It turned out that the history of the spinning top is incredibly fascinating🔥🔥
For centuries, children (and I'm sure adults too) have enjoyed playing with spinning tops that twirl in a delightful manner. There were several types of these spinners, but the two main ones were the small wooden ones that spun between the fingers and the larger ones that were spun with a string (in Turkey, such a top is still popular and known as a 'topaç').
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Between 1879 and 1913, the not-so-famous company Lorenz Bolz from Zirndorf patented several inventions and created the 'whistling top' (Brummkreisel). It featured a genuinely complex mechanism that combined a gyroscope with a screw shaft. With each subsequent press on the shaft, it accelerated. Eventually, the top would spin so fast that air would enter a special resonance chamber through small holes located along the diameter's edge, and magic would ensue.
A whirling top with such momentum isn't easy to stop. For instance, when our 2.5-year-old son touches it, it hardly slows down (you can see it in the video).
Now, for the facts: