The Academy Awards and the Golden Globe accolades may be over, but still the honors continue. Recently, a worthy but unsung 50-year-old entity got the recognition it has long deserved, when Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in Salem, Ore. (along with the 54-year-old Tonka Truck) and joining such past honorees as Barbie, Lego, Monopoly, the Frisbee, the Slinky, Mr. Potato Head and Silly Putty's distant cousin, Play-Doh.
You're probably surprised that what is essentially a ball of elastic pink goop could reach such heights of distinction, so let's take a look back at its history and see how it got there. Its origins were both accidental and unlikely.
It was during World War II, when scientists at General Electric in New Haven, Conn., were, at the request of the United States War Production Board, seeking a cheap rubber substitute that could be used for such things as tank treads and G.I. boot soles. One of them, Scottish engineer James Wright, combined silicone oil and boric acid and came up with a stretchy brownish-pink material that had no apparent use whatever. Dubbed "nutty putty," it became a company joke. The G.E. staff would take it to co*cktail parties as a novelty, stretching it like taffy and bouncing it off the walls to the amusem*nt of the crowd.
It was on one such occasion in 1949 that Peter Hodgson, a former advertising copywriter, observed one of these demonstrations. Hooking up with local toy-store owner Ruth Fallgatter, Hodgson bought for the price of $147 21 pounds of the stuff, hired a Yale Student -- and used his own three kids -- to separate it into half-ounce balls. He then marketed it inside colored, pull-apart plastic eggs under the name Silly Putty in the Fallgatter mail order catalog, originally shipping it in actual egg cartons. After it became an instant hit, Hodgson then began to mass produce it with the slogan "the toy with one moving part."
Before long, he was selling millions of eggs a year, the product having been given a promotional bounce in 1950 when the New Yorker magazine did a short feature on it in its "Talk of the Town" section.
Silly Putty seemed to connect with some primal urge to squeeze and stretch, and both adults and children delighted in finding original uses for it, in addition to bouncing it like a ball and molding it like clay. (Who doesn't remember using it to transfer color comics onto paper?)
In 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts used it to keep tools from floating around in zero gravity and zoos employ it to foot- and handprint gorillas.
The original Silly Putty came in a variety of two-colored plastic eggs on a 4-inch by 7-inch card, bearing the slogan "Nothing Else is Silly Putty." Over the years, various novelty forms of "The Real Solid Liquid" were introduced. Among them were "Egg-Centric Colors," with the color of the egg denoting the hue of the putty inside; "Glow in the Dark" Silly Putty, boasting four "hot fluorescent colors;" "Holographic Crystal Putty," meant to be stuck onto windows to form icicles, and produced in three colors (diamond, amethyst or turquoise); and "Changeable" Silly Putty," which changes color with the warmth of the hand.
In the 1960s, Peter Hodgson Jr. introduced the toy to Europe and the Soviet Union, making it a truly universal phenomenon. In fact, in 1961, Silly Putty was credited with attracting large numbers of Russians to the United States Plastics Expo in Moscow.
There was much ado when Silly Putty celebrated its 50th birthday last year. A new color -- glistening Metallic Gold -- was added to the repertoire, and a vintage collection of early Silly Putty eggs entered the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History because it "is a case study of invention, business and entrepreneurship and longevity."
Which, indeed, it is. edited Auction magazine and authored nine books, including "My Life as a List."
