He told us that Silly Putty is the most terrific item the Doubleday shops have been privileged to handle since 'Forever Amber.' Lee Weber, the manager of the bookshop, to ascertain the mysterious link between it and Doubleday. We went into the Doubleday bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street the other day, intending, in our innocence, to buy a book, and found all the clerks busy selling Silly Putty, a gooey, pinkish, repellent-looking commodity that comes in plastic containers the size and shape of eggs … we sought out Mr. Hodgson opened a manufacturing plant in North Branford, Conn., to make Silly Putty and, soon after, landed his first customers - Neiman Marcus and the Doubleday bookshops. to sell the stuff and contracted with some chemical engineers in Schenectady, N.Y., to derive a recipe based on General Electric's original formula. He evaluated 15 possibilities, but eventually settled on Silly Putty, for which he secured a trademark. At the same time, Hodgson began to brainstorm names for his product. He borrowed $147 to order another batch from General Electric, then hired a Yale student to place 1-ounce (28-gram) wads in plastic eggs. For reasons that remain unclear, Fallgatter declined to market the product any further, but Hodgson saw its potential. The bouncing putty became one of the Block Shop's biggest sellers. Fallgatter agreed, and the two decided to list it on a page with other adult gifts for the price of $1. He approached Ruth Fallgatter, owner of the Block Shop toy store, about listing the putty in an upcoming catalog Hodgson was helping to produce.

He watched as people spent minutes at a time folding, stretching and squeezing the strange stuff. Peter Hodgson, who owned his own ad agency in New Haven, Conn., was at a cocktail party when he spotted the putty making the rounds. Unfortunately, no factory or manufacturing plant ever discovered an application for the goop. World War II had been over for four years, and James Wright's bouncing putty was still in circulation as an invention in search of a practical use. Our first order of business: Hodgson's great gamble.

We'll also investigate the material's many odd properties - and the chemistry behind them. In this article, we'll look at the long, strange journey of Silly Putty. His name was Peter Hodgson, and his vision would eventually lead to Silly Putty, one of the most famous toys in the history of fun and games. One man, however, rescued the substance from obscurity. Unfortunately, no one ever discovered a practical use for the 'bouncing putty,' which seemed destined to fade quietly into history. General Electric sent Wright's concoction to engineers all over the world, hoping to make something awesome out of the accident. Instead, he created a substance he would eventually call 'bouncing putty'. Wright mixed boric acid and silicone oil together in the hopes of creating rubber that would make Charles Goodyear proud. One of those wrong turns was made by James Wright in the laboratory of General Electric. Individually, there were a few setbacks and wrong turns in the quest for synthetic rubber. Collectively, the chemists working on the problem may have achieved one of the greatest successes in the history of science: They produced a general-purpose synthetic rubber known as GR-S, or government rubber-styrene, in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the U.S. War Production Board challenged industrial labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber that could be used to meet wartime production demands. Japan's invasion of Southeast Asia threatened, literally, the entire war effort.Īt a loss, the U.S. soldier that went into battle, the military needed 32 pounds (nearly 15 kilograms) of rubber - for boots, tires, clothing and other equipment. In the early 1940s, as Germany waged war in Europe, the Empire of the Sun invaded rubber-producing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, cutting off supplies to the West. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for Silly Putty, the strange material that ships in an egg and behaves sometimes like a liquid and other times like a solid, necessity came in the form of Imperial Japan.

Bouncy silly putty recipe