April 14, 2015 • 50 mins
It has been called a "glorified spring", but Slinky is one of the best selling toys of all time. From accidental origins to an unlikely resurrection, Slinky has a pretty great back story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
and this is the stuff you should know projecting from
Studio one A. Just us. It's not us on stage
(00:26):
in front of hundreds of the doring fans. Now I
feel all lift with We just got back from our
tour and it's just us again. Yeah, there's a paper,
I kea lamp with a dimmer that makes it turn
into a strobe light even though it's not to post to.
And yeah, it's a toolbox over there. That's it. It's
a lot more fun to do this on stage in
(00:48):
front of people, it turns out. I think we should
do it again because the West Coast tour was pretty fun. Yeah,
so keep your eyes peeled. Um, perhaps Philly, d C,
New York in Boston, don't literally peel your eyes. Perhaps
Chapel Hill. Oh, we can't announce anything yet, but we're
just teasing with those cities that will be in in June. Yeah,
(01:10):
we're actually going to Providence. Are we just kidding? They
were like ten people in Providence going yeah. Oh man,
I got to go to Boston a game. Uh so,
how are you doing? You still jet lagged? I have
recovered somewhat. Um. I have to say that the city
(01:31):
of Seattle, there's a place I could live. It's beautiful
except for the weather. Like we had a good and
it's easy to fall in love both a place if
you're there for like a great weekend, because it was
beautiful when it was it was gorgeous. But I told
Emily she was all fired up to um, it's like,
you know, nine months out of the year, it's pretty
depressing with the weather bleak, and I think you're just
(01:52):
used to it. To feel about there, I guess you know,
you're hearty. Everybody seemed to have their spirits up, though
maybe it was the weather. I assumed it was because
we were in town, but now that I think about it,
it could have definitely been the weather. Well, Portland's fans
stood in line in the rain, and I felt all bad,
but that I was like, they stand in line for
in the rain all the time, for everything, gas, donuts,
(02:12):
what have you. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, thanks to everyone
who came out. It was so so fun. Yes, l
A San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, from both of us, from
Jerry to Ye, from everybody, heartfelt, hearty, thank you. Jerry
was a regular hot shot, you know with ws so
uh chuck. Yes, did you ever have a slinky when
(02:34):
you were a kid. Sure, I feel like I played
with them. I definitely played with them. I don't remember
actually owning a slinky at any point, least yours. It was.
It was just kind of one of those things that
I was like, always around there was always a slinky.
You could get your hands on a slinky. But you
don't remember getting a slinky right and saying this is
Mike slinky, or going to the toy store and saying like,
I want a slinky. But I did love slinkies whenever
(02:57):
I played with them. Uh. It turns out I was
just one of many many children over the last sixty
seventy years that have loved slinky. I was frustrated by
my slinky a bit because I never I never had
stairs that it worked well on. You know, you gotta
thought never had stairs, Like, yeah, I'll bet you're frustrated
(03:19):
with slinky. No, I had stairs going up to my room.
But it was you know, if you don't have the
right height and depth of stair. It just stopped and
they still got to do it again. Were they for
like really long feet, were they wide stairs or were
they really taller? What was the deal? I don't know.
I felt like I felt like they were standard stairs. Um,
(03:39):
and then it just didn't like them. Well, it would
get all I had the metal ones, it would get
all uh you know how they would tend to get tangled. Yeah,
that was sort of the hallmark of the metal slinky.
And again, like people's hair would get caught in. And
now that I'm an adult looking back, I'm like, how
did anybody's hair get caught in the slinky? What was
the deal? But when it happened, it hurt. I've kids
(04:00):
would like wrap slinkys around each other. I remember using
slinky like as rope like handcuffs. Oh yeah, Like you'd
wrap it around your friend and then sort of just
latch it and you'd be like a slinky like attaching
a knife to one end and like yeah, yeah, just
jamming it toward somebody that there's this guy on YouTube.
(04:20):
Well there's a YouTube video of a guy called slinky Master.
Oh boy, and he is good. He's just like basically
like moving it from one hand to another, making it
do all this awesome stuff in the middle. And it's
a rainbow slinky and I think it might be like
Glow in the Dark too. Holy cow, but he is
a pretty good I say, go check it out. I
gotta definitely want to check that out. Oh and actually,
we have a new thing on our website on our
(04:42):
podcast pages, so like the page where you can go
listen to any podcast on our site, there's now um
a like an additional links section where it has stuff
that we talk about. It links out to articles that
we use for extra research. They'll be on this Slinky
episode podcast page a link to that um Slinky Master.
(05:05):
You don't even need to google that. You just basically
make step You should know your homepage and we can
take care of it for you. Yeah, and we're bringing
back transcriptions right yep, which we are super happy about
because we used to have transcriptions for our friends in
the deaf and Heart of Hearing community and then we
didn't do it for a while and they were like
what gives Yeah, And so we've been working to get
those back and I think they're going to be back now.
(05:26):
So that's that's slinky good night. Oh wait, we didn't
start yet, so um, I had no idea while I
was watching people get their hair caught in slink ease
or playing with them in general that um, they had
a kind of a pretty neat history until I ran
across this article from Price in Nomics, written by a
dude named Zachary Crockett. Yeah, big, thanks, This is a
(05:50):
good article. It is um. It's called the Invention of
is Slinky? And in it, uh, Crockett starts at a
pretty reasonable place, the birth of the inventors Thanky, Richard Thompson, James,
Rick James, and then in this slinky, I don't think
he went by Rick. No, he went by Mr James,
(06:10):
inventors slinky. Yes. He was born in nineteen fourteen in Delaware,
and uh apparently his brother Samuel said that he was
always a pretty enterprising, mechanically oriented type of kid, because
he had this one story about when he was like
a thirteen, he found an old car and literally like
(06:31):
fixed the car up well enough to sell it. Yeah,
I had like mice running around living in um and
he sold it for twenty five bucks, which I went
to West Egg and converted that thirty seven dollars in
two thousand fourteen. Money not bad for a thirteen year old,
that's yeah. But it was a car. Whoever bought it
got a good deal, that's what she's saying. But I mean,
(06:52):
he probably didn't get rid of the mice. He just
got the thing to run again. Plus it wasn't his
car anyway, he just took it, licks it up. Um,
it was the mice's car. So in the nineteen thirties
he went to Penn State and did study mechanical engineering. Yeah,
he was just a tinkerer, so it made a lot
of sense. Yeah. Uh. I find that often when people
(07:14):
like you've researched the people who invented like a circuit
board for an amp or something. It seems like that
starts when you're very very young. Just interesting, that kind
of thing. You don't get into mechanical engineering in your twenties,
you know, like you ditch psychology for a mechanical engineering degree. Yeah.
My brother went the other way. He was an aerospace
engineering major and he switched to psychology. Did he really?
(07:37):
I didn't know that. Yeah, he wanted to be an astronaut.
That's awesome, but not like a six year old. He
was like, I wanted to be an astronaut. He liked
to be a cowboy to cowboys, you grew up to
actually be cowboys. Um So, anyway, he got a mechanical
engineering degree and then uh started work as a naval engineer. Yeah,
because it makes sense. It was World War two, so
(07:58):
that's what you did. Yeah, and to go fight Hitler.
So he did. He fought it from behind a desk
because they're like, you're a mechanical engineer, you just sit
here and figure out how you can make our weapons
of war better. And he was actually working on something,
um that you springs, something that basically kept some sort
of electronics on battleships. I think it had to do
(08:20):
with the measuring horsepower. Yeah, it was a horsepower meter
that I guess if you're in rough waves that would
mess with the meter. Yeah, and you didn't want it
rocking all over the place, that you would use springs
to keep it intact or keep it from moving around
too much. Right. Um So, while he was tinkering around
with one of this, he quite by accident knocked over
some stuff. I don't think it was in a fit
(08:41):
of rage. It was accidental and one of the things
he knocked over included a spring, and he watched the
spring fall off the shelf in a nice graceful arc
hit a book go over from the book onto the desk,
and then from the desk onto the floor in this
nice our arching manner exactly, and he said, let's try
(09:03):
that again. Yeah, it's apparently captivated by it. It's pretty neat,
Like this is literally one of those toys you can
trace back to one of those silly fluke moments, like
the microwave. Was that the same thing? He was, Yeah,
it was. Oh man, I can't remember what the actual
the actual thing that makes the microwave. The microwave was
(09:24):
discovered by accident that it was, Yeah, that it had
these properties that um like a guy had a chocolate
bar in his shirt because melted melt. He's like, wait
a minute, So of course he logically brand and grabbed
some popcorn and saw that that happened, and then the
microwave is born. Yeah, I think a slinky is actually
the only place that's on our website is one of
those our top ten accidental inventions or something, And I'll
(09:47):
bet microwaves are in there too. I'm sure it is UM.
So basically, you're right. The lightbulb went off over his
head and he went home and told his lovely wife Betty, Betty, Betty,
I think I got something here, and I just need
to figure out how to how to make it to
where it keeps doing this thing. I'm gonna try, because
you can't just get any spring and throw it on
(10:08):
a step, No you can. There's all sorts of different
kinds of springs that turns out, you know, like there's
a tension spring that they use on mouse traps, and
then there's the slinky spring. But now the slinky spring
is this super refined type of spring that was designed
over the course of a year through trial and error
to have just the right tension, just the right shape,
(10:29):
just the right size of the coils, just the right
everything so that it really accentuated that graceful flow, that
arcing flow that it it has that makes it the slinky.
And it took him like a year of tinkering with
all these different tensions and um types of materials before
he finally hit upon it. Yeah, and I think he
settled on a point zero five seven in diameter high
(10:52):
carbon steel UM the original slinkys were black metal, which
was kind a cool looking um by the time, like
we were kids. I think they just um they had
the shiny silver ones, and then of course we'll get
to the plastic that came along later too, but the
first ones were black um and it demonstrates uh property
(11:16):
and physics called So I ran across this like super
hardcore physics forum where somebody posted that they were talking
about the physics of slinky and somebody's like, it seems
like Hook's law is a good place to start, and
they got piled off. They said that Hooks law has
to do with the amount of force a spring exerts
on something it's attached to. So I think with Hook's law,
(11:38):
if it does apply, what you're talking about is the
force being transferred from one end of the slinky to
the other, and that as the as the momentum at
the front of the slinky goes downward, that same amount
is transferred to the back and it's pulled forward and
it just keeps going end over end. So I don't
know if Hook's law does apply or not, but if
(11:58):
it does, that's my understanding of how it would apply. Yeah,
the one definition I saw was that. Um. It basically
means a spring will return to its original shape once
the load is removed. So that makes sense, right, Um.
