Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Slinky Works

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

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. Learn all about it in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 14th, 2015. 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 it spans generations. There's just something about this dumb little toy that kids enjoyed for decades, including my own daughter who has her own slinky and loves it. So everyone please listen right now to how Slinky Works, not Slinky's Slinky.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. 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 Stuff You Should Know, projecting from Studio 1A. Just us. It's not us on stage in front of hundreds of adoring fans and I feel all listless. We just got back from our tour and now it's 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 there's a toolbox over there that's it. It's a lot more fun to do this on stage in front of people as 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 though. 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 we? No. Just kidding. There are like 10 people in Providence going, yeah, oh man, I gotta go to Boston again. So how are you doing?

You 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. 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 to, it's like nine months out of the year. It's pretty depressing with the weather. Bleak. And I think you're just used to it if you look out there. I guess. 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 in the rain all the time for everything. Gas, donuts, 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. From everybody, a heartfelt, hearty thank you. Jerry was a regular hotshot. Yeah. 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 them, but I don't remember actually owning a slinky at any point. You leased yours?

It was just kind of one of those things that was always around. There was always a slinky. You could get your hands on a slinky. But you don't remember getting a slinky and saying, this is my slinky. Or going to the toy store and saying like, I want a slinky. But I did love slinkies whenever I played with them. It turns out I was just one of many, many children over the last 60, 70 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. I thought you were going to 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 and then you've 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 they were standard stairs. Slinky just didn't like them. Well, I had the metal ones that would get all, you know, how they would tend to get tangled. 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, like you'd wrap it around your friend and then sort of just latch it and you'd be like, oh, man, it's slinky. Right. Or like attaching a knife to one end and like just jabbing 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 to 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 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 the 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. And we're super happy about because we used to have transcriptions for our friends in the deaf and hard of hearing community and then we didn't do it for a while and they were like, what gives?

Jerks. Right. 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 Slinkies. Good night. Oh wait, we didn't start yet.

So I had no idea while I was watching people get their hair caught in Slinkies or playing with them in general that they had a kind of a pretty neat history until I ran across this article from Price Nomics written by a dude named Zachary Crockett. Yeah. Big thanks. This is a good article. It is. It's called The Invention of the Slinky.

And in it, Crockett starts at a pretty reasonable place. The birth of the inventor of Slinky, Richard Thompson James. Rick James invented the Slinky. Right. I don't think he went by Rick. No. He went by Mr. James. Right.

Inventors Slinky. Yes. He was born in 1914 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 13, he found an old car and literally like fixed the car up well enough to sell it. Yeah. He was running around living in it and he sold it for 25 bucks, which I went to West

Egg and converted that $337 in 2014 money. Not bad for a 13-year-old kid. No way. God. Yeah, but it was a car. Whoever bought it got a good deal. For sure. 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. Exactly. He fixed it up. Yeah.

It was the mice's car. In the 1930s, he went to Penn State and did study mechanical engineering. Yeah. He was just a tinkerer. So it made a lot of sense. Sure. Yeah. I find that often when people like you research 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 interest in that kind of thing. Yeah. You don't get into mechanical engineering in your 20s. No. 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 an adult.

Like he's going to do it. He wanted to be an astronaut. Right. He wanted to be a cowboy too. Cowboys who 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 II. So that's what you did? Yeah. 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 used springs, something that basically kept

some sort of electronics on battleships. I think it had to do with the measuring horsepower. Yeah. It was a horsepower meter that I guess if you're in rough waves, it would mess with the meter. Yeah. And 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. No. It was accidental. Yeah. And one of the things he knocked over included a spring and he watched the spring fall off of 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. Yeah, exactly. And he said, let's try that again. Yeah. He was 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? Yeah. What was it again? It 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 it had these... A flux capacitor? Yeah.

That it had these properties that like a guy had a chocolate bar in his shirt, Percy Spencer. Oh, that's right. And it melted it. It melted. 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 it's on our website is one of those are top 10 accidental inventions or something. Yeah. And all that 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.

So, Betty, I think I've got something here and I just need to figure out 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 it turns out, you know, like there's a tension spring that they use on mousetraps. Yeah.

And then there's the slinky spring. 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 flow that it has that makes it the slinky. And it took him like a year of tinkering with all these different tensions and types of materials before he finally hit upon it.

Yeah, and I think he settled on a.0575 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 had the silver ones and then of course we'll get to the plastic that came along later too. The first ones were black and it demonstrates property in physics called Hooke's 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 Hooke's Law is a good place to start.

And they got piled on. Oh, really? They said that Hooke's Law has to do with the amount of force a spring exerts on something it's attached to. So I think with Hooke's 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.

