes its behavior very clearly and even proposes painting red the lower surface and blue the upper surface so "the color change makes the toy surprisingly beautiful" when flipping over. She is aware that the position of the center of mass is important and she proposes a screw on the stem to finely adjust the center of mass (Fig. 7), although she doesn't seem aware that it's position with respect to the center of curvature of the spherical portion is the important factor.

So, were any flip over patents between 1892 and 1950? I found some, although they are not exactly tippe tops, but almost.
Owen R. Dailey of Davenport, Iowa, obtained 3 patents, in 1927, 1928 and 1943:







The difference with a tippe top is that Dailey believed that he needed a radially unbalanced top (center of mass eccentric or principal axis tilted). In fact, the first two patents have little tips, so they wouldn't have worked without the unbalancing weight unless they were spun already leaning. Dailey was so fixated on the idea of the unbalance than even in his last patent where he gets rid of the tip and it looks that the shape alone would have made it flip, he still has the eccentric weight! He was very, very close to inventing the true tippe top, much earlier than Ostberg did. I wonder if he ever commercialized it. He worked on this top for at least 17 years, so I'm inclined to think that he did. Was this his original idea or did he see it somewhere else? Perhaps he saw a true tippe top and figured out the wrong reason of why it flipped?

There is still some mystery on the origin of the tippe top. But there is no doubt that Østberg made it popular. He spent a lot of money and effort in getting patents in many countries (I've seen translations into English, German, French, Dutch and even Greek). And he gave it the name tippe top (tippe toppen).

[ortwin]

ta0, that short story you wrote, did you write it in English? Could you please make it available to us?

[ta0]

ta0, that short story you wrote, did you write it in English? Could you please make it available to us?

Thanks for asking. I uploaded it here: https://www.ta0.com/misc/tippetop.pdf
It's not my usual short story, more historical than anything else.

Perhaps we should mention that Don Olney/The Toycrafter, made the tippe top well know in the US in the late 1990's, early 2000's. Don said he was making over 500,000 a year. He called them flipovers.

I really don't have an exact date in mind - I became fascinated with the "flipover" top - tippe top. I spent hours on the lathe trying to figure out how to make them! A few would work, but most did not. One day a bag of wheels arrived from my wood parts turning supplier, that had 4 purple 1 1/4" balls in it. I connected in my mind to the flipover top idea, and with the help of my drill press, some vise grips, and some 1/4" dowels I created 4 flipovers that worked! I immediately ordered 500 more of those balls from my supplier, and to make a long long story short, after about a year or so of experimenting, came up with a way of making flipovers that worked about 99.9% of the time. Over the years I sold literally millions of them! Naturally I wanted to repeat this great product, and I started exploring other tops.

[ortwin]

One of the things with the tippe top I am not sure about is the shape of the end of the stem. Is it better to keep it flat as it is found to be in most tippe tops today? For sure it should be two cents cheaper in production.
In some of the drawings in this thread the stem area, that becomes a tip, is clearly rounded. My own experiments were not conclusive in deciding which shape gives better results.

[ortwin]

Thanks for asking. I uploaded it here: https://www.ta0.com/misc/tippetop.pdf
It's not my usual short story, more historical than anything else.

Thank you ta0, I enjoyed reading it very much!
When did you write it?
The only thing in the story that seems hard to believe for me, is that everybody should have known and played peg tops around that time.
And I picked up one minor spelling mistake: it is "Wendekreisel" not "wendekreisel". You know, nouns always start with capital letters in German.

[ta0]

Thank you ta0, I enjoyed reading it very much!
When did you write it?
The only thing in the story that seems hard to believe for me, is that everybody should have known and played peg tops around that time.
And I picked up one minor spelling mistake: it is "Wendekreisel" not "wendekreisel". You know, nouns always start with capital letters in German.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I wrote it in 2013. I knew no German at that time. I will correct the mistake.
The story has some true facts: Bohr was a very good soccer player and his mathematician brother competed on the Denmark's Olympic scoccer team, Pauli had Carl Jung as his psychologist and he had problems with women (apparently he chased them in the bars of Hamburg), Christiansen was Bohr's advisor and the photo was taken at the Swedish meeting. But, of course, the tippe top they spun was likely an Østberg top and Bohr and Pauli likely hadn't seen a Wendekreisel before the 1950s. Pauli almost certainly played tops as a kid, but I would be impressed if he ever split two tops in a row

[Iacopo]

Thank you, Ta0, for this thread, it was an interesting reading. Your short story was pleasantly entertaining.

[Iacopo]

..the shape of the end of the stem. Is it better to keep it flat as it is found to be in most tippe tops today?

Maybe with the rounded end it can spin more easily in sleeping position after the reversal.

[ta0]

Thank you, Ta0, for this thread, it was an interesting reading. Your short story was pleasantly entertaining.

Thanks. I'm glad that you like it.

..the shape of the end of the stem. Is it better to keep it flat as it is found to be in most tippe tops today?

Maybe with the rounded end it can spin more easily in sleeping position after the reversal.

Yeah, I would think that it would spin longer with a rounded end. Unless the tippe top ends up standing up on the flat end of the stem. I don't recall if that has ever happened to me (I have the feeling that it has but perhaps it was in a dream).

[jim in paris]

Salut Jorge ,
I enjoyed reading you short story
based on historical facts :
what we nowadays call a " uchrony " .
I reckon that if you had opted for a 1st person narrative, it would have been difficult to choise between Wolf and Niels !

writing is the next step of reading, isnt it ?

youpee-tipee !

jim