Skip to Content
Uncategorized

90 Degree Index Ratchet Built from LEGO

An ingenious design from another era is resurrected.
February 24, 2012

It’s Friday, do you really want me to make you think? Instead, I bring you a “90 degree index ratchet,” realized in LEGO in what I gather was a single evening by Dan Zimmerman. Dan is a physicist at the University of Maryland whose day job is building a 30-ton sphere filled with liquid sodium that may or may not spontaneously generate a magnetic field like Earth’s.

Dan got the design for this ratchet from a book first published in 1930, Ingenious Mechanisms for Designer and Inventors.

There was a time before computers and the Internet that budding geeks who wanted to “program” in any sense of the word were limited to physical computers. Mechanisms like this one have the added benefit of affecting the material world rather than just someone’s eyeballs, so we called it mechanical engineering, revolutionized industrial production and only later started taking it for granted enough to ship it overseas.

Dan has also built an upright bass out of LEGOs. It even has a nice sound.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build

“I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us.”

ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.

Meet the people who use Notion to plan their whole lives

The workplace tool’s appeal extends far beyond organizing work projects. Many users find it’s just as useful for managing their free time.

Learning to code isn’t enough

Historically, learn-to-code efforts have provided opportunities for the few, but new efforts are aiming to be inclusive.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.