Kenyon Taylor1908–1986
Invented the flip-disc display
Canadian engineer and inventor at Ferranti-Packard who devised the flip-disc display, the magnetically flipped dots of early transit and stock-exchange signs.
Flipdot
A board of flip discs turned over by a fluid field moving beneath it. Fast edges leave discs caught mid-flip, squashed to slivers.
About this pattern
Kenyon Taylor, Ferranti-Packard, 1961 · Jim Blinn, 1982
Each disc has two faces, bright and dark, and nothing in between: a flip-disc sign can only say on or off. The motion lives in when the discs turn. Underneath the board runs a smooth field, blobs that merge and part, rings spreading from dropped stones, a swirling flow or a washing tide, and a disc flips over when the field crosses its level.
A flip takes a moment, so wherever the edge moves quickly it leaves a wake of discs still turning, seen edge-on as thin ellipses. Kenyon Taylor designed the flip-disc display at Ferranti-Packard in the early 1960s, and its clatter ran stock tickers, scoreboards and bus destinations for decades. The blobs are Jim Blinn's metaballs of 1982. Every field loops, so the board can play forever without replaying the past.
Behind the mathematics
Jim Blinnborn 1949
Metaballs, the blobs that drive the default board
American computer graphics pioneer who introduced blobby objects, the metaballs whose fields merge smoothly as they pass near one another.