But there's another thing, at least one other thing going
on with the slinky, and that is that it goes
along a longitudinal wave. So just like a sound wave,
(12:20):
basically a slinky is a sound wave slowed down or
the same type of wave as a as a sound wave,
and it slowed down and as the slinky is moving
on a molecular level molecule, the molecule is pushing the
ones in front of it forward, and then the whole
thing starts over again once it reaches uh equilibrium. That
(12:41):
sounds like a great explanation to me. Yes, No, that's
all right. It avoids equilibrium. Once it hits equilibrium, it stops.
But the whole thing starts with the slinky just sitting
there at the top of the step, and what it
has there is potential energy. It's story. Yeah, you gotta
move it to get that kinetic energy going. When I
was a kid, I just remember staring at it. It's
like it's not doing nothing. This is where slinky and
(13:03):
our ESP episodes collide. How's that you're just staring at slinky,
willing it to move. All right, So he comes up
with this little slinky. It works like a charm, his
little prototype. Uh. He does the smart thing, which is
if you want to find out if kids actually will
enjoy it. He got the neighborhood together and uk to
(13:24):
some kids and they went nuts. They were like, this
thing is amazing. Yeah, stop hitting that other kid with
those sticks and come over and play with this toy
that I came up with. Let me know what you think.
And they wrapped up that kid in the spring, got
it caught in that kid's hair. So this is perfect.
He's like, this is Gangbusters. And I mean like he
saw from that very early back of the envelope market
(13:47):
research that he did with the neighborhood kids, it made
him a believer. Yeah, Like he saw that kids really
were into this thing, and I got the impression that
it At no point was he like this thing is
is amazing, it's supernatural. He's like, this is a it's
really cool. It's a spring. It's physics, but it just
looks really neat and it is somehow weirdly captivating. Yeah.
(14:09):
I think they say that one in a thousand toys
hits it big, yeah, something like that. Yeah. So, I
mean there are toy inventors that labor for their entire
lives and never hit on something like the slinky. I mean,
it's one of the top ten toys in history when
they go slinky. So Betty, his wife, wasn't super Um. Well,
(14:33):
she was a little skeptical at first, which will learn
later is pretty ironic, very ironic. Um. And he actually
tasted her with naming it though. And she is the
one that found the word slinky in the dictionary. Apparently
she spent like several weeks looking for just the right word. Well,
I mean, what else was she doing? Kids? Right, exactly?
She had a lot of downtime. So um, right after
(14:53):
this break, we will talk a little bit about how
it went from a just a garage neighborhood idea to
one of the biggest selling toys ever. All right, so
(15:19):
he's got a slinky, he's got the prototype, he gets
a five hundred dollar a loan to start from a
friend to start James Spring and Wire Company LC. Yeah,
pretty good name. Yeah. Well, and you got the five
bucks apparently pretty easy from the friend by just showing
him the slinky. Yeah, and he was like, how much
do you need? I didn't look up how much five
(15:39):
bucks is, but uh, in but we can guess that
it's uh about forty million. No, no, no, because I
think it's about let's see, it was about I think
bucks probably roughly today, which I mean that's substantial. They
give a friend and it was enough to get things going.
(16:02):
I think he really, I mean he had the prototype,
he just needed an official company banner basically. So he
has his machine shop and he has his prototype, and
he gets a bunch of wire and he makes a
bunch of slinkies. Well, he goes through his local machine
shop first, right, So he's at his local machine shop
and he and he makes four slinkies. Uh there were
(16:25):
two and a half inches tall, contained eighty feet of wire,
which that's pretty impressive. I didn't know it was nearly
that much. But it makes sense, I guess because I
think every kid's tried to uncoil theirs fully, you know. Yeah,
And apparently slinky starts out as like normal round wire,
but then they smush it to make it flat. Yeah,
because it's got to be flat to perform and sit
(16:47):
on itself. Yeah. I didn't I didn't realize though that
I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but he didn't realize
it started out as like a round, like diameter type wire. Yeah,
but what kind of what kind of metal did he
started out? Um, Swedish steel, high grade blue black Swedish steel.
Guess that was the wire of the day. Um. And
(17:08):
it was in ninety eight coils and at first they
just wrapped it in parchment paper. Um. Later on I
think they packaged it in just a box like it's
in today, right, Actually today, I think it's in that
awful plastic stuff that you can't open. Oh is it now? Well,
they have a throwback you can get yeah that it's
still like modeled after the original box, which is kind
(17:29):
of neat. Yeah, So I don't see why he wouldn't
get that one personally. So with the original metal slinky
and the whole history from the time he walked into
that metal shop the first time, once he had the
prototype figured out h throughout today, there was only one
design change in the whole time, and that was to
crimp the ends that after it was produced to keep
(17:51):
it from tangling. Is easy and um for safety. So
it didn't like cut some kid's eye out right. So
after a bunch of kid's eyes were cut out, they Acrymthian.
I don't know if they had four sight or if
if it wasn't response to eyes being gouged out, but
and I mean still today I went on Amazon to
double check and the slinky is still two and a
(18:13):
half inches tall. It didn't say how many coils it
was because they didn't get that descriptive, but that it's
the same thing as it was back in five. Yeah,
I'm surprised they didn't have like, uh, you know the
Mega X streamlink that like um powered by Mountain Dew
or something like that. You know, they probably do have that. Actually,
(18:40):
I love that though the original slinky is still like
it exact same Yeah, the original metal ones. Yeah, why
change something that's perfect? Right? Right? And and so the
the the James has knew that this thing was perfect,
had a great name, worked really well. The neighborhood kids
loved it. So of course this thing's gonna become like
(19:00):
a hit right out of the gate, right. Nope, No,
you're being coy. My friend uh he took it to
uh toy stores and the there was one storekeeper said,
this is the atomic age it's want big, bright, fancy
things with lots of colors and lights. We couldn't give
the thing away if it played God Bless America and
picked up the Daily Double as it walked down the steps.
(19:22):
That's very cynical. It is very cynical. He used exclamation
points and stuff. Um, but James, Rick James was like,
I'm Rick James, and you don't tell me what to
do with my toys. And he got in such a Gimbals,
who is very famous as the Macy's competitor from le
thirty fourth Street, the only reason most of us have
ever heard of Gimbals. Um and Gimbals in Philadelphia apparently
(19:45):
said do you know what I like you? I like
the way you smell. I'm going to put your toys
in our Christmas display and we'll just see where it
goes from there. Yeah, he was local at that, living
outside of Philly, right. I wonder if that so he
eventually moved outside of Philly, but I'm not sure exactly
where they were at this point. It would make sense,
although it's entirely possible he was hustling hard enough that
(20:07):
he was just hitting department stores all over the Northeast.
Well and Delawares not too far anyway, so yeah, they
may have still been in Delaware, but they m they
did talk the Philadelphia Gimbals into putting this on their
Christmas display. So in Christmas November, the slinky debuts to
public and it immediately takes off like a rocket. Right.
(20:28):
No again that was double koy. Uh no it it
for weeks just sat there because of course it's just
this thing that kids had never seen before, the spring
and parchment paper sitting between like really awesome toys. Yeah,
it's just like all it's nothing but potential energy at
that point, there's like a spring sitting between those atomic
(20:51):
aged toys that that one shopkeeper was using exclamation points about,
right yeah, I mean if there if there was ever
a toy that needed a demonstration um to delight in amaze,
it was the slinky. So very frustrated with this um,
Richard James apparently said to his wife, like, I'm going
down to Gimbals and I'm going to deal with this
(21:12):
head on and um. He said, meet me there in
like ninety minutes or something like that. So he went
down there. He took a couple of slinkies out of
their parchment paper and started looking dummies. Yeah, you stupid kids,
keep your hair away, but check this out. And um
he started playing with them, and apparently by the time
Betty got down there, ninety minutes later, he had sold
(21:34):
all four hundred slinkies and there was apparently a line
around the block asking for more. Yeah, that sounds like
such a trumped up story, but you know, I love
it though. It was like, within ninety minutes, It's great.
The world was slinky crazy. Yeah, the Santa f a
miracle on thirty fourth Street comes through and does like
a little twirl and goes out of frame again. But
(21:54):
he did sell those four hundred units that day, supposedly,
and by Christmas, uh, they had sold twenty and so
it really did take off super pass once kids understood
what the heck it was, and that was that's a
significant amount of money, Chuck, I used west Egg this
time one dollar. They sold him for a dollar a piece.
So he sold four hundred units and twenty thousand by
(22:15):
the end of Christmas. That translates to like thirteen dollars
in today's money. So imagine being a parent today and
being like, you want me to pay thirteen dollars for
a spring. Are you crazy? But they still managed to
capture the public imagination just right, and the thing just
spread like wildfire, not just in Christmas of nineteen by
(22:35):
Christmas of nineteen forty seven, there was a New York
Times article and like the fashion section talking about how
the must have adornment of the year was a slinky
dipped in gold with glitter. It sounds like something Edward
Burne's might have cooked up, right, Yeah, I think so. Um.
I think that Another cool thing is they remained a
(22:56):
dollar for a lot of their life. And um it
said in this article here that in the mid nineties
are only a dollar eighty nine. Um, now they're like
four or five bucks. It looks like I saw again
on Amazon, Amazon, Amazon dot com Amazon, Uh, it was
like two nine. It was the lowest I saw. Hey,
that's a good deal for a slinky. But even still, Yeah,
(23:17):
if you want a great deal on anything, go to
Amazon dot com. I saw others that, other nameless online
toy store retailers that were supposed to do four or
five bucks. No Amazon, I could see that though. Four
or five bucks that makes sense. But the point is is,
for a very long time, still pretty cheap. Yeah, it
stayed the same even as the cost of living increased,
(23:37):
so it's relative price went down tremendously. And they did
that on purpose. Well, and that was yeah, exactly. That
was one of the things that as we'll see here shortly,
Betty's one of her favorite things. What is it, uh
that kids could have a cheap toy, and she wanted
even poor kids to be able to buy something. And uh,
here's my spring, here's the sink. Just give me a dollar.
(24:01):
So the James is and by this time they were
they were pretty pretty much partnership from what I understand,
at the very least, um, Betty was playing some sort
of supporting role, at least as an advisor possibly um.
But again they had like six kids and she was
raising them. Uh so it was really mostly Richard running
the company. But they took the Slinky to the the
(24:23):
Toy Fair, the American Toy Fair in New York, which
is the same one that Barbie debuted at in the fifties.
