Silly Putty

You don’t want to eat Silly Putty. You also don’t want to set it on fire or drop it from high elevations (it shatters). But just about anything else goes.

Keep it on the desk or the car, then stretch and knead it to alleviate stress. Sculpt it into various and sundry objet d’art, you little Michelangelo, you.

Press it against a newspaper or comic or jam it under a wobbly table leg and impress your not-so-handy dinner companions.

Remove lint from your clothes, clean your typewriter keys, bounce it, bowl it, juggle it, plug a leak with it . . . Just put it back in its plastic egg home when you’re done.

In the early 1940s, a New Haven, Connecticut engineer named James Wright was busy trying to design an inexpensive synthetic rubber. When he dropped a little boric acid into silicone oil, he got what he wanted, sort of.

The resulting goo was certainly stretchy and bouncy, but General Electric, whom Wright was under contract to, didn’t fall in love. But the putty was not to be denied.

A few years later, an out-of-work ad man named Peter Hodgson came upon the “nutty putty” or “gupp”, as it was nicknamed back then – some say at a party, and some say at a toy store.

Replete with a vision of the putty as a mass-produced toy, Hodgson borrowed money, bought the rights from GE, and bought a load of the stuff.

He christened it ‘Silly Putty’ and sold one-ounce portions inside plastic eggs because Easter was coming up.

Thanks to a piece in The New Yorker, sales were brisk, and the Putty has remained on the toy scene ever since. Hodgson died in 1976, a very rich man.

Silly Putty is chemically classified as a non-Newtonian fluid, its viscosity dependent on temperature and force applied. In 1961, it was featured at the Plastics Expo in Moscow.

In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 carted it into space in a specially-designed silver egg casing and used it to fasten down tools in zero-gravity.