Selects: How Slinky Works

Hi, everybody. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. It is Saturday, and that means it's time for my weekly Selects episode. Pick. I went through the archives and I found this gym from April fourteenth, twenty fifteen, How Slinky Works. A big fan of our Classic Toys episode and this is one of them. And the great thing about a slinky everyone is its spans generations. There's just something about this dumb little toy that kids enjoyed for decades, including my own daughter,

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 in front of hundreds of the dooring fans.

No, I feel all listless.

We just got back from our tour and.

That was just us again. Yeah, there's a paper ikea lamp with a dimmer that makes it turn into a strobe light even though it's not supposed to. And yeah, it's a toolbox over there. That's it.

It's a lot more fun to do this on stage in front of people, and it turns out.

I think we should do it again because the West Coast tour was pretty fun.

Yeah, so keep your eyes peeled. Perhaps Philly, d C. New York, and Boston.

Don't literally peel your eyes.

Then perhaps Chapel Hill.

Oh man.

We can't announce anything yet, but we're just teasing with those cities that we'll be in in June.

Yeah, we're actually going to Providence, are no, No, just kidding.

There were like ten people in Providence going yeah, oh man, I got to go to Boston again.

So how are you doing? You're still jet lagged.

I have recovered somewhat. I have to say that the city of Seattle is a place I could live. It's beautiful except for the weather, like we had it good and it's easy to fall in love with the place if you're there for like a great weekend, right because it was beautiful when everyone.

Was out, it was gorgeous.

But I told Emily she was all fired up too. It's like, you know, nine months out of the year. It's pretty depressing. Yeah, with the weather bleak, and I think you're just used to it. I 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 fans stood in line in the rain, and I felt all bad, But then I was like, they stand in line for in the rain all the time, for everything.

Gas, doughnuts, what have you.

Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, thanks to everyone who came out. It was so so fun.

Yes, La San Francisco, Portland, Seattle from both of us. From Jerry too, Yeah, from everybody, A heartfelt, hearty thank you.

Jerry was a regular hot shot, you know.

With w's so chuck. Yes, did you ever have a slinky when you were a kid, Sure, I feel like I played with them. I definitely played with him. I don't remember actually owning a slinky at any point, at least yours.

It was.

It was just kind of one of those things 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 my slinky.

Or going to the toy store and saying like, I want a slinky, right. But I did love slinkies whenever I played with them. Yeah, 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 well, I never had stairs that it worked well on.

You know, you gotta thought, say I never had stairs, Like, yeah, I'll bet you're frustrated 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 stops. Yeah, and then you got to do it again.

Were they for like really long feet, were they wide stairs or were they really tall or what was the deal?

I don't know. I felt like I felt like they were standard stairs.

And then you just didn't like them.

Well, we get all. I had the metal ones. It would get all 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 and 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 think kids would like wrap slinkies 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, ah, i's.

Slinky, or like attaching a knife to one end and like yeah, yeah, just jamming it towards somebody.

That was fun.

There's this guy on YouTube while 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 got it. Definitely want to check that out.

Oh and actually, we have a new thing on our website on our podcast pages, so like the page where you can go listen to any podcast on our site, there's now 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 Slinky Master. Oh you don't even need to google that. You just basically make stuff 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 shirks? Yeah, and so we've been working to get those back and I think they're going to be back now yep.

So that's Slinky's a goodnight.

Oh wait, we didn't start yet.

So I had no idea while I was watching people get their hair caught in Slinky's or playing with them in general that they had a kind of a pretty neat history until I ran across this article from PRIs Nomics, written by a dude named Zachary Crockett.

Yeah, big, thanks, it's a good article. It is.

It's called The Invention is Slinky, and in it, Crockett starts at a pretty reasonable place the birth of the inventor of slinky, Richard Thompson James.

Rick James, and in the slinky, I don't think he went by Rick.

No, he went by mister James, right, inventor's slinky.

Yes. He was born in nineteen fourteen in Delaware, and 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 thirteen, he found an old car and literally like fixed the car up well enough to sell it.

