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# The Slinky began as a spring that fell off a desk
- URL: https://oddly-enough.ghost.io/the-slinky-began-as-a-spring-that-fell-off-a-desk/
- Published: 2026-10-15T10:47:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-15T10:47:07.000Z
- Description: It walked down a stack of books. Two years later, 400 sold in 90 minutes.
- Author: Oddly Enough

| The pigeon outside my window has been standing on one leg all morning, and I respect the commitment. 1 Placebos can work even when patients know they are placebos 💊 A placebo given openly, with the patient told it contains no active ingredient, is still associated with measurable improvements in clinical trials. That surprises most people, and it surprised plenty of my colleagues too, because the textbook explanation of placebo depends on the patient being fooled. In 2021 a systematic review and meta-analysis in Scientific Reports, by Melina von Wernsdorff and colleagues, looked at trials of these open-label placebos. Eleven trials were eligible for the meta-analysis, and the pooled result showed a significant overall effect, with a standardised mean difference of 0.72, a moderate-to-large effect by the usual rule of thumb. Before anyone rushes to a pharmacy: the results varied a lot between trials, which the authors' own statistics reflect, and a pooled effect across a handful of trials is no reason to swap a real medicine for a sugar pill. None of this is medical advice. What interests me is the mechanism nobody has nailed down. If deception is not required, then the ritual of being cared for, the pill, the instructions and the expectation that something might help, may be doing more of the work than we assumed. My field is still arguing about how much, and I suspect it will be for some years. 2 The Slinky began as a spring that fell off a desk 🧸 In 1943 Richard James, a mechanical engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, was experimenting with a torsion spring when it fell from his desk onto a stack of books. Instead of landing in a heap, it walked down them, taking the hardcovers like stairs. His wife, Betty James, gave it its name, because of its wavy, stealthy movement. On November 27, 1945, the couple brought 400 of them to Gimbels department store on Eighth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. The whole lot sold out in 90 minutes, at a dollar each. The story has a second act that usually gets left out. After the couple divorced in 1961, Richard became a missionary in Bolivia, leaving Betty to run the business and raise their six children. She did both, and in 1964 she moved the company closer to home. The toy that made them famous was, in the end, mostly hers to keep going. 3 Tanzania's lake that turns animals to stone mostly does not 🦩 You may have seen the photographs: birds and bats from Lake Natron in Tanzania, white and rigid, perched as if they had been turned to stone mid-flight. They were taken by the photographer Nick Brandt, and they are real animals. They are also staged. Brandt has said he collected the dead animals he found along the shore and posed them on perches himself. Animals do not drop dead and petrify the moment they touch the water. The lake is unusually warm, salty and alkaline, and creatures that die there for other reasons are exceptionally well preserved by its salts, which is why the bodies look sculpted. The more interesting truth is that the lake is full of life. Lake Natron is an essential breeding ground for the lesser flamingo,. For one very pink bird, the lake that supposedly turns animals to stone is the place to raise a family. 4 Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century Danish king 🎧 When engineers from Intel, Ericsson and Nokia met in 1996 to plan a short-range wireless standard, they needed a working name. Jim Kardach of Intel suggested Bluetooth, after King Harald Bluetooth Gormsson, who united Denmark and Norway in 958. Kardach's reasoning was that Harald was famous for uniting Scandinavia, just as they intended to unite the PC and mobile phone industries. Bluetooth was meant to be a placeholder until marketing could come up with something better. The better names were RadioWire and PAN, short for Personal Area Networking. PAN was the favourite, but it already brought up tens of thousands of web results, and RadioWire could not finish a trademark search in time. So the placeholder stayed. The logo kept the joke going. It is a bind rune combining the Younger Futhark runes for H and B, Harald Bluetooth's initials, which means a Viking king's monogram now sits on countless headphones and keyboards. 5 The man who invented the pop-up ad later apologised 🪟 In the 1990s Ethan Zuckerman worked at Tripod, an early web company that hosted personal home pages. Advertising paid the bills, and one day a major car company was alarmed to discover its ad sitting on a page with adult content. The fix was to separate the ad from the page, so that an advert could appear in its own window at a distance from whatever the page contained. As Zuckerman later put it, I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. The pop-up ad was born. In 2014 he published an essay looking back at how much of the web came to depend on advertising. In the middle of it was a sentence that went everywhere: I'm sorry. Our intentions were good. I wish more of the internet came with notes like that. Tell someone about Betty James today. She kept the Slinky walking. |
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