May 13, 2023 • 51 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:23):
is its 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.
(00:44):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Just us. It's not us on stage in front of
hundreds of the dooring fans.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
No, I feel all listless.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We just got back from our tour and.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
It's a lot more fun to do this on stage
in front of people, and it turns out.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I think we should do it again because the West
Coast tour was pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, so keep your eyes peeled. Perhaps Philly, d C.
New York, and Boston.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Don't literally peel your eyes.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Then perhaps Chapel Hill.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Oh man.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
We can't announce anything yet, but we're just teasing with
those cities that we'll be in in June.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, we're actually going to Providence, are no, No, just kidding.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There were like ten people in Providence going yeah, oh man,
I got to go to Boston again.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So how are you doing? You're still jet lagged.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Was out, it was gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Gas, doughnuts, what have you.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, thanks to everyone who came out.
It was so so fun.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yes, La San Francisco, Portland, Seattle from both of us.
From Jerry too, Yeah, from everybody, A heartfelt, hearty thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Jerry was a regular hot shot, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It was.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You don't remember getting a slinky right and saying this
is my slinky.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I was frustrated by my slinky a bit because I
never well, I never had stairs that it worked well on.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
You know, you gotta thought, say I never had stairs, Like, yeah,
I'll bet you're frustrated with slinky.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Were they for like really long feet, were they wide
stairs or were they really tall or what was the deal?
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I don't know. I felt like I felt like they
were standard stairs.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And then you just didn't like them.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Slinky, or like attaching a knife to one end and
like yeah, yeah, just jamming it towards somebody.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
That was fun.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Holy cow.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But he is a pretty good I say, go check
it out.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I got it. Definitely want to check that out.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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
(05:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So that's Slinky's a goodnight.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Oh wait, we didn't start yet.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, big, thanks, it's a good article. It is.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Rick James, and in the slinky, I don't think he
went by Rick.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
No, he went by mister James, right, inventor's slinky.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
But I mean he probably didn't get rid of the mice.
He just got the thing to run again.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah. Plus it wasn't his car anyway, he just took
it exact fixed it up.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, it was the mice's car.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
So in the nineteen thirties he went to Penn State
and did study mechanical engineering.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah. He was just a tinkerer, so it made a
lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Like you ditch psychology for a mechanical engineering degree.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah. My brother went the other way. He was an
aerospace engineering major and he switched to psychology.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Did he really? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Too, cowboys you grew up to actually be cowboys.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
So anyway, he got a mechanical engineering degree and then
started work as a naval engineer.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, it was a horsepower meter that I guess if
you're in rough waves that would mess with the meter.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Anyway, Yeah, exactly, and he said, let's try that again.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, it's apparently captivated by it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
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
(10:19):
grabbed some popcorn and saw that that happened, and then
the microwave was born.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, and all bet microwaves are in there too.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
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
(11:12):
the right size of the coils, just the right everything,
so that it really accentuated that graceful flow, that arcing
flow that it has. Yeah, it 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.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
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
(11:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Oh really.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
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,
(12:33):
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 Hooks law does apply or not,
but if it does, that's my understanding of how it
would apply.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, the one definition I saw was that it basically
means a spring will return to its original shape once
the load is removed.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
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,
(13:15):
is pushing the ones in front of it forward, and
then the whole thing starts over again once it reaches equilibrium.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That sounds like a great explanation to me.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
This is where Slinky and our esp episodes collide. How's
that You're just staring at slinky willing it to move?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
And they wrapped up that kid in the spring, got
it caught in that kid's hair. Yeah, he said this
is perfect.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah. I think they say that one in a thousand
toys hits it big.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
First, which we'll learn later is pretty ironic.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Very ironic. And he actually tasked her with naming it though.
And she is the one that found the word slinky
in the dictionary.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, apparently she spent like several weeks drinking for just
the right word.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Well, I mean, what else was she doing raising six kids?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Right, exactly? She had a lot of downtime.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
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.
