Makers

Sign up for the Make: Newsletter

Sign up for the Make: Newsletter

Don’t forget, we’re now publishing a monthly Make: Newsletter. The November edition will be emailed out this coming week. The newsletter covers news and happenings around Maker Media, what’s going on here at Make: Online, and contains original material, such as my new “Maker’s Dictionary” column, a growing glossary of perennial tech terms and cutting-edge […]

Makers by Cory Doctorow

Makers by Cory Doctorow

MAKE columnist and Boing Boing super-blogger, Cory Doctorow, has just released his latest novel, called Makers(!) I just got my copy and tucked into it. So far, so awesome. Cory’s books always crackle with such amazing ideas, technological and cultural hacks, that seem just over the horizon, or already in some sketchy warehouse or nerd’s […]

MAKE contributors at Pop!Tech

MAKE contributors at Pop!Tech

Here’s a channel NY1 report on the recent Pop!Tech conference in Camden, ME. The piece profiles three MAKE contributors, Reuben Margolin, Zach Debord, and Mike Gould. Reuben has shown his work and spoken at Maker Faire, Zach Debord’s BEAMbots have been featured in MAKE (and on the cover of The Best of MAKE), and Mike […]

The gravity-powered xylophones of Charles and Ray Eames

901 documents the dismantling of the offices of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames following Ray’s death in 19XX. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.

The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.

The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15′ tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.