Bamboo-copter

The bamboo-copter, also known as the bamboo dragonfly or Chinese top, is a toy helicopter rotor that flies upward when its shaft is rapidly spun between the hands. It is called zhuqingting in Chinese and taketonbo in Japanese. The toy originated in Jin dynasty China around 320 AD, and the Daoist philosopher Ge Hong's book Baopuzi, written around 317, mentions a flying vehicle with returning blades that Joseph Needham read as a description of a helicopter top. The toy reached Europe, where it appears in Renaissance paintings and in drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, including a French Madonna and Child of about 1460 and Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Children's Games of about 1560. It then became the object of early experiments by the English engineer George Cayley, who began studying such tops in 1792 and described a two-propeller flying model in his 1809 article On Aerial Navigation, making it a direct ancestor of the helicopter rotor and the aircraft propeller. It also inspired the Takecopter gadget in the Doraemon anime and manga.