Slip 'N Slide

Upholsterer Robert Carrier invented the Slip 'N Slide after watching his son slide on wet painted concrete. Carrier used his trade skills to sew a Naugahyde tube along a long strip and fed a garden hose through it. He sold it to Wham-O, which swapped the expensive Naugahyde for cheaper plastic and released the first production Slip 'N Slide in 1961.

The toy's appeal was its transparency: it did exactly one thing, did it well, and required no batteries or instructions. By the 1990s it had become a summer staple of American childhoods — a centerpiece of suburban backyards and neighborhood ritual. Lifetime sales reached 30 million copies by 2011. The product earned a place in collective memory not because it was innovative but because it was honest: water, friction, gravity, and the willing suspension of adult caution.

A shadow note arrived in 1993 when the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Kransco (Wham-O's parent company) formally warned that the slides were designed for children only, after between 1973 and 1991 a 13-year-old and seven adults had suffered neck injuries or paralysis — teenagers and adults, the warning explained, hit the ground with too much speed. But summer after summer, the yellow plastic kept appearing, and the running starts kept coming.