I think Barbarie registered trademark um and they took Slinky
there and they did it all themselves. They pitched the thing,
and they had people from toy stores and department stores
from around the country just signing up and slinky was
(24:44):
he you. Apparently they made the equivalent of a billion
dollars in the first two years. Yeah, he sold more
than a hundred million in the first two years of production.
That's crazy. A hundred million. A hundred million, and this
is the population of you know, the mid forties. It's
not like you know nowadays, that would be a little
more believable. I think so well, no, think about it,
(25:06):
I we I wish I would have thought of that. Like,
there probably weren't too terribly more, much more than a
hundred million people in the US at the time, So
that's like a slinky for every person in the US,
slinky in every pot. Right, So things were going so well,
he realized that my my machine shop here in uh Delaware, Delaware,
(25:27):
suburban Pennsylvania, which whichever it was, is not up to snuff,
and I need to set up my own shop. So
he did that in Albany, New York. And it was like,
I'm a I'm an inventor. I'm just gonna make my
own machine that can make our own slinkies at a
rate of uh five seconds a pop. Yeah, the old
(25:49):
machine shop was making them in a couple of minutes
per slinking, which was fast for back then, I think.
But yeah, so Richard James said, I'm going to make
my own machine. That's that's really cool. Absolutely, I think
it's pretty neat. And not only did he make his
own machine, he made a machine that can do one
in five seconds. Like you said, so it took it,
took the round wire, smushed it and then coiled it
(26:11):
in that second crimp the ends. I guess that's crazy. Yeah,
and then bam, you got a slinky. You got a
dollar in your pocket right there. This is when um,
this is when it came in the black box and
they ditched the parchment. It was labeled Slinky Colin, the
famous walking spring toy, and it was gangbusters, man, it
was again. They sold a hundred million in the first
(26:34):
two years. To put that in perspective, I did find
out how many people there were in America in nineteen seven.
There was a hundred and forty four million people in
the US and he sold a hundred million slinky. So
for every one point four people there was, one of
them had a slinky. So that means adults were buying
slinky sto. Yeah, you know, yeah. Uh. So in the
(26:55):
nineteen fifties they started to do what all great inventors do.
They started to span the line a bit. They came
up with um, courtesy of a woman named Helen Mall said,
came up with the slinky dog and the slinky train.
Um because she was a fan that they would like
solicit ideas, and she wrote them in and said, Hey,
(27:16):
I think it would be pretty neat if you made
like a dog that walked but the middle of him
was a slinky and like in toy story exactly, which
they got some nice kickback money on that. There was
also the yeah oh yes, so then they didn't steal
people's ideas either. No, that was waiting for that to
read that. When I was reading this, I was all
(27:37):
nervous that and penniless or no. She actually was a
ended up creating twenty six toys and games in her career. Um,
the slinky Dog and Slinky train were her big biggest successes.
But they basically paid her uh sixty five grand a
year for seventeen years on that royalty, which is a
(27:58):
ton of money. Yeah, so, um, hats off to you,
Helen Moll said, there, did you get the idea of
whether she was already a toy inventor or that this
kind of gave her the boost she needed to become
a toy inventor for a career. I think she was.
I read her New York Times oh bit, and I
talked about some other games that she had tried to create.
I don't think she had like burst onto the scene
(28:19):
there or anything, but um, that's a pretty comfortable living
back then. Um. So they also had this Susie the
Slinky worm. Um, then Slinky Crazy guys. Yeah you know those,
Remember those glasses that have like the slinkies attached to
the big bloodshot eyeballs. Those are Slinky brand hysterical and Um.
(28:40):
It turns out that it wasn't just toys. The slinky
patent that Richard James originally got back in the forties
was also licensed out for other stuff, Like it was
used in Antenna's. It ended up being used on battleships
or other kinds of ships. Is a stabilizing thing like
he was originally after, Um, gutter protectors. I saw that
to light fixtures, total sense. So they also made a
(29:03):
ton of cash sub licensing this whole um that, like
the Slinky patent out for other uses besides just the
toys and the slinky hippo and all that stuff. Yeah,
and they gave soldiers in Vietnam slinkies. UM didn't license it,
like just straight up gave them slinkys to use in
the field as UH antennas. So they would throw the
(29:25):
slinky like over a tree branch and then pull it
down and connect it to their radio to boost their
antenna signal. That is pretty smart, pretty neat. You know
it's being used today in space. They're they're using the
same UM I think, the same patent originally to deploy
solar sales in space. Yeah, pretty cool. I wonder if
they're licensing that the actual they I mean, NASA was
(29:48):
using the slinky name all over the article I was reading.
And there's another one too. Um there's a paper slinky
that has it's coated with a metal on one side,
and so the UM when you make a go springy
to non springy, I think is the physics terms that
I'm searching for. It creates static electricity, and it creates
(30:10):
enough that that can be captured and used to generate power. Yeah. Way,
and it's people at Georgia Tech who are doing it well,
that makes sense. Um, all right, So where are we?
He is um sold a hundred million of these. He's
expanding the line. And right after this break, we are
going to talk about a very interesting turn in this story.
(30:33):
Uh that has to do with well, you'll see. So
we're back Chuck. Slinky is doing well. It's the fifties.
(30:56):
There's a ton of just different slinky stuff, slinky eyeballs.
Everybody's freaking out their teachers and things are going great
for the James is right. I think teacher's death drawers
are loaded with sleepy products and chattering teeth. Uh, and
rotten apples. I wonder where that came from. Giving the
teacher an apple. Yeah, I don't know, but I'll bet
(31:17):
somebody out there will let us know. Um. All right,
So it's the mid nineteen fifties. They are loaded at
this point, loaded making tons of money. At this point
they had moved to um, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia
with a thirty one bedroom estate on twelve acres. Rich,
super rich people. Yes, good for them. They're in Bryn Marr,
(31:39):
which is like the wealthiest suburbs. I bet it still
is Bryn Mar. It doesn't sound like a place that's
going down the tubes, you know. So that Welsh brin
looks pretty well. V R y n m A w R.
It's definitely something uk. I'm gonna say Welsh. All right.
(32:01):
So Betty Um, things were going well with the business,
but within the family things weren't so great because Betty
found out that Rick James was stepping out. He was
a super freak and he was fooling around on her
quite a bit from the sounds of it, all right,
And she was like, okay, let's see, am I gonna
(32:22):
ditch this zero and go find a hero or what
am I gonna do? And she said, well, I have
six kids and I'm gonna stick with this dude for
the benefit of the kids. And she did. But apparently
things were never the same after that, and as a result,
Richard James started going to church a lot more and
it really got to him. He really spoke to him
(32:44):
a lot going to church and became something of a
I guess I took it, although he didn't say he
became something of a born again. Yeah, that's exactly what
he became. Yeah. But he started out obviously as a
Catholic because he used to go to confession all the time,
which seems like, Okay, well that guy really bad about
things and he wanted to get stuff off of his chest.
Not so, says Betty, his ex wife. UM. Betty said
(33:07):
that he liked the attention that he would get from
confessing in confession. Yeah, like he he was sort of
a hot shot, and I think he liked to just,
um be revered maybe I don't know, or just for
people listen to him or who knows. That's just a
that's a weird thing. That's a weird little thing to do,
is go to confession to get attention. I thought it
(33:29):
was very strange. So, um, as he's going to confession,
as he's going to church more and more and more,
he's um also his family, he's even though yeah he's
still at home and he's living with his family, he's
becoming isolated, not just from society at large, it's becoming
pretty isolated from his family as well. He got the
impression that they didn't go down the church path quite
(33:51):
the same degree he did, and so that was causing
him to feel more and more isolated, causing him to
withdraw more and more. And um, there was at some
point a moment where he revealed that they didn't have
much money anymore, not only that they were in debt
until like seven figure debt, about a million dollars in debt,
(34:14):
because he started funneling all their millions to um dogmatic
evangelical religious groups, donating all their money. Not only donating, yeah, exactly,
he was like not paying creditors for the LLC that
owns slinky. He was diverting that revenue um from the
(34:35):
business to religious groups that he was a member of.
And this article said straight up like if you bought
a slinky before nineteen sixty, your money went exactly there.
So it was kind of a big deal. This is
a big revelation that was you know, started in the
mid fifties and really things just got weird in the
(34:55):
James family from the mid fifties till nineteen sixty. Then
all of a sudden nineteen sixty, Richard James said, Um,
have you guys ever heard of Bolivia? No, Well, it's
too bad, because I just bought it one way ticket
there and I'm going now, don't ask me why. I'm
just going to join a religious group in the wilds
(35:15):
of Bolivia. Yeah, And I've seen it characterize as a cult. Um,
that is not quite the deal. Um. They were called
the Wye Cliffe Bible Translators and they're still around. But
it was basically their mission is to translate the Bible
into as many languages and getting into as many hands
around the world as possible. And he felt that call
(35:37):
and straight up left. His family said smile you later,
and never got back in touch with him again. That
was February of nineteen sixty. And I think it was
Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian culture. Yeah,
which you know, she was upset, you know, and she
read up about him and said, this seems really weird
to me. But yeah, it wasn't quite a cult. But
(35:59):
I get that she was scorned. So that was February
nineteen sixty that UM, Richard leaves for Bolivia. And before
he left, he sat Betty down and said, as you know,
we're a million dollars in debt. I'm leaving. UM. You
have a choice here. We can either liquidate the company
(36:21):
or you can take over your choice. I really don't care.
I'm going to Bolivia and I'm probably never coming back. Yeah.
I was kind of surprised that she got that opportunity
to decide at least what to do with her future. Yeah, Like,
I was glad to know that it was within her power, right. I.
It took me a couple of times of reading this
before I finally called onto that. At first I thought
(36:42):
he just laughed and she slid into that position. But yeah,
he gave her the choice, like, you can liquid eight
you're raising six kids. You'll probably make some money off
of it after the creditors are paid off. So do
you want to do that? She said, you know what, No,
I'm gonna try taking over the company. I'm going all
in on Linky. So she took over this company, Chuck,
(37:02):
that was in really dire straits. Yeah. I don't think
we even mentioned that Slinkys had started to wane in popularity,
so not only were they in debt, but towards the
end of the nineteen fifties, everyone had like the slinky
craze its sort of passed. Yeah, so we said that
it sold a hundred million units in its first two years.
