No. 204 - Slinky

A Facebook friend posted today: I somehow never realized the slinky was a Pennsylvania product.

Neither did I.

The idea for the slinky came in 1943 when Richard James, a Naval mechanical engineer stationed at the shipyards in Philadelphia, was developing springs that could support and stabilize sensitive instruments aboard ships in rough seas. He accidentally knocked one of the springs from a shelf, and watched as the spring "stepped" from a stack of books, to a tabletop, to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright. Or so the story goes.

His wife, Betty, came up with the word Slinky (meaning "sleek and graceful") after finding the word in a dictionary, and deciding that the word aptly described the sound of a metal spring expanding and collapsing.

The toy made its debut at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945. They were priced at $1.00 each and all 400 Slinkys sold within ninety minutes. In 1995, Betty explained the toy's success by saying, "It's the simplicity of it."

The Slinky has been made in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania since 1964.

I also learned that in 2001 the elected officials in Pennsylvania wasted time selecting, designating and adopting the Slinky as the official toy of Pennsylvania.