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A spinning top, or simply a top, is a toy with a squat body and a sharp point at the bottom, designed to be spun on its vertical axis, balancing on the tip due to the gyroscopic effect. Once set in motion, a top will usually wobble for a few seconds, spin upright for a while, then start to wobble again with increasing amplitude as it loses ...
The stem may be used as a handle to pick up the top, and is also used to spin the top into motion. When a tippe top is spun at a high angular velocity, its stem slowly tilts downwards more and more until it suddenly lifts the body of the spinning top off the ground, with the stem now pointing downward. Eventually, as the top's spinning rate ...
To truly overbalance the wheel (so that torque in one direction is greater than the other) and cause motion, the radius of the spokes would have to be altered throughout the course of the wheel's motion. This would have to be done actively, thus consuming energy in the process — and so the machine would cease to be a perpetual-motion engine.
As early as 1836, the Scottish mathematician Edward Sang contrived and explained the precession of a spinning top. [14] In 1851, Charles Wheatstone [15] described an apparatus that consists of a vibrating spring that is mounted on top of a disk so that it makes a fixed angle φ with the disk. The spring is struck so that it oscillates in a plane.
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The Wizzzer or Wiz-z-zer is a gyrostat toy introduced by Mattel Toymakers in 1969, and introduced the spinning top to modern children. The "twist" (innovation) was the use of a super-spinning, high-tech bearing, that allowed the top to spin at very high speed and remain standing for a long period of time.
Perpetual motion is the motion of bodies that continues forever in an unperturbed system. A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work indefinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, since its existence would violate the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The Levitron top device is a commercial toy under this brand that displays the phenomenon known as spin-stabilized magnetic levitation. This method, with moving permanent magnets, is quite distinct from other versions which use changing electromagnetic fields, levitating various items such as a rotating world globe, model space shuttle or VW ...