Since nineteen forty seven, they've sold three million total, so
(37:26):
a full one third of all the slinky sold were
sold in the first two years. So yeah, it's star
crested and then started to fall. And so this lady
took over a company that was saddled with debt. Uh,
it's star product was not so much of a star
any longer. And um, she had six kids. She had
six kids, and she decided, rather than the liquid at
(37:47):
the company to say, no, I'm gonna see what I
can do with this. I'm gonna try to bring it back.
And she did. Yeah. I mean, reading this, she's truly
one of like the great women in American history. I
think she's she's definitely the hero of this story too,
and revered by toy enthusiasts. But I don't think a
lot of people even know her name. You know, it's
Betty James. So her first plan was, I have all
(38:10):
these creditors at least let me try and get this
deferred for now, and was somehow able to talk him
into deferring some of these payments, thank god. And Um.
Then in nineteen sixty two, she hired three dudes from Columbia,
South Carolina. UM Johnny McCullough and Homer Fesperman wrote the
(38:30):
music and Charles Weagley wrote the lyrics to what would
later become the longest running Dare I say most successful
commercial jingle of all time? Yes, I would say it's
possibly the most well known at least. So let's um,
let's play a little bit of that right now, everyone's
(38:53):
heard it, and here it is walks to say with
advocate and makes the happiest that's been down to dawn,
that's gone to get over time. So I mean that
surely sounds familiar. Apparently there was a survey that was
(39:14):
conducted that found that eighty nine point eight percent of
Americans either know what a slinky is or are familiar
with that jingle. So that's definitely it's got to be
the most successful jingle of all time. Like, what else
is there? I can't think of anything else to put
up against it? Have a cocamout smile whatever. I don't
even know how that goes. No, I think that was
(39:36):
just a slogan that wasn't a song. Oh yeah, no,
you're totally right, um, And you and I of course
all day have been singing it's log it's And I
was like, that was obviously based on the slinky jingle.
And I went back and listen to it, was like, no,
it is the slinky jingle. They just replaced the lyrics.
Well I didn't get the joke. Well rend and stimpy
fans obviously, UH know what I just did. But if
(39:59):
you were like, I don't get it, what is log
have to do anything? Just look up log I guess
log jingle maybe. So, Um, this was a huge hit
and it's funny. I was looking on um the internet
to see if I could find anything on these guys
that wrote this thing, and um, Homer Fesperman has a
Facebook page. It's got to be him. Wow. Yeah, I
(40:19):
just clicked on it and the first thing I saw
was South Carolina Game Cox and I was like, well Columbia,
South Carolina, and it looks like he's making um, like
a video scrapbooks for people. Well that's the Facebook page
was wide opened, and I wanted to get in touch
and say are you Are you the Homer? Maybe we
could just get a like a little quick interview or something,
(40:41):
but I didn't know. So look him up. Homer Fesperman,
he's on that, He's on the internet. Yeah, everybody friend him.
He'll be like, what is going on. I've been stamped
by the friendliest people on Facebook who are fans. Most
of them. So Betty's got this jingle out there. This
(41:02):
was a master stroke. She also, um did some advertising.
She really put a lot of money into advertising. But
apparently I get the impression that she had like some
she cut some good deals. It wasn't she she went
hemorrhaging money on advertising. It was all very smart UM
and Slinky's stars started to rise once again. Well, she
(41:23):
moved the facility closer to Philadelphia to UM. I think
it saved some money and allowed her to be with
her kids more. UM. Although she did, you know, she
had a caretaker. So the kids, I think they said,
like Sunday through Thursday, they had a lot of like
attention from nanny's and things. But I get the idea
she was a good mom. She was trying to do
right by her family, you know right, and not only
(41:45):
her family this uh. This article on Priceonomics points out
that she was also helping out the families of I
think the hundred and twenty person team that she put together,
and it says they were a close knit UM, which
definitely kind of jibes with the impression that I've gotten
of her. UM. So she's she's got this jingle down
(42:06):
Slinky starting to come back a little bit. And also
I think the tech that she's taking is it's a
it's an inexpensive toy that everybody can enjoy. Um, but
it's still I mean this, I don't know if all
of it would have been quite so possible had a
bit of serendipity not happened in the mid nineteen seventies.
Plastic plastic is that the thing. Yeah, there was a
(42:27):
dude in Minnesota who was a plastic worker who figured
out basically a way to make a plastic slinky and
went directly to Betty James and the um her company
and said, what do you think about this? She said,
you know what, I don't steal ideas. I paid for
him him. How much do you want me to make
the checkout for? Yeah, his name was Donald James Room,
(42:49):
and he was um of master Mark Plastics, and he
was trying to make a garden hose that coiled like
they have now, like a plastic garden hose self coiled,
and um he failed. And his kids apparently were like,
that looks like a slinky and he was like, oh well,
let me kids, I'm trying to concentrate trying to make
(43:10):
a garden hose. So um, like you said, they they
made a great deal and uh he he ended up
with tons of money too, and it made slinky super
popular again and it became the Slinky Rainbow, the Rainbow Slinky,
And yeah, all of a sudden, not just original slinky.
Now you had this what they call the a less
tangle prone alternative to slinky, which is pretty bold because
(43:33):
you're saying your original product is tangle prone. Still worked.
I think maybe they just knew that everybody knew that
the slinky is tangle prone. And um, now they had
a couple of products again that were really salable, and
the the slinky star rose once more. Yeah, and like
I said, the Toy Story, they did make a great
deal with Um, I guess it was Pixar. Yeah, and
(43:56):
sold a ton more Slinkies when Toy Story came out
because of the dog right exactly. Uh. In in nineteen
seventy four, Betty heard received news that her husband Rick
James had passed away. Who she hadn't he lived within
a few months of going to Bolivia, Like she hadn't
heard anything from him. That's just unbelievable. Um. But she
(44:18):
was doing fine and so she was probably like, thanks
for letting me know who cares who. It might have
been a little sad, I'm not gonna say that, but um.
She then sold to poof Products in for what she
called a quote boatload of money and good for her. Yeah,
(44:38):
and she lived on for another ten years, to the
right old age of ninety and I think before then
she was recognized by the Toy Industry Association's Hall of Fame.
I think Slinky was inducted in two thousand, so she
would have been alive for that. Pretty neat. Yeah, so
that's slinky. Yeah, you know what. The only other thing
I had was you can make the Star Wars blaster
(45:00):
sound with a slinky? Yeah you Um, well you can
do with the microphone, or you can you put a cup,
a paper cup and the end of the slinky and
you hold that in the air just like the height
of your head, and the rest of the slinky falls
to the ground and um then you just start. Uh. Basically,
they're all kinds of noises you can make. But if
(45:21):
you want to make that sound, you can pick up
the bottom off the floor and then just let it
drop on the floor and catch it real quick, and
it does that nice makes a neat sound. That's a
chuck tip right there. Yeah, you go to YouTube and
look up Star Wars slinky sound and there's a couple
of dudes. Of course it'll show you just how to
do it. Well, that's one of the reasons too, why
(45:41):
Betty James chose the word slinky. It's not only because
it was sleek and attractive, but also she thinks she
thought that that was a good description of what the
sound it made as it went downstairs. She would have
called it the blaster um. And there's one last thing
about slinky physics that are pretty amy easing. Let's hear it.
(46:01):
So if you if you dangle a slinky out to
where it's um completely stretched out as much as it's
going to without putting any pressure on, just letting the
force of gravity stretch out the slinky until it reaches
equally okay, um, but without this bottom touching the ground
out a fourth story window. Awesome. And you actually, if
it's like eighty something feeding and have to be higher
(46:22):
than that because it's slinky, would go right down to
the ground. Man, Well, I mean you have to wait
the bottom of it. Okay, So let's say four stories
you're right then, um, and if you have it, you're
holding it's steady, it's not moving. And then you release
the top, the top will start to fall, but if
you pay close attention, the bottom stays where it is.
(46:43):
Slinky's actually have this amazing property of managing to levitate
momentarily when the top is released, and some very smart
scientists studied this and they measured it and they found yes, indeed,
the top is moving and the bottom is remaining. It's
floating in air. And they figured out that the reason
why is because the tension is still acting against the
(47:06):
force of gravity, which has reached the equilibrium on the
lower part of the coil. And basically, the information that
gravity is, that tension is released in gravity is about
to win hasn't reached that bottom part yet. Each coil
stacks upon the next one, and the next one and
the next one. So as that's happening up top down below,
it's all hunky dory. Still it's like you're still holding
(47:27):
onto me. It's literally floating in mid air. Wow. This
it's it's ceaselessly amazing. Basically, the slinky well, those are
two pretty boss slinky tricks, and what a great way
to finish, I think. So if you want to know
more about slink Eyes, you can go to the podcast
page on how Stuff you Should Know dot com and
(47:50):
check out our slinky episode and there should be links
to this Prisonomics article and the YouTube Slinky Master all
that jam. Just go check that out. And I didn't
say search bar, but you can imagine that I would
have under normal circumstances, which means it's time for a
listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh sage from Portland's
(48:11):
Remember Sage. Yeah, we do a little Q and A
at the end of these live shows and where people
can get up and ask us questions and sages was great,
so I told her to send it in. Um hey, guys,
just got back from your live show in Portland, and
Chuck said to ride in to my amazing fact. I
was super nervous to go up there. We'll save you
did great. By the way, um my fact is that
(48:33):
you can actually tell how old a humpback whale is
by looking at their ear wax because it forms rings
like a tree. Oh yeah, I remember that humpback whales
migrate from Alaska to Yi each year for mating. The
temperature shift of the ocean water causes the rings to form.
Researchers will examine the ear wax of deceased whales there
were beach to find out their age and a lot
(48:53):
of other facts about them. Gross and fascinating, just like
the actual ear wax podcast. Guys, I found doubt this
while uh snorkeling on a cruise in Hawaii last week
for spring break. Thanks for everything, and thanks for the
live show especially, it was totally awesome. With four exclamation
points four that's pretty good rating, man alive. I had
(49:14):
so much fun, and I think I got my mom
hooked on your show too, So thanks to Sage and
her mom for bringing her. And it was good to
meet you. You did a great job. You didn't seem
nervous at all. No, totally larger in charge like you
do audience QA stuff every night. That's right. Thanks to everybody,
importantly you guys. I think Chuck. Every single person um
that we met before and after said welcome to Portland's
(49:38):
like we were literally welcomed by every single person. Yeah,
it was really neat that they're proud of their city. Um. Yes,
if you want to get in touch with us about
anything to do with whales or slinkies or live shows
or any of that jazz. You can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast asked that
(50:00):
how stuff works dot com, and, as always, join us
at our luxurious home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there,
and this is the stuff you should know projecting from
Studio one A. Just us. It's not us on stage
(00:26):
in front of hundreds of the doring fans. Now I
feel all lift with We just got back from our
tour and it's just us again. Yeah, there's a paper,
I kea lamp with a dimmer that makes it turn
into a strobe light even though it's not to post to.