(16:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah. Well, and then he got the five hundred bucks
apparently pretty easy from the friend by just showing him
the slinky.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, and he was like, how much do you need?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I didn't look up how much five hundred bucks is,
but in nineteen forty five, but we can guess that it's.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
About forty million.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Well, he goes through his local machine shop first.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, And apparently slinky starts out as like normal round wire,
but then they smush it to make it flat.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, because it's got to be flat to perform and
sit on itself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
But what kind of metal did he start out at?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Swedish steel, high.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Grade blue black Swedish steel.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Oh is it now?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
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,
(18:36):
uh huh, and for safety. So it didn't like cut
some kid's eye out.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Right, So after a bunch of kids eyes were cut out,
they'd crimp the INDs.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't have like, you know, the
Mega x stream right slinky.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That like is powered by mountain dew or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
You know, they probably do have that, actually extreme. I
love that though the original slinky is still like exact same.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, the original metal ones.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yeah, yeah, for sure I changed something that's perfect right, right,
And so the.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
James's knew that this thing was perfect, had a great name,
worked really well. Yeah, the neighborhood kids loved it.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Sure, So of course.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
This thing's going to become like a hit right out
of the gate, right.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
It is very cynical. He used exclamation points and stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
But James, Rick James was like, I'm Rick James, and
you know, tell me what to do with my toys.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
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
(20:37):
it goes from there.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah, he was local at that, living outside of Philly, right,
I wonder if that so.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well in Delaware, it's not too far anyway, So.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Right, yeah, I mean if there was ever a toy
that needed a demonstration to delight and amaze, it was
the slinky.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah. The Santa Fa Miracle on thirty fourth Street comes
through and does like a little towirl and goes out
of frame again.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
So imagine being a parent today and being like, you
want me to pay thirteen dollars for a spring?
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Hey, that's a good deal for a slinky.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
But even still, Yeah, if you want a great deal
on anything, go to Amazon dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
I saw others at other nameless online toy store retailers.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
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
(25:04):
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 fifties. I think, oh yeah,
Barbie registered trademark and they took Slinky there in nineteen
forty seven. And they did it all themselves. They'd pitched
the thing, and they had people from toy stores and
department stores from around the country just signing up. And
(25:26):
Slinky was he huge. Apparently they made the equivalent of
a billion dollars in the first two years.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
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.
(26:22):
I'm just gonna make my own machine that can make
our own slinkies at a rate of five seconds a pop.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, the old machine shop was making them in a
couple of minutes per slinky.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Which was fast for back then, I think.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
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,
(26:57):
and then bam, you got a slinky. You got a
dollar in your pocket right there.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
And he sold one hundred million slinky huh.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So for every one point four people there was, one
of them had a slinky.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
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
(27:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Right, and so like the rear end up to the front.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, like in toy Story exactly, which they got some
nice kickback money on that.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
There was also the uh yeah, oh yes, So then
they didn't steal people's ideas either.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
No, that was waiting for that to read that. When
I was reading this, I was all nervous that, like.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Paul said, died bitter and penniless in New York.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Gotcha.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I don't think she had like burst onto the scene
though or anything.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah, but that's a pretty comfortable living back then.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh heck. Yeah. So they also had this SUSI the
slinky worm and slinky crazy eyes.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah you know those.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I remember those.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
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
(29:35):
battleships or other kinds of ships. Is a stabilizing thing
like he was originally after. Yeah, gutter protectors.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, I saw that too, Light fixtures, total sense.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I wonder if they're licensing the actual.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
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,
(30:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
I think teacher's desk drawers are loaded with slinky products,
the shattering teeth and rotten apples. Wonder where that came.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
From giving the teacher an apple. Yeah, I don't know,
but I'll bet somebody out there will let us know.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
They're in Bryn Mahr, which is like the wealthiest of
the suburbs. I bet it still is Bryn Mahr.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
It doesn't sound like a place has gone down the tubes.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
No, you know, no, so Welsh Brynn looks pretty Welsh.
