CHILD'S PLAY.(creating new toys)

In 1913, an Illinois stonemason named Charles Pajeau created a toy after seeing his children playing with pencils and empty thread spools--he called it Tinkertoy. In 1916, John Lloyd Wright, the son of the architect, invented Lincoln Logs, a toy inspired by watching the earthquake-proof, "floating cantilever construction" of his father's Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo. During the Second World War, a mechanical engineer named Richard James was working on ships' suspension systems when a torsion spring fell off his desk and flopped over, and the way it wiggled struck him as funny. His wife, Betty, paging through the dictionary, came upon a word for the toy: Slinky. In 1982, a nasa nuclear engineer named Lonnie Johnson was working at home on a high-pressure pump when a jet of water accidentally shot across the bathroom. Since then, more than two hundred million Super Soakers have been sold.

Seventeen years ago, Chuck Hoberman was a kinetic sculptor, with a degree in fine art from Cooper Union and a degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He and his wife, Carolyn, who was also an artist, lived in a seventh-floor walkup just below Canal Street, in a dilapidated building with a sign outside that said, "Gentleman--Please Do Not Urinate on the Door. It Is Unsanitary." Chuck was interested in transformations--mechanical objects that could change their size without changing their shape. "I was obsessed with the idea of making objects disappear," he told me. "Not as a magic trick, but where the object could self-transform--change itself by itself." He tried to imagine a scissors hinge, like those you see in old-fashioned elevator doors, except in three dimensions, so that the structure could expand into a dome or a sphere. What would the geometry of such a structure look like? Early in the morning, before going off to his job at an engineering firm, Chuck would sit in his "study" (created by hanging a sheet between the desk and the bed), folding pieces of paper into triangles, pentagons, and polyhedrons. He worked on the problem for several years, but he made no progress.

The Hobermans are Buddhists, and one day in the spring of 1987 they were visiting their teacher's retreat, at a farm in the Hudson Valley. "I was listening to a great Tibetan lama who was teaching the philosophy of mind, a kind of brick-by-brick construction of the proper view of consciousness," Chuck recalled. "Each point was introduced, examined from the point of view of several different schools of Buddhist thought, then synthesized into a conclusion that led to the next point. I was supposed to be meditating, but I was drifting. It was a beautiful spring day, and the room was warm. Then there was a click, and in an instant I saw the solution to my obsession. I saw a linkage--a hinged loop of pieces moving in space. I could see how two, three, many linkages could be attached to one another to build up an entire transforming volume."

Chuck took out a patent on the idea, which was described in the technical literature as a "Doubly-Curved Truss Structure." He thought of his structure as art, but he wanted to prove that it had a practical, money-making purpose as well; utility is an essential part of Chuck's aesthetic. He had a series of conversations with Martin Mikulas, who was then the head of structural concepts at nasa's Langley Research Center, about developing his invention for space travel. He also spoke to a tent manufacturer about making a tent that wouldn't require poles, a luggage-maker about creating suitcases and trunks that could fold up for easier storage, and a medical-equipment manufacturer about making instruments for noninvasive surgery. Everyone Chuck spoke to was certain that he had invented something valuable, but no one was sure exactly what it was.

The notion that what Chuck Hoberman had invented was a toy came from Anthony Gentile, who, along with his twin brother, John, is a partner in Abrams Gentile Entertainment, a firm that creates toys and brokers ideas to larger manufacturers. Most independent inventors need toy brokers in order to gain access to the industry. Hasbro and Mattel, which between them account for about thirty-five per cent of the industry's twenty billion dollars in annual ...