Piece Description

In 1943, Richard James, a naval engineer, was developing a spring that could keep sensitive instruments aboard warships steady in rough seas. Accidentally, he knocked one of his test springs off a shelf. It crawled, coil by coil, to a lower shelf, then onto a pile of books and finally came to rest on a table. For two years Richard James worked to find the proper length and tension so it could walk perfectly down stairs. His wife, Betty, helped name this new spring. Flipping through the directory, she came across a word that meant "stealthy, sleek, and sinuous." That was, of course, "slinky." By 1946, James had his Slinky ready to sell. On a Snowy day, he set off for the Gimbels department store in Philadelphia to sell them. Within ninety minutes they'd sold 400 Slinkys. For the next fifteen years, Slinky continued to sell well. But Betty James saw little of the profit. Richard had, in her words, joined a "religious cult" and was giving them all the profits. By 1960 he left his wife and family to join this group in Bolivia, never to return to see his family again. Betty took over the Slinky company, now nearly bankrupt, and turned it into a multimillion dollar enterprise.