And yeah, it's a toolbox over there. That's it. It's
a lot more fun to do this on stage in
(00:48):
front of people, it turns out. I think we should
do it again because the West Coast tour was pretty fun. Yeah,
so keep your eyes peeled. Um, perhaps Philly, d C,
New York in Boston, don't literally peel your eyes. Perhaps
Chapel Hill. Oh, we can't announce anything yet, but we're
just teasing with those cities that will be in in June. Yeah,
(01:10):
we're actually going to Providence. Are we just kidding? They
were like ten people in Providence going yeah. Oh man,
I got to go to Boston a game. Uh so,
how are you doing? You still jet lagged? I have
recovered somewhat. Um. I have to say that the city
(01:31):
of Seattle, there's a place I could live. It's beautiful
except for the weather. Like we had a good and
it's easy to fall in love both a place if
you're there for like a great weekend, because it was
beautiful when it was it was gorgeous. But I told
Emily she was all fired up to um, it's like,
you know, nine months out of the year, it's pretty
depressing with the weather bleak, and I think you're just
(01:52):
used to it. To feel about there, I guess you know,
you're hearty. Everybody seemed to have their spirits up, though
maybe it was the weather. I assumed it was because
we were in town, but now that I think about it,
it could have definitely been the weather. Well, Portland's fans
stood in line in the rain, and I felt all bad,
but that I was like, they stand in line for
in the rain all the time, for everything, gas, donuts,
(02:12):
what have you. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, thanks to everyone
who came out. It was so so fun. Yes, l
A San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, from both of us, from
Jerry to Ye, from everybody, heartfelt, hearty, thank you. Jerry
was a regular hot shot, you know with ws so
uh chuck. Yes, did you ever have a slinky when
(02:34):
you were a kid. Sure, I feel like I played
with them. I definitely played with them. I don't remember
actually owning a slinky at any point, least yours. It was.
It was just kind of one of those things that
I was like, always around there was always a slinky.
You could get your hands on a slinky. But you
don't remember getting a slinky right and saying this is
Mike slinky, or going to the toy store and saying like,
I want a slinky. But I did love slinkies whenever
(02:57):
I played with them. Uh. It turns out I was
just one of many many children over the last sixty
seventy years that have loved slinky. I was frustrated by
my slinky a bit because I never I never had
stairs that it worked well on. You know, you gotta
thought never had stairs, Like, yeah, I'll bet you're frustrated
(03:19):
with slinky. No, I had stairs going up to my room.
But it was you know, if you don't have the
right height and depth of stair. It just stopped and
they still got to do it again. Were they for
like really long feet, were they wide stairs or were
they really taller? What was the deal? I don't know.
I felt like I felt like they were standard stairs. Um,
(03:39):
and then it just didn't like them. Well, it would
get all I had the metal ones, it would get
all uh you know how they would tend to get tangled. Yeah,
that was sort of the hallmark of the metal slinky.
And again, like people's hair would get caught in. And
now that I'm an adult looking back, I'm like, how
did anybody's hair get caught in the slinky? What was
the deal? But when it happened, it hurt. I've kids
(04:00):
would like wrap slinkys around each other. I remember using
slinky like as rope like handcuffs. Oh yeah, Like you'd
wrap it around your friend and then sort of just
latch it and you'd be like a slinky like attaching
a knife to one end and like yeah, yeah, just
jamming it toward somebody that there's this guy on YouTube.
(04:20):
Well there's a YouTube video of a guy called slinky Master.
Oh boy, and he is good. He's just like basically
like moving it from one hand to another, making it
do all this awesome stuff in the middle. And it's
a rainbow slinky and I think it might be like
Glow in the Dark too. Holy cow, but he is
a pretty good I say, go check it out. I
gotta definitely want to check that out. Oh and actually,
we have a new thing on our website on our
(04:42):
podcast pages, so like the page where you can go
listen to any podcast on our site, there's now um
a like an additional links section where it has stuff
that we talk about. It links out to articles that
we use for extra research. They'll be on this Slinky
episode podcast page a link to that um Slinky Master.
(05:05):
You don't even need to google that. You just basically
make step You should know your homepage and we can
take care of it for you. Yeah, and we're bringing
back transcriptions right yep, which we are super happy about
because we used to have transcriptions for our friends in
the deaf and Heart of Hearing community and then we
didn't do it for a while and they were like
what gives Yeah, And so we've been working to get
those back and I think they're going to be back now.
(05:26):
So that's that's slinky good night. Oh wait, we didn't
start yet, so um, I had no idea while I
was watching people get their hair caught in slink ease
or playing with them in general that um, they had
a kind of a pretty neat history until I ran
across this article from Price in Nomics, written by a
dude named Zachary Crockett. Yeah, big, thanks, This is a
(05:50):
good article. It is um. It's called the Invention of
is Slinky? And in it, uh, Crockett starts at a
pretty reasonable place, the birth of the inventors Thanky, Richard Thompson, James,
Rick James, and then in this slinky, I don't think
he went by Rick. No, he went by Mr James,
(06:10):
inventors slinky. Yes. He was born in nineteen fourteen in Delaware,
and uh apparently his brother Samuel said that he was
always a pretty enterprising, mechanically oriented type of kid, because
he had this one story about when he was like
a thirteen, he found an old car and literally like
(06:31):
fixed the car up well enough to sell it. Yeah,
I had like mice running around living in um and
he sold it for twenty five bucks, which I went
to West Egg and converted that thirty seven dollars in
two thousand fourteen. Money not bad for a thirteen year old,
that's yeah. But it was a car. Whoever bought it
got a good deal, that's what she's saying. But I mean,
(06:52):
he probably didn't get rid of the mice. He just
got the thing to run again. Plus it wasn't his
car anyway, he just took it, licks it up. Um,
it was the mice's car. So in the nineteen thirties
he went to Penn State and did study mechanical engineering. Yeah,
he was just a tinkerer, so it made a lot
of sense. Yeah. Uh. I find that often when people
(07:14):
like you've researched the people who invented like a circuit
board for an amp or something. It seems like that
starts when you're very very young. Just interesting, that kind
of thing. You don't get into mechanical engineering in your twenties,
you know, like you ditch psychology for a mechanical engineering degree. Yeah.
My brother went the other way. He was an aerospace
engineering major and he switched to psychology. Did he really?
(07:37):
I didn't know that. Yeah, he wanted to be an astronaut.
That's awesome, but not like a six year old. He
was like, I wanted to be an astronaut. He liked
to be a cowboy to cowboys, you grew up to
actually be cowboys. Um So, anyway, he got a mechanical
engineering degree and then uh started work as a naval engineer. Yeah,
because it makes sense. It was World War two, so
(07:58):
that's what you did. Yeah, and to go fight Hitler.
So he did. He fought it from behind a desk
because they're like, you're a mechanical engineer, you just sit
here and figure out how you can make our weapons
of war better. And he was actually working on something,
um that you springs, something that basically kept some sort
of electronics on battleships. I think it had to do
(08:20):
with the measuring horsepower. Yeah, it was a horsepower meter
that I guess if you're in rough waves that would
mess with the meter. Yeah, and you didn't want it
rocking all over the place, that you would use springs
to keep it intact or keep it from moving around
too much. Right. Um So, while he was tinkering around
with one of this, he quite by accident knocked over
some stuff. I don't think it was in a fit
(08:41):
of rage. It was accidental and one of the things
he knocked over included a spring, and he watched the
spring fall off the shelf in a nice graceful arc
hit a book go over from the book onto the desk,
and then from the desk onto the floor in this
nice our arching manner exactly, and he said, let's try
(09:03):
that again. Yeah, it's apparently captivated by it. It's pretty neat,
Like this is literally one of those toys you can
trace back to one of those silly fluke moments, like
the microwave. Was that the same thing? He was, Yeah,
it was. Oh man, I can't remember what the actual
the actual thing that makes the microwave. The microwave was
(09:24):
discovered by accident that it was, Yeah, that it had
these properties that um like a guy had a chocolate
bar in his shirt because melted melt. He's like, wait
a minute, So of course he logically brand and grabbed
some popcorn and saw that that happened, and then the
microwave is born. Yeah, I think a slinky is actually
the only place that's on our website is one of
those our top ten accidental inventions or something, And I'll
(09:47):
bet microwaves are in there too. I'm sure it is UM.
So basically, you're right. The lightbulb went off over his
head and he went home and told his lovely wife Betty, Betty, Betty,
I think I got something here, and I just need
to figure out how to how to make it to
where it keeps doing this thing. I'm gonna try, because
you can't just get any spring and throw it on
(10:08):
a step, No you can. There's all sorts of different
kinds of springs that turns out, you know, like there's
a tension spring that they use on mouse traps, and
then there's the slinky spring. But now the slinky spring
is this super refined type of spring that was designed
over the course of a year through trial and error
to have just the right tension, just the right shape,
(10:29):
just the right size of the coils, just the right
everything so that it really accentuated that graceful flow, that
arcing flow that it it has that makes it the slinky.
And it took him like a year of tinkering with
all these different tensions and um types of materials before
he finally hit upon it. Yeah, and I think he
settled on a point zero five seven in diameter high
(10:52):
carbon steel UM the original slinkys were black metal, which
was kind a cool looking um by the time, like
we were kids. I think they just um they had
the shiny silver ones, and then of course we'll get
to the plastic that came along later too, but the
first ones were black um and it demonstrates uh property
(11:16):
and physics called So I ran across this like super
hardcore physics forum where somebody posted that they were talking
about the physics of slinky and somebody's like, it seems
like Hook's law is a good place to start, and
they got piled off. They said that Hooks law has
to do with the amount of force a spring exerts
on something it's attached to. So I think with Hook's law,
(11:38):
if it does apply, what you're talking about is the
force being transferred from one end of the slinky to
the other, and that as the as the momentum at
the front of the slinky goes downward, that same amount
is transferred to the back and it's pulled forward and
it just keeps going end over end. So I don't
know if Hook's law does apply or not, but if
(11:58):
it does, that's my understanding of how it would apply. Yeah,
the one definition I saw was that. Um. It basically
means a spring will return to its original shape once
the load is removed. So that makes sense, right, Um.