So I don't know if Hooke's Law does apply or not, but if it does, that's my understanding of how it would apply. 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 longitudinal 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, 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 stored. Yeah, you got to 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 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 and gave it to some kids and they went nuts. They were like, this thing's amazing. Yeah, like hey you kids, 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. 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 research that he did with the neighborhood kids, it made him a believer. 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 and never hit on something like the slinky. I mean, it's one of the top 10 toys in history. When they get frustrated.

And it's just a little spring. It's 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 looking for just the right word. Well, I mean, what else was she doing? Raising six kids. Right. Exactly. She had a lot of downtime. Right after this break, we will talk a little bit about how it went from just a garage neighborhood idea to one of the biggest selling toys ever.

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He gets a $500 loan to start from a friend to start James Spring and wire company, LLC. Yeah. Pretty good name. Yeah, well then he got the 500 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 500 bucks is in 1945, but we can guess that it's... About 40 million?

No. No, because I think it was about, let's see, it was about I think 6,500 bucks probably roughly today. Okay. Which I mean, that's substantial to give a friend. Oh yeah. You know? 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. So he has this machine shop and he has this prototype and he gets a bunch of wire and he makes a bunch of slinkies. Well, he goes to his local machine shop first. Right. So he's at his local machine shop and he makes 400 slinkies. They were two and a half inches tall, contained 80 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. 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 that it... I mean, yeah, it makes sense, but I didn't realize it started out as like a round 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. And it was in 98 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 that's... In the box. Yeah, that is 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 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 after it was produced to keep it from tangling as easy and 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'd crimp the ends. I don't know if they had foresight or if it wasn't in response to eyes being gouged out, but that's crazy.

This is the only 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 1940, what, five? Yeah.

I'm surprised they didn't have like the Mega X stream slinky. Right. That like is powered by Mountain Dew or something like that, you know? They probably do have that actually. I love that though. The original slinky is still like exact same. Yeah. The original metal ones.

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. It's a toy, 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 this thing away if it played God bless America and picked up the Daily

Double as 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. Yeah. And he got in touch with Gimbles, who is very famous as the Macy's competitor from

there going 34th Street. It's the only reason most of us have ever heard of Gimbles. And Gimbles in Philadelphia apparently said, 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's something to do with it. They eventually moved outside of Philly, but I'm not sure exactly where they were at this point. It would make sense. Yeah. Although it's entirely possible, he was hustling hard enough that he was just hitting department stores all over the Northeast.

That's true. Well, in Delaware, it's not too far anyway. Yeah, they may have still been in Delaware, but they did talk the Philadelphia Gimbles into putting this on their Christmas display. So, in Christmas, 1945, November 1945, the slinky debuts to the public and it immediately takes off like a rocket, right? Nope. Again?

That was double-coy. 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 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.

So, 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 Gimbles and I'm going to deal with this head-on. And he said, meet me there in like 90 minutes or something like that. So he went down there, took a couple of slinkies out of their parchment paper and started... Looky 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, 90 minutes later, he had sold all 400 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's like within 90 minutes. It's great.

The world was slinky crazy. Yeah. The Santa from Miracle on 34th Street comes through and does like a little twirl and goes out of frame again. But he did sell those 400 units that day supposedly and by Christmas, they had sold 20,000. So it really did take off super fast 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 at $1. They sold them for a dollar a piece. So he sold 400 units and 20,000 by the end of Christmas. That translates to like $13 in today's money. So imagine being a parent today and being like, you want me to pay $13 for a spring? Yeah. 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 1945. By Christmas of 1947, 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 Bernays might have cooked up. Right. Yeah. I think so.

I think that another cool thing is they remained a dollar for a lot of their life. And it's said in this article here that in the mid-90s, they're only $1.89. Now they're like four or five bucks, it looks like. I saw again on Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.com, Amazon, it was like $2.29, 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.com. I saw others at other nameless online toy store retailers that were like four or five

bucks. No. Amazon. I could see that though, four or five bucks, it 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.

So its relative price went down tremendously and they did that on purpose. 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. And here's my spring. Here's the slinky. Just give me a dollar. So the James's, and by this time 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 raising them. 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 that Barbie debuted at in the 50s, I think, Barbie registered trademark. And they took slinky there in 1947 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 huge. 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 the mid 40s. Right. Yeah. It's not like nowadays that would be a little more believable, I think. Well, no, think about it. I wish I would have thought of that. There probably weren't too terribly 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. A slinky in every pot. So things were going so well, he realized that my machine shop here in Delaware or suburban Pennsylvania, 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 an inventor, I'm just going to 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 going to make my own machine. 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 the round wire, smooshed it, and then coiled it, and then crimped the ends, I guess. That's crazy. And then bam, you got a slinky. You got a dollar in your pocket right there. 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 100 million in the first two years. To put that in perspective, I did find out how many people there were in America in 1947. There was 144 million people in the U.S. And he sold 100 million slinkies. So for every 1.4 people, there was one of them had a slinky. So that means adults were buying slinkies, too.