Yeah, it had like mice running around living. Yeah, and he sold it for twenty five bucks, which I went to West Egg and converted that three hundred and thirty seven dollars in twenty fourteen. Money.

Not bad for a thirteen year old, No, no way, that's yeah. But it was a car. Whoever bought it got a good deal, That's all I'm saying.

But I mean he probably didn't get rid of the mice. He just got the thing to run again.

Yeah. Plus it wasn't his car anyway, he just took it exact fixed it up.

Yeah, 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. I find that often when people like you 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, right, just interest in that kind of thing. Yeah, oh, you don't get into mechanical engineering in your twenties, no, 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? 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, he's an adult, wanted to be an astronaut, right, He wanted to be a cowboy.

Too, cowboys you grew up to actually be cowboys.

So anyway, he got a mechanical engineering degree and then started work as a naval engineer.

Yeah, because it makes sense. It was World War Two, so that's what you did. Yeah, he had 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.

Exactly.

And he was actually working on something that you springs is something that basically kept some sort of electronics on battleships. I think it had to do with the measuring horse power.

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 to rocking all over the place that you would use springs to keep it intact or keep it from moving around too much, right, Yeah. 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 of rage, it was accidental.

Yeah.

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 arching manner.

Anyway, Yeah, exactly, and he said, let's try 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, they there was a oh man, I can't remember what the actual the actual thing that makes the microwave. The microwave was discovered by accident that yeah, that it had these properties that like a guy had a chocolate bar in his shirt melted, it melt. He's like, wait a minute, So of course he logically ran and grabbed some popcorn and saw that that happened, and then the microwave was born.

Yeah, I think it's slinky. Is actually the only place that's on our website is one of those our top ten Accidental Inventions or something.

Yeah, and all bet microwaves are in there too.

I'm sure it is. So basically, you're right. The light bulb went off over his head and he went home and told his lovely wife Betty, Betty, Betty, I think I've 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 going to try, because you can't just get any spring and throw it on 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 sure that they use on mouse traps, and then there's this slinking Yeah, but no, 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, just the right size of the coils, just the right everything, so that it really accentuated that graceful flow, that arcing

Yeah, and I think he settled on a point zero five seven to five inch in diameter high carbon steel. The original slinkies were black metal, which was kind of cool looking by the time, like we were kids. I think they just they had the shiny, silvery ones. And then of course we'll get to the plastic that came along later too, but the first ones were black and it demonstrates property and physics hooks law.

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 Cooks law is a good place to start, and they got piled on.

Oh really.

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 Hooks law, 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 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.

Yeah, the one definition I saw was that it basically means a spring will return to its original shape once the load is removed.

So that makes sense, right. But there's another thing, at least one other thing going on with the slinky, and that is that it goes along a launge tudinal wave. So just like a sound wave, basically a slinky is a sound wave slowed down or the same type of wave as a sound wave, and it slowed down and as the slinky's moving on a molecular level, molecule to molecule, is pushing the ones in front of it forward, and then the whole thing starts over again once it reaches equilibrium.

That sounds like a great explanation to me.

Yes, no, that's all right. It avoids equilibrium. Once it hits equilibrium, it stops. Oh okay, Yeah, 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 a store.

Yeah, you gotta move it to get that kinetic energy going. Yeah. When I was a kid, I just remember staring at it. It's like it's not doing nothing.

This is where Slinky and our esp episodes collide. How's that You're just staring at slinky willing it to move?

Oh? Gotcha? All right. So he comes up with this little slinky. It works like a charm, his little prototype. He does the smart thing, which is if you want to find out if kids actually will enjoy it. He got the neighborhood together. Yeah, and came to 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. Yeah, he said this is perfect.

He's like, this is Gangbusters. And I mean, like he saw from that very early back of the envelope market research that he did with the neighborhood kids, it made him a believer. Oh yeah, Like he saw that kids really were into this thing. And I got the impression that at no point was he like this thing 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. 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, yeah, and never hit on something like the slinky. I mean, it's one of the top ten toys in history. When they give frustrate a little spring, they go slinky. So Betty, his wife, wasn't super well. She was a little skeptical at.

First, which we'll learn later is pretty ironic.

