Slinky
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, And makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, Everyone knows it’s Slinky…
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, for fun it’s a wonderful toy
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky, it’s fun for a girl and a boy
Maybe it was that “slinkity” sound that drove poor Richard James around the bend.
James, a naval engineer working with tension springs, dropped one of them one day in 1943, and noticed that the spring kept moving, pulling itself end-over-end across the floor. James mentioned to his wife Betty that the spring might make a good children’s toy, and together they spent the next two years perfecting the gizmo.
Betty was the one who came up with the “Slinky” name after searching a dictionary and settling on the word meaning “stealthy, sinuous and graceful of movement.”
Richard and Betty first demonstrated the Slinky at Gimbel’s Department Store in Philadelphia at Christmas, 1945, and were so apprehensive that Betty arranged for a friend to show up and get things rolling by buying the first one. That proved to be unnecessary, as within 90 minutes their entire stock of 400 Slinkys had been sold and Slinky was off and hopping as America’s newest toy craze.
In 1960, however, Richard abandoned his wife, six children and the Slinky empire to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Betty took over the company, repaired its finances (which had suffered from Richard’s contributions to the cult), and began to advertise Slinky on TV with the snappy Slinky jingle. Slinky sales took off again and have never stopped. Close to 300 million Slinkys have been sold in the years since and it’s sill a bargain — originally sold for $1 in 1945, Slinkys go for just $3 today.
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