Walks downstairs, alone or in pairs

An inflection point, an icon, a toy. Plus, 7 other things worth your time.

It looked like a bad gamble—out $500, what can you do? Win some, lose some.

The gamblers — I guess we’ll call them that, at this point in the story — were named Richard and Betty James, and the time we’re talking about was just after World War II.

I was trying to figure out how big a deal losing $500 would have been was to them; it was the equivalent of maybe $7,500 today. I think they were working middle class, so it wasn’t nothing.

Anyway, Richard James had been a mechanical engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, in the war, trying to find a way to keep shipboard instruments in place during rough seas. The idea he came up with involved tension springs, but the Navy wasn’t really interested.

Then, he accidentally dropped one of his springs, and he was enthralled by how it moved across the floor.

How to describe this? The spring “‘stepped’ in a series of arcs,” as an MIT history put it, “from the shelf, to a stack of books, to a tabletop, to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stoo…