But there's another thing, at least one other thing going
on with the slinky, and that is that it goes
along a longitudinal wave. So just like a sound wave,
(12:20):
basically a slinky is a sound wave slowed down or
the same type of wave as a as a sound wave,
and it slowed down and as the slinky is moving
on a molecular level molecule, the molecule is pushing the
ones in front of it forward, and then the whole
thing starts over again once it reaches uh equilibrium. That
(12:41):
sounds like a great explanation to me. Yes, No, that's
all right. It avoids equilibrium. Once it hits equilibrium, it stops.
But the whole thing starts with the slinky just sitting
there at the top of the step, and what it
has there is potential energy. It's story. Yeah, you gotta
move it to get that kinetic energy going. When I
was a kid, I just remember staring at it. It's
like it's not doing nothing. This is where slinky and
(13:03):
our ESP episodes collide. How's that you're just staring at slinky,
willing it to move. All right, So he comes up
with this little slinky. It works like a charm, his
little prototype. Uh. He does the smart thing, which is
if you want to find out if kids actually will
enjoy it. He got the neighborhood together and uk to
(13:24):
some kids and they went nuts. They were like, this
thing is amazing. Yeah, stop hitting that other kid with
those sticks and come over and play with this toy
that I came up with. Let me know what you think.
And they wrapped up that kid in the spring, got
it caught in that kid's hair. So this is perfect.
He's like, this is Gangbusters. And I mean like he
saw from that very early back of the envelope market
(13:47):
research that he did with the neighborhood kids, it made
him a believer. Yeah, Like he saw that kids really
were into this thing, and I got the impression that
it At no point was he like this thing is
is amazing, it's supernatural. He's like, this is a it's
really cool. It's a spring. It's physics, but it just
looks really neat and it is somehow weirdly captivating. Yeah.
(14:09):
I think they say that one in a thousand toys
hits it big, yeah, something like that. Yeah. So, I
mean there are toy inventors that labor for their entire
lives and never hit on something like the slinky. I mean,
it's one of the top ten toys in history when
they go slinky. So Betty, his wife, wasn't super Um. Well,
(14:33):
she was a little skeptical at first, which will learn
later is pretty ironic, very ironic. Um. And he actually
tasted her with naming it though. And she is the
one that found the word slinky in the dictionary. Apparently
she spent like several weeks looking for just the right word. Well,
I mean, what else was she doing? Kids? Right, exactly?
She had a lot of downtime. So um, right after
(14:53):
this break, we will talk a little bit about how
it went from a just a garage neighborhood idea to
one of the biggest selling toys ever. All right, so
(15:19):
he's got a slinky, he's got the prototype, he gets
a five hundred dollar a loan to start from a
friend to start James Spring and Wire Company LC. Yeah,
pretty good name. Yeah. Well, and you got the five
bucks apparently pretty easy from the friend by just showing
him the slinky. Yeah, and he was like, how much
do you need? I didn't look up how much five
(15:39):
bucks is, but uh, in but we can guess that
it's uh about forty million. No, no, no, because I
think it's about let's see, it was about I think
bucks probably roughly today, which I mean that's substantial. They
give a friend and it was enough to get things going.
(16:02):
I think he really, I mean he had the prototype,
he just needed an official company banner basically. So he
has his machine shop and he has his prototype, and
he gets a bunch of wire and he makes a
bunch of slinkies. Well, he goes through his local machine
shop first, right, So he's at his local machine shop
and he and he makes four slinkies. Uh there were
(16:25):
two and a half inches tall, contained eighty feet of wire,
which that's pretty impressive. I didn't know it was nearly
that much. But it makes sense, I guess because I
think every kid's tried to uncoil theirs fully, you know. Yeah,
And apparently slinky starts out as like normal round wire,
but then they smush it to make it flat. Yeah,
because it's got to be flat to perform and sit
(16:47):
on itself. Yeah. I didn't I didn't realize though that
I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but he didn't realize
it started out as like a round, like diameter type wire. Yeah,
but what kind of what kind of metal did he
started out? Um, Swedish steel, high grade blue black Swedish steel.
Guess that was the wire of the day. Um. And
(17:08):
it was in ninety eight coils and at first they
just wrapped it in parchment paper. Um. Later on I
think they packaged it in just a box like it's
in today, right, Actually today, I think it's in that
awful plastic stuff that you can't open. Oh is it now? Well,
they have a throwback you can get yeah that it's
still like modeled after the original box, which is kind
(17:29):
of neat. Yeah, So I don't see why he wouldn't
get that one personally. So with the original metal slinky
and the whole history from the time he walked into
that metal shop the first time, once he had the
prototype figured out h throughout today, there was only one
design change in the whole time, and that was to
crimp the ends that after it was produced to keep
(17:51):
it from tangling. Is easy and um for safety. So
it didn't like cut some kid's eye out right. So
after a bunch of kid's eyes were cut out, they Acrymthian.
I don't know if they had four sight or if
if it wasn't response to eyes being gouged out, but
and I mean still today I went on Amazon to
double check and the slinky is still two and a
(18:13):
half inches tall. It didn't say how many coils it
was because they didn't get that descriptive, but that it's
the same thing as it was back in five. Yeah,
I'm surprised they didn't have like, uh, you know the
Mega X streamlink that like um powered by Mountain Dew
or something like that. You know, they probably do have that. Actually,
(18:40):
I love that though the original slinky is still like
it exact same Yeah, the original metal ones. Yeah, why
change something that's perfect? Right? Right? And and so the
the the James has knew that this thing was perfect,
had a great name, worked really well. The neighborhood kids
loved it. So of course this thing's gonna become like
(19:00):
a hit right out of the gate, right. Nope, No,
you're being coy. My friend uh he took it to
uh toy stores and the there was one storekeeper said,
this is the atomic age it's want big, bright, fancy
things with lots of colors and lights. We couldn't give
the thing away if it played God Bless America and
picked up the Daily Double as it walked down the steps.
(19:22):
That's very cynical. It is very cynical. He used exclamation
points and stuff. Um, but James, Rick James was like,
I'm Rick James, and you don't tell me what to
do with my toys. And he got in such a Gimbals,
who is very famous as the Macy's competitor from le
thirty fourth Street, the only reason most of us have
ever heard of Gimbals. Um and Gimbals in Philadelphia apparently
(19:45):
said do you know what I like you? I like
the way you smell. I'm going to put your toys
in our Christmas display and we'll just see where it
goes from there. Yeah, he was local at that, living
outside of Philly, right. I wonder if that so he
eventually moved outside of Philly, but I'm not sure exactly
where they were at this point. It would make sense,
although it's entirely possible he was hustling hard enough that
(20:07):
he was just hitting department stores all over the Northeast.
Well and Delawares not too far anyway, so yeah, they
may have still been in Delaware, but they m they
did talk the Philadelphia Gimbals into putting this on their
Christmas display. So in Christmas November, the slinky debuts to
public and it immediately takes off like a rocket. Right.
(20:28):
No again that was double koy. Uh no it it
for weeks just sat there because of course it's just
this thing that kids had never seen before, the spring
and parchment paper sitting between like really awesome toys. Yeah,
it's just like all it's nothing but potential energy at
that point, there's like a spring sitting between those atomic
(20:51):
aged toys that that one shopkeeper was using exclamation points about,
right yeah, I mean if there if there was ever
a toy that needed a demonstration um to delight in amaze,
it was the slinky. So very frustrated with this um,
Richard James apparently said to his wife, like, I'm going
down to Gimbals and I'm going to deal with this
(21:12):
head on and um. He said, meet me there in
like ninety minutes or something like that. So he went
down there. He took a couple of slinkies out of
their parchment paper and started looking dummies. Yeah, you stupid kids,
keep your hair away, but check this out. And um
he started playing with them, and apparently by the time
Betty got down there, ninety minutes later, he had sold
(21:34):
all four hundred slinkies and there was apparently a line
around the block asking for more. Yeah, that sounds like
such a trumped up story, but you know, I love
it though. It was like, within ninety minutes, It's great.
The world was slinky crazy. Yeah, the Santa f a
miracle on thirty fourth Street comes through and does like
a little twirl and goes out of frame again. But
(21:54):
he did sell those four hundred units that day, supposedly,
and by Christmas, uh, they had sold twenty and so
it really did take off super pass once kids understood
what the heck it was, and that was that's a
significant amount of money, Chuck, I used west Egg this
time one dollar. They sold him for a dollar a piece.
So he sold four hundred units and twenty thousand by
(22:15):
the end of Christmas. That translates to like thirteen dollars
in today's money. So imagine being a parent today and
being like, you want me to pay thirteen dollars for
a spring. Are you crazy? But they still managed to
capture the public imagination just right, and the thing just
spread like wildfire, not just in Christmas of nineteen by
(22:35):
Christmas of nineteen forty seven, there was a New York
Times article and like the fashion section talking about how
the must have adornment of the year was a slinky
dipped in gold with glitter. It sounds like something Edward
Burne's might have cooked up, right, Yeah, I think so. Um.
I think that Another cool thing is they remained a
(22:56):
dollar for a lot of their life. And um it
said in this article here that in the mid nineties
are only a dollar eighty nine. Um, now they're like
four or five bucks. It looks like I saw again
on Amazon, Amazon, Amazon dot com Amazon, Uh, it was
like two nine. It was the lowest I saw. Hey,
that's a good deal for a slinky. But even still, Yeah,
(23:17):
if you want a great deal on anything, go to
Amazon dot com. I saw others that, other nameless online
toy store retailers that were supposed to do four or
five bucks. No Amazon, I could see that though. Four
or five bucks that makes sense. But the point is is,
for a very long time, still pretty cheap. Yeah, it
stayed the same even as the cost of living increased,
(23:37):
so it's relative price went down tremendously. And they did
that on purpose. Well, and that was yeah, exactly. That
was one of the things that as we'll see here shortly,
Betty's one of her favorite things. What is it, uh
that kids could have a cheap toy, and she wanted
even poor kids to be able to buy something. And uh,
here's my spring, here's the sink. Just give me a dollar.
(24:01):
So the James is and by this time they were
they were pretty pretty much partnership from what I understand,
at the very least, um, Betty was playing some sort
of supporting role, at least as an advisor possibly um.
But again they had like six kids and she was
raising them. Uh so it was really mostly Richard running
the company. But they took the Slinky to the the
(24:23):
Toy Fair, the American Toy Fair in New York, which
is the same one that Barbie debuted at in the fifties.
