George Rhoads Rolling Ball Sculpture - My Biggest Influence

Without a doubt, George Rhoads was my biggest influence in wanting to create and build rolling ball sculptures. When I first started finding information about ball machines on the internet in the early 2000s, George Rhoads' sculptures stood out. They were some of the largest and most creative ball machines I could find online. There wasn't a lot of information available back then, and certainly nothing like the endless supply of videos we have today.

I often returned to the few videos and photos I could find of his work. I'd replay the videos, studying the tracks, complicated elements and moving parts with great interest - and maybe just a little bit of envy. His machines were large, but it wasn't just their size that appealed to me. They had a fun, intelligent and playful quality that I really wanted to emulate in my own work.

Finding Inspiration on the Early Internet

The challenge with the early internet was that there simply wasn't much information out there to find. There were a few other artists making whimsical ball machines, including Larry Lawrence, and I'd get captured by their movement and style as well. I'd see something I liked, such as a different track splitter or an interesting mechanical element, and head out to my shop to figure out how I could create my own version.

I wasn't interested in making an exact copy. I'd take the basic idea I'd seen and figure out how to make it work in my own style. Because I was working with different materials and building techniques, copying something exactly usually wasn't practical anyway. Figuring out my own solution was part of the fun. Over time, those ideas combined with things I'd developed myself and gradually became my own style of rolling ball sculpture.

Studying George Rhoads' Ball Machines

I would watch Rhoads' machines and try to understand what was happening mechanically. How did that track work? How did he split the balls? What triggered that element? How did the ball get from here to there? When you build rolling ball sculptures, you don't watch another machine quite the same way everyone else does. You're enjoying it, but you're also studying it.

George Rhoads created large public ball machines, and a number of his sculptures are still operating today in airports, museums, science centers and other public spaces around the United States. What interested me even more than the finished sculptures, though, was eventually learning something about how he built and troubleshot them.

The Part Nobody Sees

There is a small book written by George Rhoads' daughter about his work and life. I found it fascinating because it gave me some insight into how he approached the challenges involved in making these machines. One story in particular really stuck with me because Rhoads had the same problem I've had on nearly every rolling ball sculpture I've ever built:

A ball is on the floor. Where did it come off?

It sounds like a simple problem. It isn't. You can have a large sculpture with multiple balls traveling along several different tracks. Everything can run perfectly for an hour, and then one ball finds just the right combination of speed and position to jump a rail. If you didn't actually see it happen, figuring out where it came off can be extremely difficult.

Finding the Ball That Got Away

According to the story, Rhoads tried several different ways of solving this problem. At one point he put sand on the floor so that when a ball came off the sculpture and rolled away, he could follow its path backward and hopefully determine where it had fallen. He even tried having someone sit and watch the machine run so they could catch a failure when it happened.

Eventually, the better solution was a camera. Record the machine while it runs, and when a ball ends up on the floor, rewind the video and see exactly what happened. That story really resonated with me because I had gone through basically the same troubleshooting process on my own.

I'd finish a sculpture and sit there staring at it while it ran, hoping I'd be looking at exactly the right place when a ball finally misbehaved. That works - sort of. If you look away for a moment, you miss it, which is especially frustrating when the problem only happens once every hour or two. Eventually I came to the same conclusion: use a camera.

Then I could work on something else while the sculpture continued testing. If I came back and found a ball on the floor, or heard one drop, I could review the recording instead of sitting in front of the machine for hours waiting for something to go wrong. It was pretty gratifying to learn that George Rhoads had dealt with the same basic problems I had.

Making a Ball Machine Run Reliably

When you look at a finished rolling ball sculpture, it's almost impossible to see how much time and work went into making it run reliably. Building an element that works once isn't particularly difficult. Building one that works thousands of times in a row is different.

Problems can appear many hours into testing. A section of track that worked perfectly when it was clean can behave differently after a little dirt has built up on the rails. The ball gains traction and friction. Suddenly a corner that seemed perfectly smooth isn't so perfect anymore. That's why I spend so much time testing a finished sculpture. The goal isn't simply to get the ball from the top to the bottom. It's to build a rolling ball sculpture that can continue doing it reliably, hour after hour, day after day.

Seeing George Rhoads' Work in Person

For all the years I've admired his work, I've personally only had the chance to see a couple of George Rhoads' sculptures in person. I've seen his machine at the Colorado Springs airport and another at Boston Logan International Airport. Unfortunately, the Boston piece wasn't running when I saw it, but that didn't stop me from spending time looking over the tracks and elements and imagining the machine in motion.

There is much more of his work available to see online today than there was when I started. People have recorded his sculptures in airports, museums and other public spaces and posted the videos online. Back when I was starting out, finding even a few good videos of a Rhoads machine was exciting. Seeing the machines in person also makes you appreciate their scale and complexity in a way that video can't quite capture.

George Rhoads' Influence on My Work

His work is still, and always will be, a huge influence on my own building techniques. One area where our work differs is his use of whimsical artwork to complement the movement of the balls. It's something I've always admired and something I wish I could do better myself. But I've learned to stick with what I do best.

I'm much more of a mechanical builder than an artistic builder. I enjoy figuring out tracks, lifts, splitters and mechanical elements and finding interesting ways to make the balls move. Rhoads had an ability to combine those mechanics with whimsical art in a way that gave his machines their own personality. His influence on my work is undeniable.

When there wasn't much information about rolling ball sculptures available online, his machines showed me what was possible. They encouraged me to experiment with larger sculptures, more complicated tracks and increasingly creative mechanical elements. Over the years I've developed my own methods, materials and style, but that early inspiration never disappeared.

More than two decades later, I'm still building rolling ball sculptures and still fascinated by the same basic challenge: make a ball move through a piece of kinetic art in a way that's interesting enough that someone wants to stand there and watch where it goes next.

George Rhoads showed me very early on just how far that simple idea could be taken.