by Terese Svoboda
I never heard Henry Bull, my father-in-law, claim he invented the Whee-Lo, but his proud sons have on occasion. He manufactured and distributed the toy, and made it into a nationwide sensation in 1953, just before the hula hoop and Frisbee. A curved double metal track that held a spinning plastic wheel, the gyroscopic magnetic Whee-Lo is still available for purchase, most frequently at airport gift shops. By flicking your wrist, you propel the wheel and its spinning progress down the track and back. Mesmerizing, it’s a sort of fifties’ analog Game Boy. First called the Magnetic Walking Wheel, it came packaged with six colorful cardboard discs known as “Whee-lets” that created optical illusions as the wheel spun. According to Fortune, Henry’s company, Maggie Magnetics, sold two million units its first year.[1] Like the hula hoop, which Arthur K. “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr claim to have invented in 1958, the Whee-lo had been around for a while, although maybe not for the uncounted centuries of the hoop. One version of the Whee-Lo was known as “Uncle Spinny Dervish” in the 30s.
Someone had given Henry a prototype, which he brought home to test on his sons. My husband remembers it being about a quarter of the size of the eventual model. His father had to improve its engineering because the wheel didn’t have enough diameter and mass to create sufficient centrifugal energy to spin well. Terrible design, but interesting proof of concept. That someone was paid a licensing fee, and Maggie Magnetics manufactured it and patented improvements to the toy in 1972.
Two stories account for the genesis of Henry’s interest in the magnetics business. During the Depression, he managed to get a job selling refrigerators for GE. He became frustrated because he had no way to affix the prices in the showroom until he discovered that magnets held the labels to the fridge fronts without leaving a mark. Voila! The fridge magnet. Dull and utilitarian-looking, they came nine to a box, displayed like chocolates, each with its own compartment.
The other story was memorialized by a Bill O’Malley cartoon that ran alongside a House and Garden article, “How to get rich in your own basement.” It had a cartoon Henry standing in the then fashionable all-steel kitchen, puzzling over where to leave a note eye-level for his wife where she could see it. The article was written by Dickson Hartwell, and it was published in May, 1950, three years before my husband’s mother divorced Henry to marry Dickson. Had Dickson written it to check out the competition? “When Bull discovered his wife was forever losing her kitchen pencil just when he needed it, he designed a magnetic pencil…It clings to the side of a refrigerator like a leech and refuses to get mislaid.” (No Freudian overtones there.) Did Dickson even bother to interview Henry or did Pat just feed him the information? Despite the bitterness of his divorce, Henry saved the clipping for fifty years, with his name underlined. He was grateful for the exposure, damn the wife.
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Why was it called Maggie Magnetics? I ask my husband.
At eight I had a girlfriend named Magda.
No, he says later. That’s what I told Magda. I think my father liked the alliteration.
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The second Maggie Magnetics’ toy was the Sputnik Magnetic Satellite Set, part of the space toy race that followed the launch competitions between the U.S. and Russia. The set had a track holding two magnetic satellites on wheels, one of which housed a dog figure to denote Laika, the Russian space dog. Both circled a plastic earth. Its instructions suggested that the toy would help to explain space travel. Perhaps it also promoted talk about the space race. It did not rival the Whee-Lo’s mesmerizing simplicity, nor its sales.
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Astronauts took the Whee-Lo into space three times, on the sixteenth flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the fourth flight of the Space Shuttle “Discovery,” and the third flight of the “Endeavor” in 1993. They used it to demonstrate the conservation of momentum, angular momentum, magnets, rotational and translational kinetic energy, and phase locking, but I suspect they were just as enamored of its mind-numbing challenges as the schoolchildren they were addressing.
