In 1955 the family moved to New Orleans, where Rickey became chairman of the art department and a professor of art at Tulane University. He spent most of his second year at Tulane on a prearranged sabbatical in Rome. This is the same year that he began calling his works "kinetic sculptures" rather than "mobiles." In Rome he made more innovations to his movement devices, and began several other series of works that used multiple mechanisms in a single sculpture, such as Rotors, Water Plants, and Flowers. These works utilized a gimbal to balance a long vertical piece that housed many small, fluttering rotors on the upper end. Below the pivot point, these elements were weighted by a piece of rock or quartz. This same combination of technologies is present in a later work, Column of Nine Rotors with Two Triangles, from 1973, which uses a gimbal to balance a vertical column bracketed by two triangles. Nine spinning rotors complete the form of the column.

from Kephart, Passages of Light and Time: George Rickey's Life in Motion (Notre Dame, 2009)