Drawings and Typescripts, Animal Alphabet Book
date: label: date made
content: 1945
name: label: maker
content: Wheeler, Albert Harry
notes: label: Description
content: “ANIMAL ALPHABET BOOK” includes typed drafts and illustrations for a projected book by A. Henry Wheeler, a mathematics teacher. The illustrations are tangrams, where a tangram is a design formed from seven geometric shapes: five isosceles right triangles (two small, one medium and two large whose areas are in the ration 1:2:4), one square, and one parallelogram. The seven pieces can be fit together to make millions of designs but only 13 different polygons: a triangle, seven quadrilaterals (including a square), two pentagons, and three hexagons.
label: Description
content: It appears as if Wheeler knew about tangrams as early as 1908 since his papers include notes he had taken from a December 1908 article by the British puzzle expert Henry E. Dudeney, “Tales with Tangrams,” (<I>The Strand Magazine</I> vol. XXXVI: 581-585). While tangrams were invented in China in the late eighteenth century, in 1903 an American puzzle expert, Sam Loyd, published <I>The 8th Book of Tan</I> that contains a completely fabricated history including a statement that a deceased professor had written that there were seven books of Tangrams compiled in China over 4,000 years ago. Loyd’s book is still popular as indicated by Dover Publications having reissued its 1968 edition in 2019 with added footnotes.
label: Description
content: Wheeler’s illustrations include tangrams of all the upper case letters and all the animals for which he wrote drafts of descriptions. The animals he chose are: Alligator, Buffalo, Camel, Deer, Elephant, Fox, Giraffe, Hippopotamus, Ibex, Jackal, Kangaroo, Lion , Mule, Northern Hare, Ostrich, Pelican, Quagga, Rhinoceros, Stork, Tiger, Ursus Americanus (American Bear), Vulture, Wolf, Yak, and Zebra. For the X entry, Wheeler explained that “This particular spot marked by ‘X’ is where an animal would be if we could find a nice one beginning with ‘X’.”
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Massachusetts, Worcester
topic: label: Subject
content: Mathematics
label: Subject
content: Games
label: Subject
content: Mathematical Recreations
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Mathematics
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Gift of Louise D. Campbell
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1979.3002.134
label: catalog number
content: 1979.3002.134
label: nonaccession number
content: 1979.3002
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Animal Alphabet Book
label: Object Name
content: drawings and typescripts
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: tan (overall color)
label: Physical Description
content: white (overall color)
label: Measurements
content: average spatial: 1.6 cm x 29 cm x 37.5 cm; 5/8 in x 11 13/32 in x 14 3/4 in