Jingle in Her Pocket

to get creative. Then in he stumbled upon and abandoned buick at just thirteen. He was determined to fix up the car, and after getting it to run, he sold it twenty five dollars. The effort sparked a love affair with how things worked. By the late nineteen thirties, equipped with a mechanical engineering degree, Richard found a job as a naval engineer. When World War Two began, he was tasked with designing a system to support and stabilize instruments

for sailing through rough seas. On a muggy day in nineteen forty three, he knocked over a spare parts bin. As the parts hit the floor, and idea struck him, rekindling his curiosity as a child of the depression. He spent a year improving upon the concept. He told his wife Betty that he was certain he could sell it as a toy, and asked her to come up with a name for it. While she searched dictionaries for just the right word, Richard formed an LLC after securing the

loan from a friend in ninety six. He made four hundred units and marketed them to toy shops. Store after store rejected the toy. It was too plain, too simple. None of that deterred Richard, though, Instead he set his sights even higher. He convinced Gimbal's department store in Philadelphia to include the toy in their Christmas display window. As the weeks went on, it appeared his simple toy didn't stand a chance against the newest dolls and shiny trains.

Even this didn't stop Richard, though. He told his wife to meet him at the department store in a couple of hours. He gathered up a few of the toys and headed downtown. He set up a display right outside the store. He gave the store customers an interactive demonstration. By the time his wife arrived, Richards sold all four hundred units for a dollar apiece. Lines wrapped around the building with customers signing up to buy more. Just before Christmas,

they sold twenty thousand, and it didn't stop there. A couple set up a booth at the American Toy Fair in New York the following year. By the end of ninety seven, the toy was a national phenomenon. Two years after that, they'd sold a million units for a dollar apiece, earning one million in revenue that amount to about one billion today, But popularity began to decline by the nineteen sixties. One day, Richard confessed to Betty that he had been

having multiple affairs. Moreover, he announced that he was leaving her and their six children to join a cult in Bolivia. He told her that he no longer had use for money, and gave her two choices, liquidate or become the sole owner. Betty took the latter option. She quickly discovered another surprise. Though her husband had given away their money to the cult, leaving her seven figures in debt for the welfare of her children. It was Betty, who now had to get creative.

She hired a marketing firm to create a jingle. It worked, becoming one of the most recognizable jingles of the nineteen sixties and seventies, but rebuilding the company was hard work. She put in a lot of hours and was forced to leave her kids with a caregiver four days a week. In the early nineteen seventies, the company made a more

colorful version of the toy, and popularity sword. Betty went on to make the way more successful than her husband ever had, selling millions of variations and more than three hundred million copies of the original. She sold the company for what she described as a boatload of money. She had taken a rundown company and turned it around. For fifty years, she made the toy a best seller despite

every new fad and gadget to come along. Betty produced enough of the toys to circle the Earth one times, and negotiated a deal with Pixar to use the toy as a character in toy story, effectively doubling her sales. That simple object Betty named in nine and creatively built to be one of history's most fun and wonderful toys. You might have heard that it walks downstairs alone or in pairs. Everyone knows it's slinky. There are a few

things as traumatic as a house fire. When I was growing up, a house directly down the street from my own, a house lived in by a classmate of mind from school, tragically caught fire one December night, burning the entire structure to the ground. Thankfully everyone made it out alive, but the devastation was complete. Family heirlooms, wrapped Christmas presents, clothing, toys, photo albums, name a precious object, and they lost it. And maybe that's why so many of us fear going

through the same experience. Pull a world history book off the shelf and you'll find a number of citywide fires listed to The Great Fire of London took place in sixteen sixty six, destroying over thirteen thousand houses and making some seventy of the people living there homeless. In eighteen seventy one, it was the Great Chicago Fire, taking the

lives of nearly two fifty people. Rome has burned, as as Amsterdam, Munich, Edinburgh, and Moscow, just to name a few, And most of the cities on the list burned so easily because firefighting was usually sloppy, slow, or just playing non existent. But then came Frederick Graff. He was a hydraulic engineer born in Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five who worked for a long time as a carpenter and a draftsman.

But it was in seventeen ninety five that he took a job as an assistant to a man named Benjamin Latrobe, who was an architect. Behind the Center Square water works on the side of today's Philadelphia City Hall once stood one of his creations, the Pump House. It pulled water from the nearby river using steam powered pumps, stored it in massive wooden tanks, and then let gravity feeded out to nearby houses and businesses using wooden pipes. And Frederick

Graff was right there beside him, learning and thinking. In eighteen o five he was elected to the position of superintendent of the water works there, but he and others began to notice that the system was just not powerful enough. They needed something bigger and better, and by eighteen eleven he was guiding the construction of a new facility. Frederick was also a fan of forward thinking all over the city.

The water mains beneath The cobble stones were made of wood, and I'm sure they worked for a long while, but wood can rot or crack or warp out of alignment. So as Frederick made improvements to the old system, he began to replace those old wooden mains with new iron ones. But that created a new problem. You see, for a while, if a fire broke out somewhere in the city, one method of fighting it was to pull up the cobble stones, tap into the water maine, and then use the water

to fight the blaze. When they were done, they plugged the holes in the maine called fire plugs for obvious reasons, and then reburied them. It was smart and inventive, but the new iron pipes couldn't be tapped so easily, So Frederick went to the drawing boarding came up with the plan. At various intervals along the new iron water mains, he would install permanent exposed fire plugs basically sealed faucets that could,

if the need arose, be used by firefighters. I probably don't have to say this out loud, but just in case you haven't pictured it in your mind, I will. Frederick Graph had invented the fire hydrant Today it's a common fixture in every neighborhood, both figuratively and literally. But when he first proposed the idea, it was revolutionary. As metal water mains began to spread to more and more cities,

so too did this other fresh idea. Today, firefighters everywhere, along with dogs with full bladders, have Frederick Graff to thank for the tool that makes their job more efficient and much more manageable. In an odd twist of faith, though it's impossible to say for certain if Frederick Graph was indeed the inventor of the fire hydrants. We know about his work from other sources, but the actual patent for the divice, the document that would make a rock

solid case for his inventiveness, no longer exists. Why because it was kept in the U. S. Patent Office in Washington, d C. Which was destroyed in eighteen thirty six because a fire. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky

in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Ye