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.
Scrabble
The real mystery about the invention of Scrabble is why Frank Capra didn’t turn it into a movie.
Fade in on a Queens, NY walkup apartment in the depths of the 1930s Depression. Alfred Mosher Butts, architect, has lost his job at a time when new jobs are impossible to find. Desperate to make ends meet, Alfred Butts decides to invent a game. A methodical man, Butts does his homework first and spends hours analyzing existing games. He finds that they fell into three main categories: move games (chess, checkers, etc.), number games (dice, bingo), and word games like anagrams. Butts decides his best bet is to combine an element of chance, as in dice, with an exercise of skill and knowledge, as in word games.
For the next few months, Alfred Butts studies The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post, keeping painstaking statistics on the frequency with which each letter in the alphabet appears. Armed with his analysis, Butts creates a game he calls “Lexico,” a hybrid of anagrams and a crossword puzzle, using small plywood letter tiles and little racks made of baseboard molding. He sells Lexico himself for $1.50 and approaches all the major game companies, hoping to find a distributor to boost Lexico into the national market. They all turn him down.
But Alfred Butts perseveres, adds a playing board to his game, and renames it “Criss-Cross Words.” Unfortunately, he has created another flop, or so it seems. By now it is 1947 and Butts meets a man named James Brunot, who buys the rights to his game in exchange for royalties on units sold. Brunot fiddles with the game a bit and decides to rename it “Scrabble,” a word meaning “to scramble, scratch at hurriedly, to write quickly or scribble,” derived from the Dutch “schrabbelen” meaning “to scratch.”
And now it’s Brunot’s turn to face a flop. Scrabble is limping along, selling 2,400 sets in 1949 and losing money. Until, that is, the Chairman of Macy’s plays the game while on vacation and orders all his stores to carry it. Bang, zoom. Orders out the wazoo, coming in faster than they could make them, by 1954 they’re selling more than 3.8 million Scrabble sets a year. America goes Scrabble crazy, and never really stops.
Today there’s a Scrabble set in one out of every three US homes and Scrabble, now owned by Hasbro Inc., is an American icon. And Alfred Butts, no longer “scrabbling” to make a living, lives to age 93, playing his beloved Scrabble right up to the end.
Apple, Macintosh
From little seeds mighty brands grow, but sometimes it’s a bit hard to separate the fruit from the hokum.
The origin of the Apple name is the stuff of multiple legends, but the core story is simple. Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs, Apple’s founders, had been high-school friends who had both gone on to work in Silicon Valley after graduation. Wozniak was especially interested in designing a new kind of computer, and when he eventually came up with what would become the Apple I, Jobs suggested that they try to market the machine. Needing a name for their partnership, the pair settled on “Apple” for several reasons: (1) Jobs had once spent a summer working at an apple farm and considered apples the perfect fruit; (2) Jobs also was a big Beatles fan and admired the group’s Apple Corp. label and marketing firm, and (3) they were in a hurry to get started and neither Jobs nor Wozniak could think of a better name.
On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was launched. As a tribute to the Beatles, the name must be counted as a mixed success, since Apple Computer has, since its founding, been sued three times by the Beatles’ Apple Records for trademark infringement.
The next step was to come up with a logo. A friend named Ron Wayne created the first version, featuring Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree to convey a sense of innovative inspiration.
For his help, Jobs and Wozniak gave Wayne 10 percent of the company. But Jobs didn’t really like the logo, considering it too cluttered, and soon pressed for adopting a simple apple silhouette. Unfortunately, according to Jobs, the result looked more like an orange than an apple, so the distinctive bite from the side of the fruit was added and the famous Apple logo was born.
Meanwhile, Ron Wayne was happy to own 10 percent of the young company until he realized he was liable for 10 percent of its debts as well, so he quickly sold his shares for $500, thus ensuring his place in the Bad Business Decision Hall of Fame.
The Macintosh computer line, introduced by Apple in 1984, takes its name from the popular apple breed, which in turn harks back to the Scottish surname MacIntosh, which means “Son of the Chieftain.” Apparently Jobs actually wanted to call the machine “the Apple Bicycle,” and even after his suggestion was rejected stubbornly made a point of referring to the Mac as “a bicycle for the mind.”