A blast from the past

I bought an old 1940s underground Navy workshop at auction for $1. It is a bit of a fixer upper. I plan on turning it into a climate controlled unit to store my rare and vintage sunflower seed collection. (The wife said it can’t stay in burrow anymore.) I wiped the grime off the name plate on the workshop door and it said Richard T. James, Mechanical Engineer, U.S. Navy. It took me a week to remove the rusty old parts and other debris in the place. Most of it was junk. I discovered the previous owner was an antiques dealer and sold off all the good stuff. I did find one rather curious coiled spring. It didn’t look very practical or useful. So, I gave it to my cousin Vinnie the P. as a birthday present. The rest of my family gave me the “what a cheapskate” look when Vinnie opened the present. Vinnie gave it a close inspection and then asked me where I got it. I admitted I found it in Richard James 1940s workshop. You wouldn’t believe it, but, Vinnie was grinning from cheek to cheek and gave me a big hug. “Chippy, this is the best birthday present ever!!!!” I said “Okay … what exactly is this contraption?” Vinnie gave me a strange look and said, “This is the original prototype of a precompressed helical spring toy invented by Mr. James and first sold to the public at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945. It has gone on to sell 300 million units since. It is made from Swedish steel and has 98 coils. It was marketed as a low cost children’s toy and originally sold for $1. Richard’s wife Betty named it the Slinky.” Suffice to say none of the other presents ever got opened. Instead we went outside to “play” with it. I must admit it was a lot of fun.

We stretched the slinky like a burrow entrance. The challenge of this game was to run through it without causing it to spring back together.

I started to run through it when it started to spring back …

I grabbed on for dear life while I flew through the air at nearly the speed of sound and then it came to a sudden stop … Wow, you got to try this, it 10x’s scarcer than a roller coaster ride!

If you are curious, Vinnie had it appraised for insurance purposes at Sotheby’s in New York and it was valued at one million dollars. Vinnie plans on opening a museum at the Woodpile with this prototype slinky as the center piece of his collection of mechanical inventions. Vinnie’s Gutenberg printing press will be demoted to the second most important invention. Yes, there will be plenty of replicas to play with.

I found an old photograph of Richard James and his invention in an filing cabinet in the workshop. I can show this photo because the Navy recently declassified all information regarding a secret WWII program that hired chipmunk engineers to work on top secret projects. Richard and Betty James had to hire human actors to portray them when they marketed their slinky toy.