In 1943, mechanical engineer Richard James was designing a device that the Navy could use to secure equipment and shipments on ships while they rocked at sea. As the story goes, he dropped the coiled wires he was tinkering with on the ground and watched them tumble end-over-end across the floor.

 

After dropping the coil, he could have gotten up, frustrated, and chased after it without a second thought. But he—as inventors often do—had a second thought: perhaps this would make a good toy.

 

Richard James went home and told his wife, Betty James, about his idea. In 1944, she scoured the dictionary for a fitting name, landing on “slinky,” which means “sleek and sinuous in movement or outline.” Together, with a $500 loan, they co-founded James Industries in 1945, the year the Slinky hit store shelves.

 

At first, folks didn’t know what to make of it. How could a bundle of wire be a toy? The Jameses managed to convince a Gimbel’s department store in Philadelphia to let them do a demonstration during the Christmas shopping season in 1945. There were 400 Slinkys stocked that day, and they were gone in less than two hours—selling for $1 a pop, or about $14 in today’s value.

 

Seventy-two years ago, Richard James received a patent for the Slinky, describing “a helical spring toy which will walk on an amusement platform such as an inclined plane or set of steps from a starting point to successive lower landing points without application of external force beyond the starting force and the action of gravity.” He had worked out the ideal dimensions for the spring, 80-feet of wire into a two-inch spiral. (You can find an exact mathematical equation for the slinky in his patent materials.) It was Betty however, that masterminded the toy’s success.

 

In 1960, Richard left his family behind and joined a religious cult. He died in 1974. Betty, a new single mother with six kids, took a big risk on the toy and waged the mortgage of their home to go to a toy show in New York in 1963,  It was there that the toy caught a second wind, again selling out. The classic toy’s catchy jingle aired on television for the first time that year. After that, the toy sort of took on a life of its own.

 

During the Vietnam War, soldiers would sometimes use a Slinky as a portable, extendable antenna for their radios, fastening one end to themselves and tossing the other end over a tree branch to get a clear signal, according to Popular Mechanics. This bit of Slinky history was highlighted in “Invention at Play,” an exhibition that opened in 2002 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History before going on tour.

 

The Slinky has even gone to space. Astronaut Margaret Rhea Seddon demonstrated the Slinky’s behavior in zero gravity during a telecast from the Discovery Space Shuttle in 1985. ''It won't slink at all,'' Seddon said in the telecast. ''It sort of droops.''

 

The Slinky took many forms too, most famously the Slinky dog, which had been popular in mid-century homes before its cameo in the 1995 movie Toy Story. Before Toy Story, annual sales were only in the hundreds, reports Popular Mechanics. The movie boosted the sales of the toy, which James Industries patented in 1997, once again. The company manufactured 12,000 a year in February 1996 and numbers rose to 33,000 by April and 40,000 in July, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

 

By the end of the 20th century more than 250 million Slinkys had been sold. Today, people around the world continue to buy them.

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Source: smithsonianmag.com