Bead Chain Helix


Photo courtesy of Kenneth Snelson

Ten-fold tensegrity prism (as I would call it -- Snelson calls it a helix). In an email of July 27, 2008, in response to my remark that his bead-chain prototyping technique was the only inelastic technique I had seen for modeling tensegrities (as compared with elastic techniques like those using Tensegritoy), Snelson reminded me that Emmerich used chains, and I also remember this from a model Maxim Schrogin built. While a variety of interesting tensegrities can be modeled using elastic techniques, some cannot be done well, and an elastic model will of course misrepresent the response when it is realized using inelastic media.

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