Very ironic. And he actually tasked her with naming it though. And she is the one that found the word slinky in the dictionary.

Yeah, apparently she spent like several weeks drinking for just the right word.

Well, I mean, what else was she doing raising six kids?

Right, exactly? She had a lot of downtime.

So right after 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 he's got his slinky, he's got the prototype, he gets a five hundred dollars loan to start from a friend to start James Spring and Wire Company, LLC. Yeah, pretty good name.

Yeah. Well, and then he got the five hundred 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 hundred bucks is, but in nineteen forty five, but we can guess that it's.

About forty million.

No, no, no, because I think it's about let's see, it was about I think sixty five hundred bucks probably roughly today. Okay, which I mean, that's substantial to give a friend.

Oh yeah, I can, and it was enough to get things going. I think he really, I mean he had the prototype, he just needed an official company banner basically. Right. So he has his machine shop and he has his prototype, and he gets a bunch of wire and he makes a bunch of slinky.

Well, he goes through his local machine shop first.

Right, So he's at his local machine shop and he makes four hundred slinkies. They were 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. Yeah, 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 on itself. Yeah.

I didn't realize though, I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but I didn't realize it started out as like a round, like diameter type wire.

Yeah.

But what kind of metal did he start out at?

Swedish steel, high.

Grade blue black Swedish steel.

I guess that was the wire of the day. Yeah, and it was in ninety eight coils and at first they just wrapped it in parchment paper. 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 in the box. Yeah, that's still like modeled after the original box, which is kind of neat. Yeah, So I don't see why you wouldn't get that one personally.

So with the original metal slinky, yeah, and the whole history from the time he walked into that metal shop the first time, once he had the prototype figured out 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 it from tangling is easy, uh huh, and for safety. So it didn't like cut some kid's eye out.

Right, So after a bunch of kids eyes were cut out, they'd crimp the INDs.

I don't know if they had foresight or if if it was in response to eyes being gouged out, but that's crazy one. Yeah, and I mean still today, I went on Amazon to double check, and the slinky is still two and a half inches tall.

Wow.

It didn't say how many coils it was because they didn't get that descriptive. But it's the same thing as it was back in nineteen forty what five.

Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't have like, you know, the Mega x stream right slinky.

That like is powered by mountain dew or something like that.

You know, they probably do have that, actually extreme. I love that though the original slinky is still like exact same.

Yeah, the original metal ones.

Yeah, yeah, for sure I changed something that's perfect right, right, And so the.

James's knew that this thing was perfect, had a great name, worked really well. Yeah, the neighborhood kids loved it.

Sure, So of course.

This thing's going to become like a hit right out of the gate, right.

Nope, No, you're being coy. My friend he took it to toy stores and there was one storekeeper who said, this is the atomic age. Kids want big, bright, fancy things with lots of colors and lights. We couldn't give the thing away if it played God bless America picked up the Daily Double Is it walked down the steps. That's very cynical.

It is very cynical. He used exclamation points and stuff.

But James, Rick James was like, I'm Rick James, and you know, tell me what to do with my toys.

No, and he got in touch with Gimbals, who is very famous as the Macy's competitor from there go on thirty fourth Street. That's the only reason most of us have ever heard of Gimbals. Yeah, and Gimbals in Philadelphia apparently 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.

They 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 he was just hitting department stores all over the northeast.

Well in Delaware, it's not too far anyway, So.

Yeah, they may have still been in Delaware, but they they did talk the Philadelphi Gimbals into putting this on their Christmas display, So in Christmas nineteen forty five. November nineteen forty five, the slinky debuts to public and it immediately takes off like a rocket. Right.

Nope, again that was double koy. No. It for weeks just sat there because of course, it's just this thing that kids had never seen before, the spring and the parchment paper sitting between like really awesome toys.

Yeah, it's just like all it's nothing but potential energy at that point. Yeah, there's like a spring sitting between those atomic age toys that that one shopkeeper was using exclamation points about.

Right, yeah, I mean if there was ever a toy that needed a demonstration to delight and amaze, it was the slinky.

