Desk Toys for Adults: The Metal Ones Worth Keeping

A good desk toy does two jobs. It gives your hands something to do while your head is busy — on a call, in a long read, between emails — and it makes your desk a place other people stop at. A bad one is plastic, rattles, and is in a drawer within a week.

The ones worth keeping are almost always metal: heavy enough to feel good in the hand, quiet, and made well enough to last.

The classic: a Newton's cradle

Five steel balls hanging in a row. Lift one and let it fall, and one ball swings out from the far end; lift two, and two fly out. It is the original executive desk toy, and it still stops people walking past.

How a Newton's cradle works

When the first ball strikes the row, it stops dead, and its momentum and energy travel through the touching balls as a pressure wave until they reach the last ball, which has nothing in front of it, so it swings out. Two quantities have to balance at once — momentum and kinetic energy — and the only way the row can conserve both is for the same number of balls to leave as arrived, at the same speed. That is why two in means two out, never one ball going twice as fast.

It slows down because each collision loses a little energy to sound and heat. Better cradles, with harder steel and true alignment, run longer.

For the thinker: a chaos pendulum

A hand-sized double pendulum: one arm hangs from another, both on bearings. Give it a spin and its motion becomes chaotic in the mathematical sense — tiny differences in how you start it lead to completely different paths, so no two swings are ever the same. Endlessly watchable, and a good gift for an engineer.

For the fidgeter: sliders and flip fidgets

• A metal push slider is two heavy plates that slide past each other and snap into place with a soft click under the thumb. Quiet enough for meetings, and it looks like nothing at all.
• A flip fidget is a solid metal pyramid you flick into a spin on the desk. It spins, tips and flips far longer than seems possible, then lands flat.
• A gear-and-chain fidget has two working gears on a real roller chain, for the person who likes to see how things work.

For the card or dice player

Fidget spinners cast in antique bronze — a royal flush in spades, or a ring of dice — are desk toys with a theme: something for a poker player's hands between hands.

What to avoid

• Light plastic. It feels cheap and wears out.
• Anything loud. A desk toy that clicks like a pen will be confiscated by the rest of the office.
• Magnet ball sets near children. Small strong magnets are dangerous if swallowed; keep those for adult desks only.

As a gift

A metal desk toy is one of the few gifts that suits almost anyone at work — the reason they turn up so often in white elephant and Secret Santa exchanges. Pick by person: the cradle for anyone, the pendulum for the thinker, a slider for the fidgeter.