I think Barbarie registered trademark um and they took Slinky
there and they did it all themselves. They pitched the thing,
and they had people from toy stores and department stores
from around the country just signing up and slinky was
(24:44):
he you. Apparently they made the equivalent of a billion
dollars in the first two years. Yeah, he sold more
than a hundred million in the first two years of production.
That's crazy. A hundred million. A hundred million, and this
is the population of you know, the mid forties. It's
not like you know nowadays, that would be a little
more believable. I think so well, no, think about it,
(25:06):
I we I wish I would have thought of that. Like,
there probably weren't too terribly more, much more than a
hundred million people in the US at the time, So
that's like a slinky for every person in the US,
slinky in every pot. Right, So things were going so well,
he realized that my my machine shop here in uh Delaware, Delaware,
(25:27):
suburban Pennsylvania, which whichever it was, is not up to snuff,
and I need to set up my own shop. So
he did that in Albany, New York. And it was like,
I'm a I'm an inventor. I'm just gonna make my
own machine that can make our own slinkies at a
rate of uh five seconds a pop. Yeah, the old
(25:49):
machine shop was making them in a couple of minutes
per slinking, which was fast for back then, I think.
But yeah, so Richard James said, I'm going to make
my own machine. That's that's really cool. Absolutely, I think
it's pretty neat. And not only did he make his
own machine, he made a machine that can do one
in five seconds. Like you said, so it took it,
took the round wire, smushed it and then coiled it
(26:11):
in that second crimp the ends. I guess that's crazy. Yeah,
and then bam, you got a slinky. You got a
dollar in your pocket right there. This is when um,
this is when it came in the black box and
they ditched the parchment. It was labeled Slinky Colin, the
famous walking spring toy, and it was gangbusters, man, it
was again. They sold a hundred million in the first
(26:34):
two years. To put that in perspective, I did find
out how many people there were in America in nineteen seven.
There was a hundred and forty four million people in
the US and he sold a hundred million slinky. So
for every one point four people there was, one of
them had a slinky. So that means adults were buying
slinky sto. Yeah, you know, yeah. Uh. So in the
(26:55):
nineteen fifties they started to do what all great inventors do.
They started to span the line a bit. They came
up with um, courtesy of a woman named Helen Mall said,
came up with the slinky dog and the slinky train.
Um because she was a fan that they would like
solicit ideas, and she wrote them in and said, Hey,
(27:16):
I think it would be pretty neat if you made
like a dog that walked but the middle of him
was a slinky and like in toy story exactly, which
they got some nice kickback money on that. There was
also the yeah oh yes, so then they didn't steal
people's ideas either. No, that was waiting for that to
read that. When I was reading this, I was all
(27:37):
nervous that and penniless or no. She actually was a
ended up creating twenty six toys and games in her career. Um,
the slinky Dog and Slinky train were her big biggest successes.
But they basically paid her uh sixty five grand a
year for seventeen years on that royalty, which is a
(27:58):
ton of money. Yeah, so, um, hats off to you,
Helen Moll said, there, did you get the idea of
whether she was already a toy inventor or that this
kind of gave her the boost she needed to become
a toy inventor for a career. I think she was.
I read her New York Times oh bit, and I
talked about some other games that she had tried to create.
I don't think she had like burst onto the scene
(28:19):
there or anything, but um, that's a pretty comfortable living
back then. Um. So they also had this Susie the
Slinky worm. Um, then Slinky Crazy guys. Yeah you know those,
Remember those glasses that have like the slinkies attached to
the big bloodshot eyeballs. Those are Slinky brand hysterical and Um.
(28:40):
It turns out that it wasn't just toys. The slinky
patent that Richard James originally got back in the forties
was also licensed out for other stuff, Like it was
used in Antenna's. It ended up being used on battleships
or other kinds of ships. Is a stabilizing thing like
he was originally after, Um, gutter protectors. I saw that
to light fixtures, total sense. So they also made a
(29:03):
ton of cash sub licensing this whole um that, like
the Slinky patent out for other uses besides just the
toys and the slinky hippo and all that stuff. Yeah,
and they gave soldiers in Vietnam slinkies. UM didn't license it,
like just straight up gave them slinkys to use in
the field as UH antennas. So they would throw the
(29:25):
slinky like over a tree branch and then pull it
down and connect it to their radio to boost their
antenna signal. That is pretty smart, pretty neat. You know
it's being used today in space. They're they're using the
same UM I think, the same patent originally to deploy
solar sales in space. Yeah, pretty cool. I wonder if
they're licensing that the actual they I mean, NASA was
(29:48):
using the slinky name all over the article I was reading.
And there's another one too. Um there's a paper slinky
that has it's coated with a metal on one side,
and so the UM when you make a go springy
to non springy, I think is the physics terms that
I'm searching for. It creates static electricity, and it creates
(30:10):
enough that that can be captured and used to generate power. Yeah. Way,
and it's people at Georgia Tech who are doing it well,
that makes sense. Um, all right, So where are we?
He is um sold a hundred million of these. He's
expanding the line. And right after this break, we are
going to talk about a very interesting turn in this story.
(30:33):
Uh that has to do with well, you'll see. So
we're back Chuck. Slinky is doing well. It's the fifties.
(30:56):
There's a ton of just different slinky stuff, slinky eyeballs.
Everybody's freaking out their teachers and things are going great
for the James is right. I think teacher's death drawers
are loaded with sleepy products and chattering teeth. Uh, and
rotten apples. I wonder where that came from. Giving the
teacher an apple. Yeah, I don't know, but I'll bet
(31:17):
somebody out there will let us know. Um. All right,
So it's the mid nineteen fifties. They are loaded at
this point, loaded making tons of money. At this point
they had moved to um, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia
with a thirty one bedroom estate on twelve acres. Rich,
super rich people. Yes, good for them. They're in Bryn Marr,
(31:39):
which is like the wealthiest suburbs. I bet it still
is Bryn Mar. It doesn't sound like a place that's
going down the tubes, you know. So that Welsh brin
looks pretty well. V R y n m A w R.
It's definitely something uk. I'm gonna say Welsh. All right.
(32:01):
So Betty Um, things were going well with the business,
but within the family things weren't so great because Betty
found out that Rick James was stepping out. He was
a super freak and he was fooling around on her
quite a bit from the sounds of it, all right,
And she was like, okay, let's see, am I gonna
(32:22):
ditch this zero and go find a hero or what
am I gonna do? And she said, well, I have
six kids and I'm gonna stick with this dude for
the benefit of the kids. And she did. But apparently
things were never the same after that, and as a result,
Richard James started going to church a lot more and
it really got to him. He really spoke to him
(32:44):
a lot going to church and became something of a
I guess I took it, although he didn't say he
became something of a born again. Yeah, that's exactly what
he became. Yeah. But he started out obviously as a
Catholic because he used to go to confession all the time,
which seems like, Okay, well that guy really bad about
things and he wanted to get stuff off of his chest.
Not so, says Betty, his ex wife. UM. Betty said
(33:07):
that he liked the attention that he would get from
confessing in confession. Yeah, like he he was sort of
a hot shot, and I think he liked to just,
um be revered maybe I don't know, or just for
people listen to him or who knows. That's just a
that's a weird thing. That's a weird little thing to do,
is go to confession to get attention. I thought it
(33:29):
was very strange. So, um, as he's going to confession,
as he's going to church more and more and more,
he's um also his family, he's even though yeah he's
still at home and he's living with his family, he's
becoming isolated, not just from society at large, it's becoming
pretty isolated from his family as well. He got the
impression that they didn't go down the church path quite
(33:51):
the same degree he did, and so that was causing
him to feel more and more isolated, causing him to
withdraw more and more. And um, there was at some
point a moment where he revealed that they didn't have
much money anymore, not only that they were in debt
until like seven figure debt, about a million dollars in debt,
(34:14):
because he started funneling all their millions to um dogmatic
evangelical religious groups, donating all their money. Not only donating, yeah, exactly,
he was like not paying creditors for the LLC that
owns slinky. He was diverting that revenue um from the
(34:35):
business to religious groups that he was a member of.
And this article said straight up like if you bought
a slinky before nineteen sixty, your money went exactly there.
So it was kind of a big deal. This is
a big revelation that was you know, started in the
mid fifties and really things just got weird in the
(34:55):
James family from the mid fifties till nineteen sixty. Then
all of a sudden nineteen sixty, Richard James said, Um,
have you guys ever heard of Bolivia? No, Well, it's
too bad, because I just bought it one way ticket
there and I'm going now, don't ask me why. I'm
just going to join a religious group in the wilds
(35:15):
of Bolivia. Yeah, And I've seen it characterize as a cult. Um,
that is not quite the deal. Um. They were called
the Wye Cliffe Bible Translators and they're still around. But
it was basically their mission is to translate the Bible
into as many languages and getting into as many hands
around the world as possible. And he felt that call
(35:37):
and straight up left. His family said smile you later,
and never got back in touch with him again. That
was February of nineteen sixty. And I think it was
Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian culture. Yeah,
which you know, she was upset, you know, and she
read up about him and said, this seems really weird
to me. But yeah, it wasn't quite a cult. But
(35:59):
I get that she was scorned. So that was February
nineteen sixty that UM, Richard leaves for Bolivia. And before
he left, he sat Betty down and said, as you know,
we're a million dollars in debt. I'm leaving. UM. You
have a choice here. We can either liquidate the company
(36:21):
or you can take over your choice. I really don't care.
I'm going to Bolivia and I'm probably never coming back. Yeah.
I was kind of surprised that she got that opportunity
to decide at least what to do with her future. Yeah, Like,
I was glad to know that it was within her power, right. I.
It took me a couple of times of reading this
before I finally called onto that. At first I thought
(36:42):
he just laughed and she slid into that position. But yeah,
he gave her the choice, like, you can liquid eight
you're raising six kids. You'll probably make some money off
of it after the creditors are paid off. So do
you want to do that? She said, you know what, No,
I'm gonna try taking over the company. I'm going all
in on Linky. So she took over this company, Chuck,
(37:02):
that was in really dire straits. Yeah. I don't think
we even mentioned that Slinkys had started to wane in popularity,
so not only were they in debt, but towards the
end of the nineteen fifties, everyone had like the slinky
craze its sort of passed. Yeah, so we said that
it sold a hundred million units in its first two years.
Since nineteen forty seven, they've sold three million total, so
(37:26):
a full one third of all the slinky sold were
sold in the first two years. So yeah, it's star
crested and then started to fall. And so this lady
took over a company that was saddled with debt. Uh,
it's star product was not so much of a star
any longer. And um, she had six kids. She had
six kids, and she decided, rather than the liquid at
(37:47):
the company to say, no, I'm gonna see what I
can do with this. I'm gonna try to bring it back.
