Inventor of Etch A Sketch dies in France at 86

[brador]

I don't understand the part of how he came to his invention. Can someone explain please?

>he peeled a translucent decal from a light switch plate and found pencil mark images transferred to the opposite face

So he had a sticker you can see through, used pencil to draw on it and you could see those left on the surface under it. But how does that link with the way an Etch-a-sketch works?

[SoftwareMaven]

The Etch a Sketch works by scraping aluminum off of glass, so the implementation is kind of the inverse of the inspiration; but they both revolve around taking a pointer and running it across something adhering to the surface.

[daniel-cussen]

"Ohio Art saw his idea at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1959. The toy, with its gray screen, red frame and two white knobs that are twisted back and forth to create drawings, was launched in 1960 and became the top seller that holiday season. More than 100 million have been sold worldwide since."

Wow, that must have grossed over a billion in today's dollars. There's a billion-dollar idea for you.

[CKKim]

Indeed. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Cassagnes I wonder: 'idea' or 'discovery'?

"Cassagnes, an electrician at the Lincrusta Company, was performing a routine installation of a factory light switch plate wrapped in a translucent decal covering. During the installation, he removed the decal and wrote on it with a pencil, noticing that image transferred to the opposite face. Cassagnes tinkered with his discovery, which led to the world's first prototype of the Etch A Sketch."

I love these stories of something chanced upon by accident being turned into a product. It wouldn't surprise me if most successful ideas come about this way, rather than from a 'visionary' entrepreneur brainstorming the 'next big thing'.

[ChuckMcM]

The true inventor of the iPad :-)

I was one of those kids that eventually couldn't take it any more and I took my Etch-a-Sketch apart to figure out how the heck it worked. Just a warning, that stuff gets on everything. :-) There are only a handful of toys that left a big impression on me as a young man, this one was right up there with the Slinky.

[edouard1234567]

100M of these have been sold. Most popular tablet yet!

[melling]

The iPad has already sold 100m.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad

I would expect Android tablets to be accelerating through that number in the next year or two. The world is going to change quickly.

[cseelus]

Stunning what some people are able to create with this stuff: http://www.gvetchedintime.com/gvetchedintime/gallery.php

[prezjordan]

It's amazing how simple the etch-a-sketch is, but most people find it difficult to draw basic shapes. Side-note: I'm not very good with an etch-a-sketch but I found a hidden ability of mine and drew this [1], which got thrown in "Weird NJ" magazine.

[1]: http://i3.minus.com/jbuePHaiXbDPXg.JPG

[richardburton]

The relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/551/

[pavel_lishin]

The relevant Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-04-03/

(Brief aside: is XKCD the modern Dilbert?)

[arjn]

Beautiful, simple, entertaining.

[mauvehaus]

And an enormous mess if you get curious and take it apart to see how it works. They're hard to take apart for a reason. Fortunately, I did it on a keychain-sized one, and not a full sized one.