So in the 1950s, they started to do what all great inventors do, they started to expand the line a bit. They came up with courtesy of a woman named Helen Moll said, came up with a slinky dog and the slinky train because she was a fan. 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. So like the rear end, we catch up to the front, yeah, like in Toy Story, exactly. Which they got some nice kickback money on that.

There was also the, yeah, oh yeah. 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. Right. Moll said died bitter and penniless in New York. No, she actually was a, ended up creating 26 toys and games in her career. Wow. So the slinky dog and slinky train were her biggest successes, but they basically paid

her 65 grand a year for 17 years on that royalty. That's awesome. Which is a ton of money. Yeah. So hats off to you, Helen Moll said. 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 O-Bit and they talked about some other games that she had tried to create. Gotcha. I don't think she had like burst onto the scene or anything, but that's a pretty comfortable living back then. Oh heck yeah. So they also had this Susie, 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, those are slinky brand hysterical. And it turns out that it wasn't just toys, the slinky patent that Richard James originally got back in the 40s 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 as a stabilizing thing like he was originally after.

Yeah. Gutter protectors. Yeah, I saw that too. Light fixtures. Makes total sense. So they also made a ton of cash sub-licensing this whole, 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 it 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 antenna 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. I mean NASA was using the slinky name all over the article I was reading. Oh, well then they're paying. And there's another one too. There's a paper slinky that has, it's coated with a metal on one side and so when you make it go springy to non-springy I think it's the physics terms that I'm searching for.

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 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 that has to do with, well, you'll see. Hey y'all, it's Justin Richmond and growing up I was told that college would be my ticket to success. No one in my family had ever completed a degree so when I transferred to UC Berkeley in 2011 I thought as long as I'd made it to the next two years, I'd made it. Of course, it was really only the beginning. I had no idea what came next, what I wanted to do for a living or what making a living

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So we're back, Chuck. Slinky's doing well. It's the 50s. There's a ton of different slinky stuff, slinky eyeballs. These freaking out their teachers and things are going great for the Jameses, right? I think teachers' desk drawers are loaded with slinky products. And shattering teeth. And rotten apples.

I 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. Oh yeah. All right. So it's the mid-1950s. They are loaded at this point.

Loaded. They had no money at this point, they had moved to a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia with a 31-bedroom estate on 12 acres, rich, super rich people. Yes. Good for them. They're in Bryn Mawr, which is like the wealthiest of the Philadelphia suburbs. Oh yeah. I bet it still is.

Bryn Mawr. It doesn't sound like a place that's going down the tubes. No. You know? No. What is that? Welsh? Bryn...

Looks pretty Welsh. M-A-W-R. It's definitely something UK. I'm going to 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 fooling around on her quite a bit from the sounds of it.

Right. Okay, let's see, am I going to 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 going to 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 it really got to him.

He really spoke to him a lot, going to church and became something of a, I guess I took it, although it didn't say he became something of a born again. Yeah. That's exactly what it 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 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 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 ditched 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. He 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 more isolated, causing him to withdraw more

and more. And 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. It's like seven figure debt. 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. And then some. Yeah, exactly. He was like not paying creditors for the LLC that owned Slinky. He was diverting that revenue from the business to religious groups that he was a member of. Yeah. And he said straight up, like if you bought a Slinky before 1960, your money went exactly

there. Right. So it was kind of a big deal. This is a big revelation that was started in the mid fifties and really things just got weird in the James family from the mid fifties till 1960. And then all of a sudden in 1960, Richard James said, have you guys ever heard of Bolivia? No. Well, that'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, smile you later and never got back in touch with him again as far as I could tell. That was February of 1960 and I think it was Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian cult. 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 I get it.

She was scorned. That was February 1960 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 realize 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. Right. It took me a couple of times of reading this before I finally caught 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. Right. 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 1950s, everyone had like the Slinky craze had sort of passed. Yeah. So we said that it sold 100 million units in its first two years.

Since 1947, no, 1945, they've sold 300 million total. Oh, wow. So a full one third of all the Slinky's 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. Its star product was not so much of a star any longer and she had six kids. She had six kids. 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. And reading this, she's truly one of like the great women in American history, I think. 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 we're somehow able to talk them into deferring some of these payments. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah.

So in 1962, she hired three dudes from Columbia, South Carolina. Johnny McCullough and Homer Fessperman wrote the music and Charles Weigley 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 play a little bit of that right now. Everyone's heard it.

