 Consistent with Steiner chains, the centers of the hexlet spheres lie in a single plane, on an ellipse.Soddy's hexlet was also discovered independently in Japan, as shown by Sangaku tablets from 1822 in Kanagawa prefecture.Soddy's hexlet is a chain of six spheres, labeled "S"1–"S"6, each of which is tangent to three given spheres, "A", "B" and "C", that are themselves mutually tangent at three distinct points.