When I was a child my grandparents had a big farm with a big finished basement with many carpeted stairs leading down to it. They showed me how to play with the metal slinky they gave me and it went down the stairs and it would lumber its way down the stairs making that wonderful metal slinky sound.

At one point early in my engineering career I started to get interested in unique clocks and desk toys and other fun things that are small enough I could build them and maybe make a few bucks selling them as well. The infinite slinky was one of those inventions.

It would go down stairs that were inspired by escalator stairs that move and wrap around two ends to continue providing more and more steps at a specific speed. A slinky needs a certain speed to do well so you would be able to get the stair mechanism to go at the correct speed without much trouble.

Nothing came of it and a number of years later saw that someone built a version of it. Check it out in the video.

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