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Unfortunately, this posed a threat to small children and killed two before it was withdrawn from the market in 1978.
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Unfortunately, this posed a threat to small children and killed two before it was withdrawn from the market in 1978.
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.
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.
Weird. Weird, weird, weird. Those kids died the most bizarre deathes I ever heard of. Drowned on a dry lawn…