So very frustrated with this, Richard James apparently said to his wife, like, I'm going down to Gimbals and I'm going to deal with this head on. Yeah, and he said meet me there in like ninety minutes or something like that.

Yeah.

So he went down there, took a couple of Slinkies out of their parchment paper and started lookie, dummies, Yeah, you stupid kids, keep your hair away, but check this out. And he started playing with them, and apparently by the time Betty got down there, ninety minutes later, he had sold 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 Fa Miracle on thirty fourth Street comes through and does like a little towirl and goes out of frame again.

But he did sell those four hundred units that day, supposedly, and by Christmas they had sold twenty thousand, so it really did take off super fast. Yeah, 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. Oh yeah, a one dollar They sold him for a dollar apiece. Yeah, so he sold four hundred units and twenty thousand by the end of Christmas. That it translates to like thirteen dollars in today's money.

Oh wow.

So imagine being a parent today and being like, you want me to pay thirteen dollars for a spring?

Yeah?

Are you crazy? But they still managed to capture the public imagination just right. Yeah, and the thing just spread like wildfire, not just in Christmas of nineteen forty five. By Christmas of nineteen forty seven, there was a New York Times article in 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 Brenees might have cooked up, right, Yeah, I think so. I think Another cool thing is they remained a dollar for a lot of their life, right. And it said in this article here that in the mid nineties are only a dollar eighty nine. Now they're like four or five bucks.

It looks like I saw again on Amazon. Yeh, Amazon, Amazon dot com. Amazon, it was like two twenty nine. It was the lowest I saw.

Hey, that's a good deal for a slinky.

But even still, Yeah, if you want a great deal on anything, go to Amazon dot com.

I saw others at other nameless online toy store retailers.

And always that we were supposed to do four or five bucks. No Amazon, I could see that though, four or five bucks it makes sense. Yeah, 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, so its 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 that kids could have a cheap toy and she wanted even poor kids to be able to buy something, right, and here's my spring, here's this link to just give me a dollar.

So the James is and by this time they were they were in pretty much partnership from what I understand, at the very least, Betty was playing some sort of supporting role, at least as an advisor. Possibly sure, But again they had like six kids and she was raised, so it was really mostly Richard running the company. But they took the Slinky to the toy Fair, the American Toy Fair in New York, which is the same one

Yeah, he sold more than one hundred million in the first three years of production. That's crazy. One hundred million, one hundred million, And this is the population of you know, the mid forties, right, Yeah, it's not like you know nowadays, that would be a little more believable, I think.

So well, no, think about it. I wish I would have thought of that. Like, there probably weren't too terribly more, much more than one 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 uh, Delaware, Delaware, 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 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 five seconds a pop.

Yeah, the old machine shop was making them in a couple of minutes per slinky.

Which was fast for back then, I think.

But yeah, so Richard James said, I'm gonna 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, yeah, it took it, took the round wire, huh, smushed it yep, and then coiled it. Yeah, in nine seconds, 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 this is when it came in the black box and they ditched the parchment and it was labeled Slinky Colon, the famous walking spring toy, and it was gangbusters.

Man, it was again. They sold one hundred million in the first two years. To put that in perspective, I did find out how many people there were in America in nineteen forty seven. There was one hundred and forty four million people in the US.

And he sold one hundred million slinky huh.

So for every one point four people there was, one of them had a slinky.

So that means adults were buying slinkys too. Yeah, you know. Yeah, So in the nineteen fifties they started to do what all great inventors do, They started to expand the line a bit. Yeah, they came up with courtesy of a woman named Helen Malsaid came up with a slinky dog and the slinky train because she was a fan that they would like solicit ideas, and she wrote them in and said, Hey, I think it would be pretty neat if you made like a dog that walked, but the middle of them was a slinky.

Right, and so like the rear end up to the front.

Yeah, like in toy Story exactly, which they got some nice kickback money on that.

There was also the uh 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 nervous that, like.

Paul said, died bitter and penniless in New York.

No, she actually was a ended up creating twenty six toys and games in her career. Wow, the slinky dog and slinky train were her biggest successes. But they basically paid her sixty five grand a year for seventeen years on that royalty. That's awesome, which is a ton of money. Yeah, so hats off to you.