And she did. Yeah. I mean, reading this, she's truly
one of like the great women in American history. I
think she's she's definitely the hero of this story too,
and revered by toy enthusiasts. But I don't think a
lot of people even know her name. You know, it's
Betty James. So her first plan was, I have all
(38:10):
these creditors at least let me try and get this
deferred for now, and was somehow able to talk him
into deferring some of these payments, thank god. And Um.
Then in nineteen sixty two, she hired three dudes from Columbia,
South Carolina. UM Johnny McCullough and Homer Fesperman wrote the
(38:30):
music and Charles Weagley wrote the lyrics to what would
later become the longest running Dare I say most successful
commercial jingle of all time? Yes, I would say it's
possibly the most well known at least. So let's um,
let's play a little bit of that right now, everyone's
(38:53):
heard it, and here it is walks to say with
advocate and makes the happiest that's been down to dawn,
that's gone to get over time. So I mean that
surely sounds familiar. Apparently there was a survey that was
(39:14):
conducted that found that eighty nine point eight percent of
Americans either know what a slinky is or are familiar
with that jingle. So that's definitely it's got to be
the most successful jingle of all time. Like, what else
is there? I can't think of anything else to put
up against it? Have a cocamout smile whatever. I don't
even know how that goes. No, I think that was
(39:36):
just a slogan that wasn't a song. Oh yeah, no,
you're totally right, um, And you and I of course
all day have been singing it's log it's And I
was like, that was obviously based on the slinky jingle.
And I went back and listen to it, was like, no,
it is the slinky jingle. They just replaced the lyrics.
Well I didn't get the joke. Well rend and stimpy
fans obviously, UH know what I just did. But if
(39:59):
you were like, I don't get it, what is log
have to do anything? Just look up log I guess
log jingle maybe. So, Um, this was a huge hit
and it's funny. I was looking on um the internet
to see if I could find anything on these guys
that wrote this thing, and um, Homer Fesperman has a
Facebook page. It's got to be him. Wow. Yeah, I
(40:19):
just clicked on it and the first thing I saw
was South Carolina Game Cox and I was like, well Columbia,
South Carolina, and it looks like he's making um, like
a video scrapbooks for people. Well that's the Facebook page
was wide opened, and I wanted to get in touch
and say are you Are you the Homer? Maybe we
could just get a like a little quick interview or something,
(40:41):
but I didn't know. So look him up. Homer Fesperman,
he's on that, He's on the internet. Yeah, everybody friend him.
He'll be like, what is going on. I've been stamped
by the friendliest people on Facebook who are fans. Most
of them. So Betty's got this jingle out there. This
(41:02):
was a master stroke. She also, um did some advertising.
She really put a lot of money into advertising. But
apparently I get the impression that she had like some
she cut some good deals. It wasn't she she went
hemorrhaging money on advertising. It was all very smart UM
and Slinky's stars started to rise once again. Well, she
(41:23):
moved the facility closer to Philadelphia to UM. I think
it saved some money and allowed her to be with
her kids more. UM. Although she did, you know, she
had a caretaker. So the kids, I think they said,
like Sunday through Thursday, they had a lot of like
attention from nanny's and things. But I get the idea
she was a good mom. She was trying to do
right by her family, you know right, and not only
(41:45):
her family this uh. This article on Priceonomics points out
that she was also helping out the families of I
think the hundred and twenty person team that she put together,
and it says they were a close knit UM, which
definitely kind of jibes with the impression that I've gotten
of her. UM. So she's she's got this jingle down
(42:06):
Slinky starting to come back a little bit. And also
I think the tech that she's taking is it's a
it's an inexpensive toy that everybody can enjoy. Um, but
it's still I mean this, I don't know if all
of it would have been quite so possible had a
bit of serendipity not happened in the mid nineteen seventies.
Plastic plastic is that the thing. Yeah, there was a
(42:27):
dude in Minnesota who was a plastic worker who figured
out basically a way to make a plastic slinky and
went directly to Betty James and the um her company
and said, what do you think about this? She said,
you know what, I don't steal ideas. I paid for
him him. How much do you want me to make
the checkout for? Yeah, his name was Donald James Room,
(42:49):
and he was um of master Mark Plastics, and he
was trying to make a garden hose that coiled like
they have now, like a plastic garden hose self coiled,
and um he failed. And his kids apparently were like,
that looks like a slinky and he was like, oh well,
let me kids, I'm trying to concentrate trying to make
(43:10):
a garden hose. So um, like you said, they they
made a great deal and uh he he ended up
with tons of money too, and it made slinky super
popular again and it became the Slinky Rainbow, the Rainbow Slinky,
And yeah, all of a sudden, not just original slinky.
Now you had this what they call the a less
tangle prone alternative to slinky, which is pretty bold because
(43:33):
you're saying your original product is tangle prone. Still worked.
I think maybe they just knew that everybody knew that
the slinky is tangle prone. And um, now they had
a couple of products again that were really salable, and
the the slinky star rose once more. Yeah, and like
I said, the Toy Story, they did make a great
deal with Um, I guess it was Pixar. Yeah, and
(43:56):
sold a ton more Slinkies when Toy Story came out
because of the dog right exactly. Uh. In in nineteen
seventy four, Betty heard received news that her husband Rick
James had passed away. Who she hadn't he lived within
a few months of going to Bolivia, Like she hadn't
heard anything from him. That's just unbelievable. Um. But she
(44:18):
was doing fine and so she was probably like, thanks
for letting me know who cares who. It might have
been a little sad, I'm not gonna say that, but um.
She then sold to poof Products in for what she
called a quote boatload of money and good for her. Yeah,
(44:38):
and she lived on for another ten years, to the
right old age of ninety and I think before then
she was recognized by the Toy Industry Association's Hall of Fame.
I think Slinky was inducted in two thousand, so she
would have been alive for that. Pretty neat. Yeah, so
that's slinky. Yeah, you know what. The only other thing
I had was you can make the Star Wars blaster
(45:00):
sound with a slinky? Yeah you Um, well you can
do with the microphone, or you can you put a cup,
a paper cup and the end of the slinky and
you hold that in the air just like the height
of your head, and the rest of the slinky falls
to the ground and um then you just start. Uh. Basically,
they're all kinds of noises you can make. But if
(45:21):
you want to make that sound, you can pick up
the bottom off the floor and then just let it
drop on the floor and catch it real quick, and
it does that nice makes a neat sound. That's a
chuck tip right there. Yeah, you go to YouTube and
look up Star Wars slinky sound and there's a couple
of dudes. Of course it'll show you just how to
do it. Well, that's one of the reasons too, why
(45:41):
Betty James chose the word slinky. It's not only because
it was sleek and attractive, but also she thinks she
thought that that was a good description of what the
sound it made as it went downstairs. She would have
called it the blaster um. And there's one last thing
about slinky physics that are pretty amy easing. Let's hear it.
(46:01):
So if you if you dangle a slinky out to
where it's um completely stretched out as much as it's
going to without putting any pressure on, just letting the
force of gravity stretch out the slinky until it reaches
equally okay, um, but without this bottom touching the ground
out a fourth story window. Awesome. And you actually, if
it's like eighty something feeding and have to be higher
(46:22):
than that because it's slinky, would go right down to
the ground. Man, Well, I mean you have to wait
the bottom of it. Okay, So let's say four stories
you're right then, um, and if you have it, you're
holding it's steady, it's not moving. And then you release
the top, the top will start to fall, but if
you pay close attention, the bottom stays where it is.
(46:43):
Slinky's actually have this amazing property of managing to levitate
momentarily when the top is released, and some very smart
scientists studied this and they measured it and they found yes, indeed,
the top is moving and the bottom is remaining. It's
floating in air. And they figured out that the reason
why is because the tension is still acting against the
(47:06):
force of gravity, which has reached the equilibrium on the
lower part of the coil. And basically, the information that
gravity is, that tension is released in gravity is about
to win hasn't reached that bottom part yet. Each coil
stacks upon the next one, and the next one and
the next one. So as that's happening up top down below,
it's all hunky dory. Still it's like you're still holding
(47:27):
onto me. It's literally floating in mid air. Wow. This
it's it's ceaselessly amazing. Basically, the slinky well, those are
two pretty boss slinky tricks, and what a great way
to finish, I think. So if you want to know
more about slink Eyes, you can go to the podcast
page on how Stuff you Should Know dot com and
(47:50):
check out our slinky episode and there should be links
to this Prisonomics article and the YouTube Slinky Master all
that jam. Just go check that out. And I didn't
say search bar, but you can imagine that I would
have under normal circumstances, which means it's time for a
listener mail. I'm gonna call this uh sage from Portland's
(48:11):
Remember Sage. Yeah, we do a little Q and A
at the end of these live shows and where people
can get up and ask us questions and sages was great,
so I told her to send it in. Um hey, guys,
just got back from your live show in Portland, and
Chuck said to ride in to my amazing fact. I
was super nervous to go up there. We'll save you
did great. By the way, um my fact is that
(48:33):
you can actually tell how old a humpback whale is
by looking at their ear wax because it forms rings
like a tree. Oh yeah, I remember that humpback whales
migrate from Alaska to Yi each year for mating. The
temperature shift of the ocean water causes the rings to form.
Researchers will examine the ear wax of deceased whales there
were beach to find out their age and a lot
(48:53):
of other facts about them. Gross and fascinating, just like
the actual ear wax podcast. Guys, I found doubt this
while uh snorkeling on a cruise in Hawaii last week
for spring break. Thanks for everything, and thanks for the
live show especially, it was totally awesome. With four exclamation
points four that's pretty good rating, man alive. I had
(49:14):
so much fun, and I think I got my mom
hooked on your show too, So thanks to Sage and
her mom for bringing her. And it was good to
meet you. You did a great job. You didn't seem
nervous at all. No, totally larger in charge like you
do audience QA stuff every night. That's right. Thanks to everybody,
importantly you guys. I think Chuck. Every single person um
that we met before and after said welcome to Portland's
(49:38):
like we were literally welcomed by every single person. Yeah,
it was really neat that they're proud of their city. Um. Yes,
if you want to get in touch with us about
anything to do with whales or slinkies or live shows
or any of that jazz. You can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to stuff podcast asked that
(50:00):
how stuff works dot com, and, as always, join us
at our luxurious home on the web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
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