V r y n m awr.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
It's definitely something uk.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
I'm gonna say Welsh, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
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
(33:24):
it really got to him. It really spoke to him
a lot going to church and became something of a
I guess I took it, although he didn't say he
became something of a born again.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, that's exactly what he game.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, he pretty he was sort of a hot shot,
and I think he liked to just be revered maybe
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I thought it was very strange.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
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,
(34:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah. And this article said straight up like if you
bought a slinky before nineteen sixty, your money went exactly there, right.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
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
(35:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
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
(36:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
That was February of nineteen sixty. And I think it
was Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian cult.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
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
(37:06):
don't care. I'm going to Bolivia and I'm probably never
coming back.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I'm going all in on Slinky.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
So she took over this company, Chuck, that was in
really dire straits.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And she had six kids.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah. I mean, reading this, she's truly one of like
the great women in American history.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I think she's She's definitely the hero of this story too.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
And revered by toy enthusiasts. But I don't think a
lot of people even know her name, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Nope, it's Betty James everybody.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
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
(39:15):
Weegley wrote the lyrics to what would later become the
longest running Dare I say most successful commercial jingle of
all time?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yes? I would say it's possibly the most well known
at least.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Just like a club. Everyone else is ninety.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
That's been the get to give, I get the favorite
all over town.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
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
(40:12):
can't think of anything else to put up against it.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Have a coca and a smile whatever.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I don't even know how that goes.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Just look up log. I guess log jingle maybe.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
You the Homer Fest?
Speaker 1 (41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
He's on the he's on the internet.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, everybody friend him. He'll be like, what is going on?
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Have been spam by the friendliest people on Facebook?
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Who are fans? Yeah, most of them.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
So Betty's got this jingle out there. This was a
master stroke.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
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
(42:51):
little bit. And also I think the tact that she's
taking iss a. It's an inexpensive toy that everybody can enjoy, right,
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 nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Plastic plastic was that the thing.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
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
(43:29):
make the checkout for?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Me, stupid kids, I'm trying to concentrate.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
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
(44:26):
couple of products again that were really saleable, and the
slinky star rose once more.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Who she hadn't he cues within a few months of
going to Bolivia, like she hadn't heard anything from him.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, you know what. The only other thing I had
was you can make the Star Wars blaster sound with
a slinky?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Oh really?
Speaker 1 (45:46):
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
(46:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
That's a chuck tip right there.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
That was before the Star Wars blaster, or she would
have called it exact the blaster.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
And there's one last thing about slinky physics that are
pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
It reaches equally about out a window.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Man, Well, I mean you have to weight the bottom
of it.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
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.
(47:34):
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 mid air.
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
(47:56):
tension is released and gravity's about to win hasn't reached
that bottom part yet. Each coil stacks upon the next
one and the next one, in the next one. So
as it's happening up top down below, it's all hunky dory.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Still it's like you're still holding on to me.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
As far as I know, it's literally floating in mid air. Wow,
it's ceaselessly amazing, basically the slinky.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yes, well those are two pretty boss slinky tricks.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
And what a great way to finish, I think.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
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,
(48:48):
which means it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
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.
(49:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
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
(49:46):
week for spring break. Thanks for everything, and thanks for
the live show especially. It was totally awesome with four
exclamation points. Oh four, that's pretty good, rating, men a lot.
I had so much fun and I think I got
my mom hooked on your show, too.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
No, totally large and in charge like you do audience
QA stuff every night.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, it was really neat that they're proud of their
city as they should be. Yes.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
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
(50:48):
you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
App Apple Podcasts. Have you listen to your favorite shows
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
(00:23):
is its 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.
