Alexander Calder achieved international fame as the creator of the mobile. Calder was born in 1898 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. His parents were both artists, his mother a painter and his father and grandfather both noted sculptors. Calder did not study art immediately but graduated from college with a study in engineering and after traveling to Europe decided to return to New York and study art. He spent many hours developing in interest in what would become a lifelong passion as he sketched people and animals at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. Through a series of jobs he became involved in the Paris artworld. The turning point in his career came when he visited the studio of Mondrian. He was inspired by the light flowing through the room and by it's movement on the colored rectangles of cardboard tacked on the walls. Everything in the room was painted and Calder felt it would be fun to make these rectangles move. He went on to make motorized and hand-cranked sculpture, being recognized as the first artist to "make sculpture move". The term "mobile" was applied to his abstract sculptures based on the motions produced naturally by air and wind. As Calder grew older, his work became monumentally larger in size. His outdoor sculpture in Spoleto, Italy is a 30 ton, 60 ft high stabile large enough to accommodate cars and buses. His mobile in the American wing of the Nation Gallery in Washington, D.C. occupies several floor levels and several hundred feet. In his career Calder not only created mobile, but also went on to produce line drawings, toys, jewelry, tapestries and paintings. Calder died in New York in 1976.