A Hazardous History of the Slip 'N Slide

One day in the summer of 1960, Robert Carrier arrived at his home in Lakewood, California, and saw his 10-year-old son Mike laying in front of the garage. When he got closer, he noticed his son was laughing. The property had a painted concrete driveway, and when it got wet, its surface became slick. Mike and his friends had spent the afternoon turning on the garden hose, getting a running start from the garage—which was carpeted—and then belly-flopping onto the concrete, sliding all the way to the curb.

“You guys are going to kill yourselves doing this,” Carrier said. Yet he didn’t tell them to stop.

When the Carriers moved to a new home—which had a back patio painted with the same slick coating—Mike and his friends brought their garden hose antics with them. The fun and games continued until Mike ended up crashing through a gate and breaking it.

It was at this point that Robert Carrier decided that if his son was going to insist on sliding, he might as well try to make it as safe as possible.

Carrier was an upholsterer who happened to work for a company that produced boat seats and had access to a variety of materials. So he brought home a 50-foot roll of Naugahyde, a fabric coated in vinyl, which he unspooled on his property. Carrier curled the material over on one side and stitched it in intervals. When the hose was fed through the curl, water seeped through the holes and kept the surface wet.

The result was a backyard lane devoted to slipping and sliding. When Carrier saw neighborhood kids racing over and traffic on his street getting backed up, he decided to patent his invention. The application referred to it as a “portable aquatic play device for body planing.” He called it the Slip ‘N Slide—though he probably should have named it the Slip ‘N Sue.

Carrier and his business partner, Richard Eriser, took his idea to the Wham-O company, a brand devoted to celebrating off-kilter toys like the Hula Hoop and Frisbee. Wham-O was also inventor-friendly and open to outside submissions. They agreed to manufacture and market the Slip ‘N Slide with one adjustment: The expensive Naugahyde material would have to be replaced with plastic.

The 30-foot-long, 40-inch-wide Slip ‘N Slide went on sale in 1961 and was an immediate hit, selling 300,000 units priced at $9.95 in a matter of months. Kids were instructed to unwind the material across an area free of rocks or debris and then stake it into the ground. The surface had a lubricant molded directly into the plastic that acted as a propellant, so that kids sprinting to the top of the slide would take off like human projectiles. Some kids even added dish soap to the water provided by their garden hose for additional propulsion.

The same year the Slip ‘N Slide was introduced, Wham-O officials observed an interesting phenomenon: The more fun kids had, the more compelled adults felt to try it. Initially, this wasn’t seen as a big deal; plenty of parents play with their kids' toys. But the Slip ‘N Slide had been engineered for children of limited height and weight, typically under 125 pounds. When adults jumped on the surface, they were not always jettisoned across. Sometimes their weight meant they would abruptly stop, the forward momentum driving the weight of their body directly onto their necks. This could be devastating for the spinal cord and it was possible to suffer quadriplegia, paraplegia, or even death as a result of the impact.

Between 1973 and 1991, it's estimated that a total of seven adults and one 13-year-old suffered neck injuries or paralysis as a direct result of using the Slip ‘N Slide. Though these instances were rare, Wham-O was apparently concerned to the point they opted to take it off the market in the late 1970s. It wasn’t brought back to store shelves until Wham-O was purchased by the Kransco company in 1982.

The Slip ‘N Slide had always carried warnings that it was for use by children 10 or 11 years of age and younger. But it was not a superficially dangerous-looking plaything, and adults either failed to take the warning seriously or simply discarded the box and instructions without paying any attention to them. As a possible result, Kransco experienced two major lawsuits that would elevate the Slip ‘N Slide to the level of a public nuisance.

In 1987, Michael Hubert of Wisconsin used his neighbor’s Slip ‘N Slide and suffered a broken neck. The 34-year-old was left an incomplete paraplegic, meaning he had a limited ability to walk and use his hands. He sued Kransco over the injury. American Empire Surplus Lines Insurance Company, which insured Kransco, offered Hubert a $250,000 settlement, which he rejected. The case went to a jury trial in 1991 and Hubert was awarded $12.3 million. The jury declared the Slip ‘N Slide defective and unreasonably dangerous.

Kransco ultimately settled with Hubert for $7.5 million. They subsequently sued American Empire, claiming the insurance company could have settled for $750,000 but chose not to, leaving Kransco on the hook for paying the settlement above the $1 million they had in coverage. Kransco won that case and was awarded $17 million.

In 1988, a University of Central Florida student named Robert Goldstein broke his neck on the slide. He also sued and was awarded $1.6 million in 1995. John C. Mitchell II, the lawyer who represented Goldstein, later said he believed the lawsuits influenced Kransco to take the Slip ‘N Slide off the market in 1991. But that was far from the end of the controversy.

In 1993, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a recall notice in conjunction with Kransco to alert consumers to the dangers of the slide. Though it had been discontinued, 9 million had been sold between 1961 and 1992 and an unknown number were still available in stores. (A total of 30 million slides were sold through 2011.) The CPSC warned the slide was for children and that adults and teenagers might suffer permanent spinal cord injury. Unlike some product recalls, however, the CPSC did not take action to take it off the market entirely. The reason, according to a spokesperson, was that it was a product for children, and children were not getting hurt on it—only adults were.

In 1994, attorney Matthew Rinaldi told The Seattle Times that accurate injury numbers were hard to come by because previous settlements may have included agreements not to discuss the case. Rinaldi represented a man in California who became a quadriplegic as a result of the slide. In preparation for that case, he found two people who broke their necks in the 1970s, one of whom had died. He also found six adults who suffered broken necks in the 1980s and 1990s as well as one 8-year-old girl who suffered brain damage. In 1989, a consumer advocacy group known as the Consumer Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action reported that 5000 people had gone to the hospital for slide-related injuries in 1988 alone.

In 1994, while the Slip 'N Slide was still dormant, Kransco sold Wham-O to Mattel. The company was sold again in 1997, this time to an investment group led by Charterhouse Group. In 2001, Wham-O brought out a revamped version of the Slip ‘N Slide with a longer path, water tunnels, and archways. The company said it was “perfectly safe” for anyone under the age of 11 to use.

Since that time, Wham-O has been sold twice more—first to Cornerstone Overseas Investments in 2005 and then to InterSport and Stallion Sport in 2015. The Slip ‘N Slide remains on sale with the standard cautions that it should only be used by kids, though that hasn’t prevented adults from trying it out. This time, they tend to post the results on YouTube.

"Officially, the box says under 12," Wham-O president Todd Richards told the Los Angeles Times in 2017. "Not everyone abides by that."

While the history of the Slip 'N Slide appears sensational, it's not unique in the realm of playthings that can prompt injury. Between 2002 and 2011, roughly 1 million people—most of them kids under the age of 16—wound up in the emergency room as a result of bouncing on a trampoline. A third of them suffered long bone fractures.

When used as directed, Slip 'N Slides can be a fun and safe diversion, though that still hasn't stopped the product from being stigmatized. In late 2018, another consumer watchdog group, World Against Toys Causing Harm, released their list of the most dangerous toys on the market. Among them: water balloon slingshots, backyard pools, and the Slip ‘N Slide.