Accession No
6139
Brief Description
School geometry equipment sets, including faulty and badly designed protractors, 1990s.
Origin
Maker
Class
mathematics
Earliest Date
1994
Latest Date
1998
Inscription Date
Material
Plastic
Dimensions
Length 300mm; width 245mm; height 70mm (in total)
Special Collection
Provenance
Donated on or before 09/07/2007. Purchased by a Mathematics teacher, who noticed that his students were getting incorrect results when measuring angles. He found that many of their protactors had been designed in a way that precluded accurate measurement (opaque rather than clear plastic) or correct measurement (centre point of protractor below the 0 and 180 degrees points). He bought many of these and wrote to suppliers, manufacturers and shippers to try and stop their production.
Inscription
Description Notes
6 school geometry equipment sets and 6 loose protractors, demonstrating the faulty and badly designed protractors on sale in the 1990s.
Set 1: two set squares, a ruler and protractor in plastic wallet. Protractor is opaque and baseline is too high so cannot be used properly. Bought from Woolworths, 1998.
Set 2: two set squares, ruler, protractor, compass, pencil sharpener, pencil and rubber inside purple plastic case with hinged clear plastic front. Protractor is opaque. Objects marked as made in China.
Set 3: two set squares, ruler, protractor, pencil sharpener, pencil and rubber inside red plastic box with sliding blue lid. Sides of box are gradated: one as 7inch ruler, one as 18cm ruler. Protractor is opaque and baseline is both too high and wonky. Box marked as made in China.
Set 4: two set squares, ruler, protractor, compass, pencil sharpener, pencil and rubber, in yellow hinged plastic case. Protractor is opaque and baseline is too high. By Grafix, bought from Wilkinson’s, 1998.
Set 5: two set squares, ruler, protractor and 12 pencils in cardboard and plastic packaging. Protractor’s base line is not horizontal but rather dips in the middle by almost 5mm. Objects marked as made in China, 1994.
Set 6: two set squares, ruler and protractor designed to slot into one another. Protractor is opaque. and baseline is too high.
6 loose protractors: 2 have dipped baselines (i.e. not horizontal), 3 have baselines that are too high, and all 6 are opaque.
Condition: good.
References
Events
Description
A protractor is a device for measuring the angle between two points or two lines. It is a semicircle, with a scale marked around its circumference from 0 to 180 degrees. The instrument should be made out of a clear material, typically transparent plastic, so that the scale can be held precisely over the lines whose angle is to be measured.
In this collection of faulty protractors, bought by a mathematics teacher named Peter Bailey, the protractors are made of solid coloured plastic rather than clear, making it impossible to correctly place them over the angle to be measured. Others in the collection do not have a horizontal baseline; their centre point dips down almost 5mm below the horizontal so that none of the markings are correct. Others have a base-line marked high above the actual baseline of the protractor, making it difficult to line up measurements accurately.
Peter Bailey donated these useless instruments along with a large collection of correspondence between him and the shops and companies producing and selling them. His own account of the episode, entitled ‘A Piece of Mathematical History, or, How I Rid the World of Useless Protractors’, recounts his three year quest to convince these companies to desist from harming the mathematical education of school students across the country. Despite initial setbacks, including being rebuffed by the BBC’s Watchdog program and the Trading Standards office, Bailey eventually heard from major retailers such as Woolworths and Wilkinsons confirming that they had discontinued the faulty sets.
20/10/2016
Created by: Joshua Nall on 20/10/2016
FM:46608
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