An executive toy is a novelty item that is usually a small mechanical gadget placed on the desk of a corporate executive or other office workers. They have no work-related function, but are usually interesting to look at and entertaining.
The first executive toy may have been a gadget designed by the great mathematician and engineer Philo of Byzantium (about 280 BC - about 220 BC), an octagon-shaped ink pot with openings on each side. One could turn the pot so that any face is on top and dip the pen in the opening, but the ink never ran out through the holes on other sides. The inkwell was suspended in the centre on a series of gimbals and remained stationary in spite of any rotation.
Examples of executive toys include:
- Ant farm
- Baoding Balls
- Crookes radiometer
- EcoSphere (closed Aquarium)
- Etch A Sketch
- Hoberman sphere
- Liquid motion toy (Dripper or Wave Motion variants)
- Drinking bird
- Magic 8-Ball
- Mechanical puzzle
- Musical box
- Nanoblocks, a system of plastic building blocks similar to Lego but about half the linear dimensions. Most finished models are designed to be tiny, of a size suitable for an office desk decoration.
- Newton's cradle, where a set of metal balls are suspended from above, one is pulled from the rest and kicks them, transferring the kinetic energy to the last one.
- Perpetual pendulum, which doesn't stop due to an electric magnet in the base of the toy.
- Pin Art, a box with thousands of small pins of equal length inserted into a board, that can be pressed from one side with any object so that the other ends of the pins form a three-dimensional image of the object on the other side of the board.
- USB toys, small gadgets or toys which draw their electrical power from the USB or Universal serial bus on a computer.
- Rubik's Cube
- Novelty lighter
- Novelty Magnet
- Small plastic magnetic pigs, sheep, etc.
- Top
- Yo-yo
- Paddle ball
- Squirt gun
- Snow globe
- Lava lamp
- Plasma globe
- Decorative paperweight
- Neodymium magnet toys
- Magnetic face toy (Fuzzy Face, Wooly Willy, etc.)
- Mechanical bank
- Fake Aquarium
- Stress ball
- Ferrofluid toy
- Zen Garden
- Sand Pendulum
- Hourglass
Famous quotes containing the words executive and/or toy:
“... the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the boss’s moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.”
—Anne Bogan, U.S. executive secretary. As quoted in Working, book 1, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“... Everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)