Four hundred coils of blued Swedish steel wire sold out in ninety minutes at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in 1945, at a dollar apiece. That toy, the Slinky, came from a naval engineer who watched a torsion spring tumble off a shelf and kept walking end over end across the floor. Fifteen years later, the same man walked away from the company and the family that spring had built, and joined a Bible-translation mission in South America. His wife spent the next four decades turning his accident into one of the best-selling toys in American history.

An Accident at the Shipyard

Richard James was working as a mechanical engineer in 1943, developing spring-based systems to keep sensitive instruments steady aboard naval ships at Cramp Shipbuilding Yard in Philadelphia, according to the Wikipedia biography of Betty James, sourced to company and toy-industry histories. When a torsion spring fell from a shelf and “walked” down a stack of books and across a table before landing upright on the floor, James saw a toy instead of an engineering failure. He spent two years refining the coil and the steel gauge, and his wife, Betty, picked the name Slinky out of a dictionary because it described the sound and motion of the toy so well, per the same account.

A Sellout at Gimbels

The couple manufactured 400 units for a Christmas 1945 debut. Early static store displays generated no interest at all, so Richard set up a ramp and demonstrated the toy walking down it by hand — and sold out the entire stock in ninety minutes, according to the Wikipedia entry on Richard T. James. The couple founded James Industries to manufacture the toy at scale, and it became a fixture of postwar American childhood.

Decline, a Religious Group, and a Departure

Sales slowed by the late 1950s, and around that time Richard James became deeply involved with an evangelical Christian group. In 1960 he left the United States for Bolivia to join Wycliffe Bible Translators, “leaving behind his wife, six children, and nearly-bankrupt company in the United States,” according to Wikipedia’s account of his departure. He gave away much of his fortune to the mission and to other religious causes before he left, and he did not return to run the business again. He died of a heart attack in Bolivia in 1974, according to the same source.

Betty James Rebuilds the Company Alone

Betty James was left to run James Industries with six children to raise and a company on the edge of collapse. She took over as chief executive, moved operations from Philadelphia to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, and built the brand around the jingle that generations of American kids can still hum, according to her Wikipedia biography. She kept the toy’s price deliberately low for decades; in a 1996 interview with The New York Times cited in that biography, she explained her reasoning directly: “So many children can’t have expensive toys, and I feel a real obligation to them.” When Toy Story featured an animated Slinky Dog character in 1995, sales of the actual toy climbed again, giving the company one more surge under her leadership.

What She Left Behind

Betty James ran the company for nearly four decades before selling James Industries to POOF Products in 1998. She was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 2001. By the time she died on November 20, 2008, at age 90, more than 300 million Slinkys had been sold worldwide, according to Wikipedia’s sourced figures. The Slinky itself had already been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2000, when the running sales count stood at more than 250 million, according to Smithsonian Magazine’s history of the toy. Richard James’ original patent, granted January 28, 1947, specified 80 feet of wire coiled into a spiral just two inches across — a plain engineering document for a toy that would end up traveling far beyond the shipyard where it was born.

A Toy That Outgrew Its Origins

The Slinky’s afterlife took it places neither James ever imagined. Soldiers in Vietnam reportedly used the coils as makeshift radio antennas, tying one end to themselves and tossing the rest over a tree branch, according to Smithsonian’s reporting. NASA astronaut Rhea Seddon demonstrated one aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery during a 1985 telecast, noting on camera that in zero gravity “it won’t slink at all. It sort of droops,” per the same account. And when Toy Story revived interest in the Slinky Dog character in 1995, factory output jumped from a few hundred units to roughly 40,000 a month by mid-1996, Smithsonian’s history notes — proof that Betty James’ decades of steady, low-margin management had built something durable enough to catch a second wind whenever pop culture rediscovered it.