Helen mal 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.

Gotcha.

I don't think she had like burst onto the scene though or anything.

Yeah, but that's a pretty comfortable living back then.

Oh heck. Yeah. So they also had this SUSI the slinky worm and slinky crazy eyes.

Yeah you know those.

I remember those.

Yeah, those glasses that have like the slinkies attached to the big bloodshot eyeballs. Yeah, those are slinky brand hysterical. And it turns out that it wasn't just toys. This slinky patent that Richard James originally got back in the forties was also licensed out for other stuff, like it was used in antennas. It ended up being used on battleships or other kinds of ships. Is a stabilizing thing like he was originally after. Yeah, gutter protectors.

Yeah, I saw that too, Light fixtures, total sense.

So They also made a ton of cash sub licensing this whole 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. Didn't license that, like just straight up gave them slinkies to use in the field as antennas. So they would throw the slinky like over a tree branch and then pull it down and connect it to their radio to boost their intenna signal.

That is pretty smart, pretty neat. You know it's being used today in space. Oh really, they're using the same I think the same patent originally to deploy solar sales in space. Oh wow, yeah, pretty cool.

I wonder if they're licensing the actual.

They I mean, NASA was using the slinky name all over the article I was reading. And there's another one too. There's a paper slinky that has it's coated with a metal on one side, and so the when you make it go springing to non springy I think is the physics terms that I'm searching for sure, it creates static electricity, and it creates enough that that can be captured and used to generate power. No way, yeah, way, And it's people at Georgia Tech who are doing it.

Well, that makes sense, all right, So where are we He has sold one 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 that has to do with well, you'll see.

So we're back, Chuck. Slinky's doing well. It's the fifties. There's a ton of different slinky stuff, slinky eyeballs. Everybody's freaking out their teachers. Yeah, and things are going great for the Jameses, right.

I think teacher's desk drawers are loaded with slinky products, the shattering teeth and rotten apples. Wonder where that came.

From giving the teacher an apple. Yeah, I don't know, but I'll bet somebody out there will let us know.

Yeah, 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 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 Mahr, which is like the wealthiest of the suburbs. I bet it still is Bryn Mahr.

It doesn't sound like a place has gone down the tubes.

No, you know, no, so Welsh Brynn looks pretty Welsh. V r y n m awr.

It's definitely something uk.

I'm gonna say Welsh, all right.

So Betty, 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 fulling around on her quite a bit from the sounds of it, right, And she was.

Like, Okay, let's see, am I gonna ditch this zero and go find a hero or what am I going to 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, I'm sure. And as a result, Richard James started going to church a lot more and

Yeah, that's exactly what he game.

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 felt really bad about things and he wanted to get stuff off of his chest. Not so, says Betty, his ex wife. Betty said that he liked the attention that he would get from confessing in confession.

Yeah, he pretty he was sort of a hot shot, and I think he liked to just be revered maybe I don't know.

Or just for people to 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 was very strange.

So as he's going to confession, as he's going to church more and more and more, he's 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, he's becoming pretty isolated from his family as well. I got the impression that they didn't go down the church path quite the same degree he did, and so that was causing him to feel more and

Not only that they were in debt to like seven figure debt, yeah, about a million dollars in debt. Yeah, because he started funneling all their millions to dogmatic evangelical religious groups, donating all their money.

Not only donating some Yeah, exactly. He was like not paying creditors for the LLC that owns slinky. He was diverting that revenue from the business to religious groups that he was a member of.

Yeah. And this article said straight up like if you bought a slinky before nineteen sixty, your money went exactly there, right.

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 James family from the mid fifties till nineteen sixty, and then all of a sudden in nineteen sixty, Richard James said, have you guys ever heard of Bolivia? No, Well, it's too bad because I just bought a 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 of Bolivia.

Yeah, and I've seen it characterized as a cult. That is not quite the deal. They were called the Wycliffe Bible Translators and they're still around, but it was basically their mission is to translate the Bible into as many languages and get it into as many hands around the world as possible. And he felt that call and straight up left. His family said smell you later, and never got back in touch with him again. No, so as far as I could deal.

