Inspired by this thread.
Could you walk a Slinky down an escalator for an extended period of time, or would the escalator’s movement keep the Slinky from walking?
I never did find any youtube postings…
I assume what would happen is it would work for a short period of time. Also, look at the construction of an escalator. From my childhood I remember carpeted stairs working best. I bet the metal stairs wouldn’t do so well. The size of each step (they’re longer than regular steps for the most part, right?) would also play a part.
But I’m sure you could find an escalator with some slight grip to the steps and with a short length of each one.
At least while attempting it you would never really have to go fetch the thing when it stopped slinking. 
(I don’t know why, but I find that very amusing).
It’ll never take off. 
Seriously, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, assuming the slinky could slink over a step as wide as an escalator step. Maybe we need to find one of the old wooden-treaded escalators that I have heard about (in London Underground stations?)
The dimensions of the old wooden-tread escalators were the same as the metal ones and have all been replaced since the Kings Cross fire in the 80s.
Greenford station still has one.
I impress myself with my nitpicks, sometimes 
Time to go to London with a camcorder and a Slinky!
By ‘an extended period of time’, I bet you’re thinking ‘forever’.
A slinky can walk down stairs because it’s going down, not just because it’s doing stairs. If it goes down, it can carry on. If it doesn’t, it must stop. I think you have a mental picture of a slinky walking down the escalator as it travels up, and so staying in place. Can’t happen.
May I humbly retract all of that?
If you could get a slinky of exactly the right size and match the escalator speed to slinky speed, you could theoretically keep your slinky going forever.
My my experience, I could never make a slinky go down more than a few stairs before it stopped slinking, so don’t ask me to do it.
Variations on this would include a hot wheel car on the handrail, set up with enough friction that its descent exactly matches the speed of the handrail. It would just sit in one spot forever.
Show me a Hot Wheels (or Matchbox) car that tracks straight for more than a few feet.
I don’t imagine the Slinky would walk forever, which is why I went with “an extended period of time.” I’m thinking more like 5-10 minutes.
Top floor of Macy’s in NY has one.
Basic physics will tell you that the Slinky will cease to slink after a very short time. Slinkys are able to slink because they gain slinking energy by going downhill. If they can’t actually descend, there’s no energy available to make that “slink slink” sound, or power the slinky spring.
Nope. The slinky IS going downhill, as far as its concerned. It’s just that the escalator is come up at the same rate.
If you don’t believe me, get a Slinky and let it slink from one hand to a lower hand. Then lift that hand up, move the other one below, and continue. It was always great fun to see how long you could keep the slinky going.
Fine, then replace the Hot Wheels car with a very small airplane :dubious:.
(What, this thread went to hell as soon as Sam Stone made a comment that was oddly similar to the airplane on a treadmill thread. (Whoops, did I just say that)).
No, Sam Stone is correct… the Slinky could definitely walk down the Escalator forever. But only if it’s downward speed perfectly matched the upward speed of the Escalator. To achieve this in real life, you would have to fine tune the speed of the Escalator so that the Slinky would remain at the same position.
How long? You arms will get tired long before the slinky does.
Here is the escalator you need. Variable speed.
Or maybe this.
Suddenly I’m reminded of Ace Ventura and the seemingly endless steps leading up to the mountain temple when imagining a perpetual escalator slinky descent …
“Isn’t this incredible?! It’s gonna be some kinda record!”
I’ve done the Hot Wheels thing, but I used coins instead of a toy car, and a conveyor belt instead of an escalator handrail.
The conveyor belt was a short one of the type used on loading docks to load and unload trucks. It could be extended into the back of the truck, and raised or lowered depending on the type of truck. This raising or lowering enabled me to give the surface of the belt a specific angle, which was necessary because I couldn’t control its speed, which was constant. I started the conveyor, then rolled about five or six coins out of my hand against the direction of belt travel. The first few times, some coins crashed quickly, but after a while I got them steady. I then had the problem of the coins going too fast or too slowly, but I used the angle adjustment to fine tune this so they were more or less stationary relative to me. What really helped was the presence of slight irregularities on the steel bed under the rubber belt. This was because I could never get the coins completely stationary relative to me, but the irregularities did the rest of the job for me by introducing tiny “hills” in the belt that would keep the coins in a “valley” about a foot or two long.
Once I had this happening, the result was way cool. The coins would slowly move up and down the length of the “valley”, and would even perform little overtaking moves around one another like cyclists in a velodrome. Sometimes they would bump one another, but as they were facing the same way, the gyroscopic force tended to keep them upright.
It went for about twenty minutes, until two coins crashed together a bit too hard, fell, and the others fell over them like an accident in a horse race.
TheLoadedDog, that sounds really cool… Does anyone have access to something like that so that they could recreate this and videotape it?
And does anyone want to maybe test the slinky + escalator? I mean, we don’t have proof that the metal stairs won’t grip enough… Maybe with the correct weight and length slinky it would work.
Anyone?
Don’t look at me. The nearest escalator is… well, probably an hour or so away.
If grip is a problem, you could tape thin sheets of rubber to each end to serve as “feet”. You’d lose some efficiency due to air drag (!) but other than that I think you’d see an improvement in grip and tipover efficiency.