Richard Topson James ( 1914 - 1974 ) - naval engineer, Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . He and his wife, Betty In the first half of the 1940s, they became inventors of the spring toy Slinki .
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James graduated from the Quaker West Town Boarding School in Chester, Pennsylvania , in 1935 . In 1939, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering . In 1943, Richard James was a naval engineer who tried to develop a device designed to measure the power of naval ships .
Richard James also worked on a device that was supposed to compensate for the rolling and vibrations of sensitive ship instruments even in a stormy sea. He worked with springs. When he accidentally dropped one of them and saw how the spring continued to move after hitting the ground, he had the idea of a new toy.
He took out a $ 500 loan to start production and founded the James Spring & Wire Company . The name for the new toy was coined by his wife Betty James . Slinki was successfully demonstrated at an exhibition in Philadelphia in 1945, and then in 1946 at the American Toy Fair. It has become a huge success, about 300 million toys have been acquired since then.
In the 1950s, Richard’s character began to change. James became more and more religious and more than once tried to persuade his family to go to Bolivia for Christian missionary work. In 1960, he went there alone, leaving Betty and six children in the United States . Betty then held the post of CEO of James Industries.
Richard repeatedly tried to maintain communication and correspondence with his family, but Betty stopped contact with him and filed for divorce, finally and for a long time heading the company for the production of the link.
James died in 1974 in Bolivia .