Normally, a science experiment gone wrong produces useless things, things like a monkey with three heads, or a radioactive supervillain, or some sort of intelligent and highly toxic sludge-creature who goes about devouring cities. Very rarely does it produce a toy.
That’s exactly what happened with Silly Putty, though. The liquid/solid/whatever plaything was originally invented by accident during World War II. The Japanese were blocking the supply of rubber to the Western world, so scientists in the US were employed to find a new synthetic substitute. James Wright, a Scottish engineer working for General Electric, combined boric acid and silicone oil with the hope that it would be a solution. The new compound proved to be scientifically useless, and was picked up by Ruth Fallgatter, owner of the Block Shop toy store, and her marketer, Peter Hodgson, Sr. The pair included the toy in Block Shop’s 1949 catalog, offering the “nutty putty” in a clear compact cast. It was huge seller, but Fallgatter declined to include it the next time around.
Hodgson decided to form his own company to sell it himself, re-naming it “Silly Putty” and packaging it in plastic eggs. He introduced the toy at the New York Toy Fair in February 1950. Other toy marketers advised him to give up his venture, but after getting the toy into some larger outlets like Neiman-Marcus, the toy’s sales really picked up.
Over the next 50 years, Silly Putty became a household name and secured a permanent place in toy culture history. In 2001, it was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Today the company is owned by Crayola’s parent company, Binney & Smith, and produces over 6 million eggs annually. Thats over 4,000 tons!
Silly Putty has since been employed for a myriad of things. The most popular thing to do with it is to lift
newspaper or comic page images off onto the putty, which retains the images on its surface. It has also found some practical used, though. For instance, many doctors recommend that patients undergoing smoking cessation therapy keep it around and play with it when they feel the urge to light up. It keeps their hands busy and helps to quell the craving. It was also taken into space with the Apollo 8 lunar exploration mission in 1968 to help stave off boredom. The clever astronauts also found it useful for sticking tools down during their anti-gravity periods.
One computer company decided to find out what would happen if you dropped 50 lbs. of the stuff off the top of the parking garage. Not really practical, but entertaining.
What’s your favorite way to use Silly Putty? I used to like to press objects into it to see what kind of impressions they made. Seashells were my favorite! The zoo in Columbus, Ohio did something similar, making impressions of the hands and feet of their gorillas to create replicas of the prints as learning tools. Pretty nifty, huh?
