Copyright bbc
Sixty years ago engineer Denys Fisher settled down to relax on a Sunday night and listen to a spot of classical music. Within minutes, he was hit by a Eureka moment that solved a problem he had been wrestling with for months - and led to a permanent addition to the canon of childhood toys. Born in Leeds in 1918, Denys was successful by any measure in 1965. The now middle-aged engineer had dropped out of university and joined his family's firm before doing well enough to start his own company. That firm was also expanding and, with the Cold War at its height, had secured a contract with NATO to design detonators for weapons. But his new line of work sat uneasily on his shoulders. "Spirograph came at a critical point in dad's life," says his son, Duncan Fisher. "He left the family business in his middle age and started up on his own and he was able, he was very successful, but he'd ended up in the armaments industry, as many engineers often do. "But dad was a pacifist. So once he got beyond the interesting engineering of it, it troubled him that that's where his engineering had led him. And the last thing that he ever wanted to do was help create weapons." Duncan says his father was looking for something different and was fascinated by mathematical patterns. "There were complex devices that created these patterns. They've been around for more than 100 years, where you sort of crank a handle and mechanically you put a pen into a holder, crank a handle, and it will sort of clunk around and draw these patterns," he explains. "After playing around with those devices, he set them aside for about six months or so and one Sunday night, he was listening to Beethoven, and suddenly this idea popped into his mind. "The thing is you didn't need all those complex levers and crank arms - just that simple Spirograph form that we know."