(00:44):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Just us. It's not us on stage in front of
hundreds of the dooring fans.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
No, I feel all listless.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
We just got back from our tour and.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
It's a lot more fun to do this on stage
in front of people, and it turns out.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
I think we should do it again because the West
Coast tour was pretty fun.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, so keep your eyes peeled. Perhaps Philly, d C.
New York, and Boston.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Don't literally peel your eyes.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Then perhaps Chapel Hill.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Oh man.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
We can't announce anything yet, but we're just teasing with
those cities that we'll be in in June.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, we're actually going to Providence, are no, No, just kidding.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
There were like ten people in Providence going yeah, oh man,
I got to go to Boston again.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So how are you doing? You're still jet lagged.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Was out, it was gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Gas, doughnuts, what have you.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, thanks to everyone who came out.
It was so so fun.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yes, La San Francisco, Portland, Seattle from both of us.
From Jerry too, Yeah, from everybody, A heartfelt, hearty thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Jerry was a regular hot shot, you know.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
It was.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
You don't remember getting a slinky right and saying this
is my slinky.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I was frustrated by my slinky a bit because I
never well, I never had stairs that it worked well on.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
You know, you gotta thought, say I never had stairs, Like, yeah,
I'll bet you're frustrated with slinky.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Were they for like really long feet, were they wide
stairs or were they really tall or what was the deal?
Speaker 1 (04:17):
I don't know. I felt like I felt like they
were standard stairs.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And then you just didn't like them.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Slinky, or like attaching a knife to one end and
like yeah, yeah, just jamming it towards somebody.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
That was fun.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Holy cow.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But he is a pretty good I say, go check
it out.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
I got it. Definitely want to check that out.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
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
(05:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
So that's Slinky's a goodnight.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Oh wait, we didn't start yet.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, big, thanks, it's a good article. It is.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Rick James, and in the slinky, I don't think he
went by Rick.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
No, he went by mister James, right, inventor's slinky.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
But I mean he probably didn't get rid of the mice.
He just got the thing to run again.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah. Plus it wasn't his car anyway, he just took
it exact fixed it up.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, it was the mice's car.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
So in the nineteen thirties he went to Penn State
and did study mechanical engineering.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah. He was just a tinkerer, so it made a
lot of sense.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Like you ditch psychology for a mechanical engineering degree.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah. My brother went the other way. He was an
aerospace engineering major and he switched to psychology.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Did he really? I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Too, cowboys you grew up to actually be cowboys.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
So anyway, he got a mechanical engineering degree and then
started work as a naval engineer.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Yeah, it was a horsepower meter that I guess if
you're in rough waves that would mess with the meter.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Anyway, Yeah, exactly, and he said, let's try that again.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, it's apparently captivated by it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:58):
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
(10:19):
grabbed some popcorn and saw that that happened, and then
the microwave was born.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, and all bet microwaves are in there too.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
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
(11:12):
the right size of the coils, just the right everything,
so that it really accentuated that graceful flow, that arcing
flow that it has. Yeah, it 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.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
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
(11:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Oh really.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
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,
(12:33):
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 Hooks law does apply or not,
but if it does, that's my understanding of how it
would apply.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, the one definition I saw was that it basically
means a spring will return to its original shape once
the load is removed.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
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,
(13:15):
is pushing the ones in front of it forward, and
then the whole thing starts over again once it reaches equilibrium.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That sounds like a great explanation to me.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
This is where Slinky and our esp episodes collide. How's
that You're just staring at slinky willing it to move?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
And they wrapped up that kid in the spring, got
it caught in that kid's hair. Yeah, he said this
is perfect.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah. I think they say that one in a thousand
toys hits it big.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
First, which we'll learn later is pretty ironic.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Very ironic. And he actually tasked her with naming it though.
And she is the one that found the word slinky
in the dictionary.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, apparently she spent like several weeks drinking for just
the right word.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Well, I mean, what else was she doing raising six kids?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Right, exactly? She had a lot of downtime.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
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.