That was February of nineteen sixty. And I think it was Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian cult.

Yeah, which you know, she was upset, sure, you know, and she read up about him and said this seems really weird to me, right, But yeah, it wasn't quite a cult, but I get it. She was scorned.

So that was February nineteen sixty that 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. You have a choice here. We can either liquidate the company 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.

R Right. It took me a couple of times of reading this before I finally called on to that. At first I thought he just laughed and she slid into that position. But yeah, he gave her the choice, like, you can liquidate, 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 going to try taking over the company.

I'm going all in on Slinky.

So she took over this company, Chuck, that was in really dire straits.

Yeah. I don't think we even mentioned that Slinky's had started to wane in popularity, right, So not only were they in debt, but toward the end of the nineteen fifties, everyone had like the slinky craze had sort of passed.

Yeah, so we said that it sold one hundred million units in its first two years. Since nineteen forty seven. No, nineteen forty five, they've sold three hundred million total. Oh wow, so 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.

Yeah.

And so this lady took over a company that was saddled with debt. It's star product was not so much of a star any longer.

And she had six kids.

She had six kids. Yeah, and she decided, rather than to liquidate the company, to say, no, I'm going to see what I can do with this. I'm going to 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.

Nope, it's Betty James everybody.

So her first plan was, I have all these creditors at least let me try and get this deferred for now, and was somehow able to talk them into the some of these payments. Yeah, thank god. And then in nineteen sixty two, she hired three dudes from Columbia, South Carolina. Johnny McCullough and Homer Fesperman wrote the music, and Charles Weegley 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 let's play a little bit of that right now. Everyone's heard it, and here it is who walks to day without to get and makes the happiest sounds that bumping down.

Just like a club. Everyone else is ninety.

That's been the get to give, I get the favorite all over town.

So I mean that surely sounds familiar. Apparently there was a nineteen ninety survey that was 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 yeah, 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 coca and a smile whatever.

I don't even know how that goes.

No, I think that was just a slogan that wasn't a song. Oh, yeah, No, you're totally right. And you and I, of course all day have been singing it's log, It's log.

And I was like, sure, that was obviously based on the Slinky jingle. And I went back and listened to I was like, no, it is the slinky jingle. They replace the lyrics. I didn't get the joke.

Well, Ren and stimpy fans obviously know what I just did. But if you were like I don't get it, what does log have to do anything?

Just look up log. I guess log jingle maybe.

Yeah. So this was a huge it and it's funny. I was looking on the internet to see if I could find anything on these guys that wrote this thing, and Homer Fesperman has a face book page. It's got to be him.

Wow.

Yeah, I just clicked on it and the first thing I saw was South Carolina game Cocks. Yeah, And I was like, well Columbia, South Carolina. Yeah, And it looks like he's making like a video scrapbooks for people. Well, that's Facebook page was wide open, and I wanted to get touch and say are you are.

You the Homer Fest?

Maybe we could just get a like a little quick interview or something, but I didn't know. So look him up, Homer Fest Perman.

He's on the he's on the internet.

Yeah, everybody friend him. He'll be like, what is going on?

Have been spam by the friendliest people on Facebook?

Who are fans? Yeah, most of them.

So Betty's got this jingle out there. This was a master stroke.

Oh yeah.

She also did some the 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's she went hemorrhaging money on every time. It was all very smart and Slinky's star started to rise once again.

Well, she moved the facility closer to Philadelphia too. I think it saved some money and allowed her to be with her kids more, 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 attention from nanny's and things right, 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 her family this This article on Perisonomics points out that she was also helping out the families of I think the one hundred and twenty person team that she put together. Yeah, and it says they were a close knit, which definitely kind of jibes with the impression that I've gotten of her totally. So she's she's got this jingle down. Slinky's starting to come back a

Plastic plastic was that the thing.

Yeah, there was a 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 her company and said, what do you think about this? She said, you know what, I don't steal ideas I pay for him. How much do you want me to make the checkout for?