And here it is. Who walks the stair without a care and makes the happiest sound, bounce up and down just like a clown. Everyone knows it's linky, the best present yet to give or get the favorite all over town. So that surely sounds familiar. Apparently there was a 1990 survey that was conducted that found that 89.8% 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.

What else is there? I can't think of anything else to put up against it. Have a coconut 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. So that was obviously based on the slinky jingle and I went back and listened to it. I was like, no, it is the slinky jingle. They just replaced 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 with anything?

Just look up log, I guess log jingle maybe. So this was a huge hit 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 Facebook page. It's got to be him. Wow, yeah. I just clicked on it and the first thing I saw was South Carolina Gamecocks. And I was like, well, Columbia, South Carolina.

And it looks like he's making like video scrapbooks for people. Well, Facebook page was wide open and I wanted to get in touch and say, are you the Homer Fesperman? Yeah, maybe we could just get a little quick interview or something, but I didn't know. So look him up, Homer Fesperman. He's on the internet. Yeah, everybody friend him. He'll be like, what is going on?

I've been spammed 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. 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 went hemorrhaging money on advertising. 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 like attention for nannies and things.

But I get the idea. She was a good mom. She was trying to do right by her family. Right. And not only her family, this article on Priceonomics points out that she was also helping out the families of I think the 120 person team that she put together. And it says they were close knit, which definitely kind of jibes with the impression that I've gotten of her.

So she's got this jingle down, Slinky's starting to come back a little bit. And also, I think the tech that she's taking is it's an inexpensive toy that everybody can enjoy. But it's still, I mean, I don't know if all of it would have been quite so possible had a bit of serendipity not happened in the mid 1970s. 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 them. How much do you want me to make the check out for?

Yeah. His name was Donald James Ruhm 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 send it to the Slinky. He's like, shut up, you 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 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 a less tangle prone alternative to Slinky, which is pretty bold because 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 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 and sold a ton more Slinkies when toy story came out because of the dog. Right, exactly. And in 1974, Betty heard, received news that her husband, Rick James, had passed away. Who she hadn't, he cut ties 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. So she was probably like, thanks for letting me know. Who cares? Who? Who? It might have been a little sad.

Yeah. I'm not going to say that. But she then sold to Poof Products in 1998 for what she called a quote, a boatload of money. And good for her. Yeah. And she lived on for another 10 years to the ripe old age of 90. And I think before then she was recognized by the Toy Industry Association's Hall of

Fame. Yeah. So I think Slinky was inducted in 2000. 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 a microphone or you can, you put a cup, a paper cup in 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 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. It 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.

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 she thought that that was a good description of what the sound it made as it went downstairs. Yeah. That was before the Star Wars Blaster. I wish she would have called it 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 it, just letting the force of gravity stretch out the Slinky until it reaches equally above. It's like out a window, let's say. Okay. But without this bottom touching the ground. Out a fourth story window. Awesome.

And you actually, if it was like 80 something feet, it'd have to be higher than that because the 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. 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. What? You guys 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 midair. And they figured out that the reason why is because the tension is still acting against the 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 and 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 it's happening up top, down below, it's all hunky-dory still. It's like you're still holding on to me as far as I know.

It's literally floating in midair. Wow. It's ceaselessly amazing, basically, the Slinky, yes. Well, those are two pretty boss Slinky tricks. Up. 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 stuffyshanot.com and check out our Slinky episode and there should be links to this PriceNomics 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 going to call this Sage from Portland. Remember Sage? Yeah. We do a little Q&A at the end of these live shows and where people can get up and ask us

questions. And Sage's was great, so I told her to send it in. Hey guys, just got back from your live show in Portland and Chuck said to write in to my amazing fact. I was super nervous to go up there. Well, Sage, you did great, by the way. My fact is that you can actually tell how old a humpback whale is by looking at their earwax because it forms rings like a tree.

Oh yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Humpback whales migrate from Alaska to Hawaii each year for mating. The temperature shift of the ocean water causes the rings to form. Researchers will examine the earwax of deceased whales that were beached to find out their age and a lot of other facts about them. Gross and fascinating, just like the actual earwax podcast, guys.

I found out this while 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. Ooh, four. That's pretty good rating. Man, alive. I had so much fun and I think I got my mom hooked on your show too. Oh, 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.

Nice. We were literally welcomed by every single person. Yeah. It was really neat. 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 slinkies or live shows

or any of that jazz, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our luxurious home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Nedra Glover-Tawab and I'm coming to you with a new podcast, You Need to Hear This.

I'm a therapist and relationship expert and I'm helping people like you navigate through tough relationship issues. We all go through them. You're also going to hear from some of your favorite public figures because hardship is universal. Listen to You Need to Hear This on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Miami, early 1980s, just as the drug scene was shifting from cannabis to cocaine, an

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