You’d attach a garden hose to the Water Wiggle and it would flail randomly around on a jet of water, as in this vintage commercial

Unfortunately, this posed a threat to small children and killed two before it was withdrawn from the market in 1978.

  • ladicius@lemmy.world
    9·
    8 days ago

    How did that thing kill children? Made them stumble into a pit or something? Because I can’t imagine this flimsy device to do more than maybe give a black eye.

    • EnmebaraGuesser@piefed.caOPEnglish
      15·
      8 days ago

      Looks like somehow(?) the head came off, and two children drowned ('75 and '78) when the exposed nozzle got caught in their mouth. US Consumer Product Safety Commission recall here.

      I’ll guess the shape of the exposed nozzle when that happened made it easy to get into a kid’s mouth, but hard to get out. Kids are prone to drinking from fountains and hoses. Not the same, but to illustrate the asymmetry of insertion and removal, that is also true of spherical shapes close to the size of a mouth. A large-ish sphere is easy to get into a mouth, and hard to get out. Couple that with panic of a drowning 3 year old.

      Perhaps Wham-O could have redesigned it to remove that risk, but looks like it was just pulled from the market completely.

      • ladicius@lemmy.world
        16·
        8 days ago

        Weird. Weird, weird, weird. Those kids died the most bizarre deathes I ever heard of. Drowned on a dry lawn…

    • EnmebaraGuesser@piefed.caOPEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      Drowning I did not expect.

      Same. Before I looked it up, I was thinking maybe choking after a hose got wrapped around a kid’s neck. Or getting hit by the garden hose part. High pressure uncontrolled hoses can be dangerous to full grown adults, and while this would be much lower pressure, 3yo’s are fragile.

      I didn’t even have drowning on my radar as a possibility. That would also make it impossible for the kid to cry out for help.