Gizmodo posted about The Flexy today, an eco-friendly cardboard Slinky type thing. It reminded me of something I had seen in the early 90s.
Reignhold Marxhausen was an artist who taught at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, where I was born. He was a very interesting character and is most well known for his sound sculptures/toys (it got him on Letterman). I saw him speak once when I was in junior high and he brought a lot of things to play with. One of them happened to be The Flurry, a cardboard Slinky type thing he invented and manufactured in the 70s. The picture above comes from one being sold on eBay which has a good description.
A current Concordia student has started a blog dedicated to Marxhausen’s work. A recent post shows some of his sculptures and The Flurry in motion (notice the two-colored one).
Two random things I remember about Marxhausen:
He had a patch of clover in a high traffic area—the driveway or the sidewalk. He noticed that it would often have not just four-leaf clovers but even more leaves than that. This lead him to believe that you could create four-leaf clovers through pressure, but as far as I know he didn’t build a contraption to test this.
The carpet in his living room was a patchwork of carpet samples that a store had thrown out.