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In 1984 Russians were interested in my husband’s patent for a single launch low-gravity space station. The film business he’d worked in as an assistant director had slacked off, and he hadn’t yet applied to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and was instead tinkering with inventions, like his father. He brought the patent pending to Brighton’s International Aeronautical Federation Conference, where the Russians asked for a meeting. He was so taken aback by the hangar-sized room they’d rented for interviews, especially the tiny shed they’d built in the very middle, complete with a dangling single light bulb, that he refused the interview. He wasn’t going to be the next Manchurian candidate and undergo brainwashing. Most likely the Soviets lacked the capital for setting up a decent conference display, but just a few years earlier, CIA operative Uri Geller, an expert in bending spoons with his mind, had given President Jimmy Carter a four-hour briefing on the Soviets and their efforts in the field of psychic manipulation. [2]
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My husband wasn’t allowed to bring the Wheel-o home because of his jealous stepfather Dickson. Because he took apart everything, he received an erector set one Christmas and his brother did not. Henry wanted my husband to be an engineer, but his mother saw him as a minister – because he was so good at negotiating peace between the various domestic partners. Her sole acknowledgment of his mechanical talent came late in the 50s, when she gave him first day covers from the UN depicting space exploration events. Dickson collected stamps, but these were for him.
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Every night for six weeks! Really?
That was my response after the first night of my husband’s space plant experiment, actually about two hours into the first night. Proof-of-concept for space farming in low earth orbit consisted of three layers of flats filled with plants under grow lights calibrated to mimic space time in lunar orbit. Forty-five minutes on, forty-five minutes off. But I was a farmer’s daughter, how could I not appreciate the experiment? The baby also did not appreciate this experiment. We slept in a loft above the lights but no amount of curtaining could conceal the change. Just as the baby would start to relax, the lights switched on or off. How did the astronauts not go mad? Yes, they used masks but the baby would not, and I needed to keep track of the baby. You, I said rather pointedly to my husband, can sleep through anything.
This particular experiment was cut short, nipped in the bud, seriously discouraged, nyet.
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In the late 90s, my husband left the film business and graduated from NYU and we moved to Menlo Park where he worked in Paul Allen’s think tank, Interval Research. It was nirvana for inventors: they sat around in teams (like comedy writers!) and thought up ideas for things you didn’t know you even needed, like his U-in-a-Movie, an arcade device that inserted your automatically-directed performance into an existing movie, and a music sensor that plays Jimi Hendrix’s guitar at Seattle’s Experience Museum (now the Museum of Pop Culture).
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When I married him I said if you’re really an inventor, why fool around, why not harness lightning? I bought him condensers. He suggested I hold the end of the kite string. When climate change arrived, I said why not save the world? So he patented Artificial Sea Ice, a system for containing icebergs, which should, in turn, slow their melting. One of his boyhood friends, Lawson Brigham, is one of the world’s authorities on shipping and navigating sea ice. He was interested, and serendipitously, so was a man with exactly my husband’s name, a doppelganger, who lived in Europe and headed expeditions to glaciers in Greenland. Funding remains a problem. Then suddenly everyone needed ventilators for the pandemic. My husband made a homemade ventilator with parts from the hardware store and one small Arduino kit. A wearable iron lung, the invention is non-invasive and designed to keep patients out of the hospital. He hopes it will be especially useful if you’re triaged out of treatment as someone with co-morbidities or too old for their positive pressure ventilators. Like us.
There was also the Musical Chair that could be played by pumping its seat, varying the tone like a trombone with oscillator pitches.
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Together we designed The Fat Game, and a board game to improve psychotherapy. Game agents were not enthusiastic about either. Governors’ Island exhibited “Our Town Selfie,” a cellphone project that combined my reworked Thurber script adjusted for virtual actors who “phoned in” their performances in real time and were then combined into a full performance, but the tech (then) was very slow. We worked on an electronic game called “It,” a cat -and-mouse hide-and-seek interactive outdoor cell phone game that won several prizes. For a number of years, he traveled to campuses across the country as an MC, organizing treasure hunts using cellphone clues I would figure out from college websites. One favorite was invading the women’s bathroom for a hint. He and Scot Gresham-Lancaster, a musician he’d met at Interval Research, developed Cellphonia, a tech server that combined voices from the cell phone into chaotic opera-like choruses, winning several grants with a dozen performances here and abroad. That in turn inspired his work with the acolytes of David Tudor, who electrified woks and other mundane objects, turning them into sound art at places like Brown and Caramoor. When The Daily News backed the launch of his augmented reality Pokemon-Go-like game, with clues embedded in the newspaper, it was on September 11, 2001.
