When serial Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio finally broke his Academy Award drought last week he inadvertently triggered a small surge in sales of spinning tops. The reason, explains Will Cutler, a product designer from Burton upon Trent, is somewhat complicated.

Movie buffs will remember that DiCaprio’s character in the 2010 science-fiction film Inception was a thief who infiltrated the subconscious of his victims. In a world where dreams and real life are difficult to distinguish, Dominic Cobb relied on a small top – his totem – to check if he was awake (the spinning top slows and topples) or dreaming (it spins for ever).

So, when DiCaprio picked up his Best Actor Oscar for The Revenant, the internet celebrated with a meme showing the actor using his top to check if he was dreaming or if he had actually got his hands on a gold statue. And that, according to Mr Cutler, the designer of the Vorso MK1 top, was enough to cause “an upturn in business”.

“I’m serious man,” said the 26-year-old designer. “I’m worried we won’t have enough stock.”

In truth, the curious renaissance of the spinning top was under way before DiCaprio won his first Oscar. A cursory search of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo – places where the latest tech gadgets tend to dominate – reveals a plethora of tops, a rudimentary toy that has existed since antiquity.

Today’s tops tend to be small, metal objects with hyperbolic names. They include the TTi-180, the UltraTop XXX, the BilletSpin, the Kraken and the ForeverSpin, a product that reportedly raised $1.5m (£1m) on Kickstarter. Some of the new generation of tops glow in the dark, others can be stacked like building blocks; most promise extravagant spin times. A few boast more metaphysical qualities: the UltraTop, for example, is billed as “a great way to relax, escape from the hustle and bustle and meditate”.

Oscars 2016 winners Show all 24 1 /24 Oscars 2016 winners Oscars 2016 winners Leonardo DiCaprio Oscar for Best Actor: "The Revenant" Oscars 2016 winners Brie Larson Oscar for Best Actress: "Room" 2016 Getty Images Oscars 2016 winners Mark Rylance Oscar for Best Supporting Actor: "Bridge of Spies" Oscars 2016 winners Alicia Vikander Oscar for Best Supporting Actress: "The Danish Girl" Oscars 2016 winners Alejandro González Iñárritu Oscar for Best Director: "The Revenant" Oscars 2016 winners Emmanuel Lubezki Oscar for Best Cinematography: "The Renevant" Oscars 2016 winners Mark Mangini (L) and David White Oscar for Best Sound Editing: "Mad Max: Fury Road" Oscars 2016 winners Margaret Sixel Oscar for Best Editing: "Mad Max: Fury Road" Oscars 2016 winners Lesley Vanderwalt (R), Elka Wardega (C) and Damian Martin Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling: "Mad Max: Fury Road" Oscars 2016 winners Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson Oscar for Best Production Design: "Mad Max: Fury Road" Oscars 2016 winners Jenny Beavan Oscar for Best Costume Design: "Mad Max: Fury Road" Oscars 2016 winners Tom McCarthy (L) and Josh Singer Oscar for Best Original Screenplay: "Spotlight" Oscars 2016 winners Adam McKay (L) and Charles Randolph Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay: "The Big Short" Oscars 2016 winners (L-R) Steve Golin, Blye Pagon Faust, Nicole Rocklin, and Michael Sugar Oscar for Best Picture: "Spotlight" Oscars 2016 winners Jimmy Napes (L) and Sam Smith Oscar for Best Original Song: 'Writing's On The Wall' - "Spectre" REUTERS Oscars 2016 winners Ennio Morricone Oscar for Best Original Score: "The Hateful Eight" Oscars 2016 winners Laszlo Nemes Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film: "Son of Saul" Oscars 2016 winners Shawn Christopher Ogilvy (L) and Benjamin Cleary Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film: "Stutterer" Oscars 2016 winners James Gay-Rees (L) and Asif Kapadia Oscar for Best Documentary Feature: "Amy" Oscars 2016 winners Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject: "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" Oscars 2016 winners Pete Docter (R) and Jonas Rivera Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film: "Inside Out" Oscars 2016 winners Director Gabriel Osorio Vargas (L) and producer Pato Escala Pierart Oscar for Best Animated Short Film: "Bear Story" Oscars 2016 winners Andrew Whitehurst (R), Paul Norris (2nd L), Mark Ardington (L) and Sara Bennett Oscar for Best Visual Effects: "Ex Machina" Oscars 2016 winners Chris Jenkins (R), Gregg Rudolf (C) and Ben Oslo Oscar for Sound Mixing: "Mad Max: Fury Road"

Most of the tops are designed and made in the United States, but Mr Cutler’s is machined on a lathe in Staffordshire. Cut from high grade metals and alloys to a tolerance of 0.05 microns, and equipped with either a stainless steel, ceramic or synthetic ruby tip, it is an object of desire designed to spin for more than 10 minutes.

Long spin times require a top made from a particularly heavy metal – tungsten, for example – and a hard surface. Mr Cutler recommends a concave mirror made from surgical glass. The record spin for a Vorso top is 15 minutes 38 seconds; not bad considering a bespoke top with a diamond-coated tip made by a team of Japanese master craftsmen set a record at a contest last December by spinning for almost 19 minutes.

All this refined engineering doesn’t come cheap: the basic Vorso MK1 costs £32; the Alpha, a stainless steel-over copper top by American design legend Rich Stadler, will set you back about £90. Heavily customised tops – popular with completists who often buy a set of tops in a variety of exotic metals – sell for more than £500.

Who is buying these exotic tractricoids? According to Mr Cutler, the typical customer is a male professional aged 25 to 35 who works in an office, “but has a love of the outdoors”. A man who wishes he was elsewhere, presumably?

“The tops look like toys that should cost very little money,” says Mr Cutler. “But they require extremely high levels of engineering and are made on machines that cost £350,000.