(16:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah. Well, and then he got the five hundred bucks
apparently pretty easy from the friend by just showing him
the slinky.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, and he was like, how much do you need?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I didn't look up how much five hundred bucks is,
but in nineteen forty five, but we can guess that it's.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
About forty million.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Well, he goes through his local machine shop first.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, And apparently slinky starts out as like normal round wire,
but then they smush it to make it flat.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, because it's got to be flat to perform and
sit on itself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
But what kind of metal did he start out at?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Swedish steel, high.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Grade blue black Swedish steel.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Oh is it now?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
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,
(18:36):
uh huh, and for safety. So it didn't like cut
some kid's eye out.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Right, So after a bunch of kids eyes were cut out,
they'd crimp the INDs.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't have like, you know, the
Mega x stream right slinky.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
That like is powered by mountain dew or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
You know, they probably do have that, actually extreme. I
love that though the original slinky is still like exact same.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, the original metal ones.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yeah, yeah, for sure I changed something that's perfect right, right,
And so the.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
James's knew that this thing was perfect, had a great name,
worked really well. Yeah, the neighborhood kids loved it.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Sure, So of course.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
This thing's going to become like a hit right out
of the gate, right.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
It is very cynical. He used exclamation points and stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
But James, Rick James was like, I'm Rick James, and
you know, tell me what to do with my toys.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
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
(20:37):
it goes from there.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah, he was local at that, living outside of Philly, right,
I wonder if that so.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Well in Delaware, it's not too far anyway, So.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Right, yeah, I mean if there was ever a toy
that needed a demonstration to delight and amaze, it was
the slinky.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah. The Santa Fa Miracle on thirty fourth Street comes
through and does like a little towirl and goes out
of frame again.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
So imagine being a parent today and being like, you
want me to pay thirteen dollars for a spring?
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Hey, that's a good deal for a slinky.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
But even still, Yeah, if you want a great deal
on anything, go to Amazon dot com.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
I saw others at other nameless online toy store retailers.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
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
(25:04):
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 fifties. I think, oh yeah,
Barbie registered trademark and they took Slinky there in nineteen
forty seven. And they did it all themselves. They'd pitched
the thing, and they had people from toy stores and
department stores from around the country just signing up. And
(25:26):
Slinky was he huge. Apparently they made the equivalent of
a billion dollars in the first two years.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
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.
(26:22):
I'm just gonna make my own machine that can make
our own slinkies at a rate of five seconds a pop.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, the old machine shop was making them in a
couple of minutes per slinky.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Which was fast for back then, I think.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
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,
(26:57):
and then bam, you got a slinky. You got a
dollar in your pocket right there.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
And he sold one hundred million slinky huh.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
So for every one point four people there was, one
of them had a slinky.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
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
(27:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Right, and so like the rear end up to the front.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, like in toy Story exactly, which they got some
nice kickback money on that.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
There was also the uh yeah, oh yes, So then
they didn't steal people's ideas either.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
No, that was waiting for that to read that. When
I was reading this, I was all nervous that, like.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Paul said, died bitter and penniless in New York.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Gotcha.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I don't think she had like burst onto the scene
though or anything.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah, but that's a pretty comfortable living back then.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Oh heck. Yeah. So they also had this SUSI the
slinky worm and slinky crazy eyes.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah you know those.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I remember those.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
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
(29:35):
battleships or other kinds of ships. Is a stabilizing thing
like he was originally after. Yeah, gutter protectors.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, I saw that too, Light fixtures, total sense.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I wonder if they're licensing the actual.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
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,
(30:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
I think teacher's desk drawers are loaded with slinky products,
the shattering teeth and rotten apples. Wonder where that came.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
From giving the teacher an apple. Yeah, I don't know,
but I'll bet somebody out there will let us know.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
They're in Bryn Mahr, which is like the wealthiest of
the suburbs. I bet it still is Bryn Mahr.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
It doesn't sound like a place has gone down the tubes.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
No, you know, no, so Welsh Brynn looks pretty Welsh.
