Slinky

The classic coiled-spring toy! Stretch it, coil it, and if you're really good you may be able to get it to walk down the stairs.

It stretches, coils, tumbles from hand to hand, and (with a little cooperation and the right staircase) will even walk itself down a flight of stairs.

If you received a few Slinkys over the years, you probably got good at spotting one before you even unwrapped the gift - that small, almost square wrapped box had a distinctive size, shape, and weight. You just knew it was going to be a Slinky.

Getting a Slinky to walk down stairs was another matter. The commercials made it look easy, but I found that narrow, wooden stairs worked much better than wide carpeted ones because a Slinky takes surprisingly short steps. My brother tried to get one to walk down an escalator at the mall - the plan was that as the escalator steps moved up, the Slinky would move down (much like we used to do ourselves, walking down the up escalator). But the steps on the escalator were too wide, so the whole plan quickly failed.

Another important rule of Slinkys: be careful if you try to see how far you can stretch it (like when you grab one end and try to pull it away from your sibling). It will kink. And once it gets a serious kink in it, it's just never going to work quite the same way again.

The Slinky's back story is almost as good as the toy. Engineer Richard James got the idea for the Slinky after watching a spring tumble and coil, rather than simply fall. But trying to convince department stores that a coiled piece of wire would make a good Christmas toy for children was not easy. That changed during the 1945 Christmas season, when a demonstration at a Gimbels department store in Philadelphia sold 400 Slinkys in about 90 minutes.

The original metal version is still the classic, but it isn't the only choice. Slinky also comes in giant size, Slinky Jr., plastic, and various other versions. But it's hard to improve on the original, classic coiled-metal Slinky.