Yeah. His name was Donald James Room, and he was of master Mark Plastics, and he was trying to make a garden hose that coiled like they have now, like a plastic garden hose that self coiled, and he failed and his kids apparently were like, that looks like a slinky and he was like, oh well let.

Me, stupid kids, I'm trying to concentrate.

I'm trying to make a garden hose. So, like you said, they made a great deal and he he ended up with tons of money too. Yeah, and it made slinky super popular again.

And it became the Slinky Rainbow, the Rainbow Slink, And Yeah, all of a sudden, not just original slinky. Now you had this what they call it, a less tangle prone alternative to slinky. Yeah, which is pretty bold because you're saying your original product is tangle prone. Yeah, still worked. I think maybe they just knew that everybody knew that the slinky is tangle prone. And now they had a couple of products again that were really saleable, and the slinky star rose once more.

Yeah, and like I said, the Toy Story, they did make a great deal with I guess it was Pixar. Yeah, and sold a ton more slinkies when Toy Story came out because of the dog right exactly. And in nineteen seventy four, Betty Heard received news that her husband, Rick James, had passed away.

Who she hadn't he cues within a few months of going to Bolivia, like she hadn't heard anything from him.

That's just unbelievable. But she was doing fine, and so she was probably like, thanks for letting me know who cares. I'm sure it might have been a little sad. Yeah, I'm not gonna say that. But she then sold to poof Products in nineteen ninety eight for what she called a quote boatload of money and good for her.

Yeah, And she lived on for another ten years, to the ripe 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 sound with a slinky?

Oh really?

Yeah, Well you can do it with the microphone, or you can you put a cup, like a paper cup in the end of the slinky and you hold that in the air just at like the height of your head and the rest of this slinky falls to the ground and then you just start. Basically, there are all kinds of noises you can make, but if 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 can go to YouTube and look up Star Wars slinky sound and there's a couple of dudes of course that'll show you just how to do it.

Well. That's one of the reasons too, why Betty James chose the word slinky is not only because it was sleek and attractive, but also thinks she thought that that was a good description of what the sound it may does. It went downstairs.

That was before the Star Wars blaster, or she would have called it exact the blaster.

And there's one last thing about slinky physics that are pretty amazing.

Let's hear it.

So, if you dangle a slinky out to where it's 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 about out a window.

Let's say, okay, but without this bottom touching the ground out a fourth story though awesome, and you actually, if it was like eighty something feet, it'd have to be higher than that. Because it's slink, you would go right down to the ground.

Man, Well, I mean you have to weight the bottom of it.

Okay, So let's say four stories. You're right then, and if you have it, you're holding it 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. Whoa slinkys 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

Still it's like you're still holding on to me.

As far as I know, it's literally floating in mid air. Wow, it's ceaselessly amazing, basically the slinky.

Yes, well those are two pretty boss slinky tricks.

Yep.

And what a great way to finish, I think.

So if you want to know more about slinkies, you can go to the podcast page on how Stuff you Should Know dot com and check out our slinky episode and there should be links to this PRIs Nomics article and the YouTube slinky mast or 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 Sage from Portland. Remember Sage. Yeah, we do a little Q and A at the end of these live shows and where people can get up in it ask us questions and sages was great, so I told her to scend it in. 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 saved. You did great. By the way, my fact is that you can actually tell how old a humpback whale is by looking at

Yeah.

Humpback whales migrate from Alaska Towaii 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 beached to find out their age and a lot of other facts about them. Gross and fascinating, just like the actual ear Wax podcast. Guys. I found out this while snorkeling on a cruise in Hawaii last week for spring break. Thanks for everything, and thanks for

Cool.

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 large and in charge like you do audience QA stuff every night.

That's right.

Thanks to everybody in Portland, you guys, I think chuck. Every single person that we met before and after said welcome to Portland, Like we were literally welcome by every single person.

Yeah, it was really neat that they're proud of their city as they should be. Yes.

If you want to get in touch with us about anything to do with whales or slinkys or live shows or any of that jazz, you can tweet to us at sysk podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at houstuffworks dot com, and as always, joined us at our luxurious home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio.

App Apple Podcasts. Have you listen to your favorite shows