V r y n m awr.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
It's definitely something uk.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
I'm gonna say Welsh, all right.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
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
(33:24):
it really got to him. It really spoke to him
a lot going to church and became something of a
I guess I took it, although he didn't say he
became something of a born again.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Yeah, that's exactly what he game.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, he pretty he was sort of a hot shot,
and I think he liked to just be revered maybe
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I thought it was very strange.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
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,
(34:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
Yeah. And this article said straight up like if you
bought a slinky before nineteen sixty, your money went exactly there, right.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
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
(35:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
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
(36:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
That was February of nineteen sixty. And I think it
was Betty who called it a cult, an evangelical Christian cult.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
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
(37:06):
don't care. I'm going to Bolivia and I'm probably never
coming back.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
I'm going all in on Slinky.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
So she took over this company, Chuck, that was in
really dire straits.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
And she had six kids.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah. I mean, reading this, she's truly one of like
the great women in American history.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I think she's She's definitely the hero of this story too.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
And revered by toy enthusiasts. But I don't think a
lot of people even know her name, you know.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Nope, it's Betty James everybody.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
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
(39:15):
Weegley wrote the lyrics to what would later become the
longest running Dare I say most successful commercial jingle of
all time?
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yes? I would say it's possibly the most well known
at least.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Just like a club. Everyone else is ninety.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
That's been the get to give, I get the favorite
all over town.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
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
(40:12):
can't think of anything else to put up against it.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Have a coca and a smile whatever.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
I don't even know how that goes.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
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?
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Just look up log. I guess log jingle maybe.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
You the Homer Fest?
Speaker 1 (41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
He's on the he's on the internet.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Yeah, everybody friend him. He'll be like, what is going on?
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Have been spam by the friendliest people on Facebook?
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Who are fans? Yeah, most of them.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
So Betty's got this jingle out there. This was a
master stroke.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
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
(42:51):
little bit. And also I think the tact that she's
taking iss a. It's an inexpensive toy that everybody can enjoy, right,
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 nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Plastic plastic was that the thing.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
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
(43:29):
make the checkout for?
Speaker 1 (43:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Me, stupid kids, I'm trying to concentrate.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
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
(44:26):
couple of products again that were really saleable, and the
slinky star rose once more.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Who she hadn't he cues within a few months of
going to Bolivia, like she hadn't heard anything from him.
Speaker 1 (44:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, you know what. The only other thing I had
was you can make the Star Wars blaster sound with
a slinky?
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Oh really?
Speaker 1 (45:46):
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
(46:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
That's a chuck tip right there.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
That was before the Star Wars blaster, or she would
have called it exact the blaster.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
And there's one last thing about slinky physics that are
pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
It reaches equally about out a window.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Man, Well, I mean you have to weight the bottom
of it.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
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.
(47:34):
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 mid air.
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
(47:56):
tension is released and gravity's about to win hasn't reached
that bottom part yet. Each coil stacks upon the next
one and the next one, in the next one. So
as it's happening up top down below, it's all hunky dory.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Still it's like you're still holding on to me.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
As far as I know, it's literally floating in mid air. Wow,
it's ceaselessly amazing, basically the slinky.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
Yes, well those are two pretty boss slinky tricks.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
And what a great way to finish, I think.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
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,
(48:48):
which means it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
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.
(49:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
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
(49:46):
week for spring break. Thanks for everything, and thanks for
the live show especially. It was totally awesome with four
exclamation points. Oh four, that's pretty good, rating, men a lot.
I had so much fun and I think I got
my mom hooked on your show, too.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Cool.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:06):
No, totally large and in charge like you do audience
QA stuff every night.
Speaker 1 (50:11):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (50:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, it was really neat that they're proud of their
city as they should be. Yes.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
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
(50:48):
you Should Know dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
App Apple Podcasts. Have you listen to your favorite shows
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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