Such is the hit-or-miss life of inventors.
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The last toy manufactured by Maggie Magnetics was “Sneaky Snake,” a sort of early version of “Operation” where players had to dodge a magnetic snake with their wands, the kind of game, it seems to me, that leads only to frustration and then battling between boys and subsequent breaking of wands. It did not do well.
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Harvey Matusow, a paid FBI informant who named hundreds of people for McCarthy, went to jail only when he told the truth and retracted his testimony. Among those affected by his accusations were the State Department, CBS, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the YWCA and the UN.[3] Matusow said there were 500 Communist teachers in the New York City school system, and made headlines saying things like “The Sunday section of the New York Times alone has 126 dues-paying Communists. On the editorial and research staffs of Time and Life magazines are 76 hard-core Reds. The New York Bureau of the Associated Press has 25.”[4] In 1952 he destroyed Pete Seeger’s group, the Weavers, by insinuating that they had communist leanings.[5] He flipped three times, making him an anti-anti-Communist. “I’m not saying that I’m a credible person,” he said in a much later Rolling Stone interview.[6] He argued that the problem was not the people he crushed and ruined but the country that produced him and pushed him to power. Serving four years in jail, he saw himself as a sort of Daniel Ellsberg of his time.[7] Although people paid thousands of dollars a week not to be named by him, he insisted that he used the sale of a patent on a new version of the Whee-lo to pay his lawyers. Was he the inventor Henry negotiated with to start the Whee-lo business? Nowhere is Matusow mentioned in the patent. Perhaps he meant a variant of the Yo-yo – or else he lied.
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Henry had a game agent named Felicia with the deep raspy voice of a forties actress. She was the one who told us our Fat Game would never go, but she also had the distinction of having rejected Scrabble – we shouldn’t have been discouraged. While remembering how she tossed it into a closet one weekend, and regretted it forever after, she was quick to point out that two game manufacturers had passed on it before Hasbro bought it.
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Henry’s partner, a Mr. Green, was an ex-GE engineer. A few years after Henry’s divorce, Mr. Green made a deal to sell Maggie Magnetics while Henry was away on a sales trip. If Henry wouldn’t sign, there would be a big lawsuit. The details of this humiliation were not clear. Obviously they didn’t have the partnership agreement very well written. Were there lies involved? Although Henry said he supported himself for the next thirty-five years solely by playing the stock market, I imagine he must have had a big payout and collected a percentage on the ongoing sales, with his portion cut off when new buyers “improved” the toy and gained full control of the patent.
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The Whee-Lo appeared in the 2005 movie, Robots, and in a 2006 episode of Family Guy.
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My husband is a “blue sky man,” a visionary. He understands all the pieces of whatever problem, reorients them to work better and generates enthusiasm for the change. Sometimes that results in an invention, but seldom does it result in money. You can invent all you want, but unless you find someone to promote your invention, you may as well not have filed for the patent at all.
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Henry never said he invented the Whee-Lo, but he always took credit for it. After all, few would have picked it up if he hadn’t promoted it.
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[1] Luce, Henry Robinson. Fortune, Vol. 58, Pt. 2 1958. 190.
[2] Broad, William J. “Pentagon is said to focus on ESP for wartime use.” NY Times 10 Jan 1984. Sec. C, 1.
[3] Martin, Douglas. “Harvey Matusow, 75, an Anti-Communist Informer, Dies.” NY Times. 4 Fev 2002. 87.
[4] Alwood, Edward. Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press. Phila: Temple University Press 2007. 66.
[5] “Agent Calls Singers Reds” NYT. 26 Feb 1952.
[6] Alverson, Charles. “Harvey Matusow: I Led Twelve Lives.” Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/harvey-matusow-i-led-twelve-lives-75024/
AUGUST 17, 1972
[7] Rolling stone.