Silly Putty, the pink-colored, magical-smelling, uh, stuff that comes in those plastic eggs, is turning 50 this year and shows no signs of vanishing from the American toy scene. About 6 million containers were sold last year, and it has even gone high-tech with a Web site (www.sillyputty.com).
Silly Putty was born in 1950, although its roots go back to World War II, when rubber shortages had American scientists looking for rubber substitutes. Combining boric acid and silicone oil in a test tube turned out to be of little use, but the mixture did unexpected things — it bounced and, for a solid, flowed like a liquid.
Peter Hodgson, an advertising copywriter, borrowed $147 to buy a batch, packed wads of it in plastic eggs and included it in a toy store catalog. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, people are finding uses for Silly Putty that Hodgson never could have dreamed of. It’s being used to clean ink off keyboards and to strengthen hand muscles in physical therapy, and doctors are putting it over the eyes of patients during CAT scans.
Sadly, though, its most famous property is becoming a thing of the past. Because of new inks and printing processes used by newspapers, it’s pretty much impossible to transfer images from the comics to a chunk of putty.
But we still have that smell.
