The Origin of Silly Putty

Who doesn’t love Silly Putty? You can bounce it, snap it, and even press images onto it to share with your friends! It’s cheap and it makes for hours of fun for all ages! Have you ever wondered who invented this miraculous substance, and why? Here’s the story of how Silly Putty accidentally came into the world.

In 1943, at a General Electric laboratory, in New Haven, Connecticut, an engineer names James Wright and his team was charged with the difficult task of inventing a synthetic rubber that could withstand extreme temperatures for use in the military. One day, they decided to try a mixture of boric acid and silicone oil. The experiment resulted in a substance that stretched and bounced and could be broken with a hammer, but for their purposes, it was useless, so they started handing it out to the local children to play with.

Several years later, in 1950, a marketer named Peter Hodgson, who was working on producing a mail order catalog for a toy store, noticed a group of adults playing with the substance at a cocktail party. After seeing the amazing putty in action, he went to General Electric and bought $147 dollars worth of putty, hired a few students from Yale to package it into small plastic eggs and listed it in the toy store catalog. Even without a photo, it was an instant success! In the first five years, over 32 million containers of Silly Putty were sold worldwide. General Electric continued to manufacture silly putty until 1959. In 1977, Binney & Smith, the maker of Crayola products, acquired the rights to Silly Putty, and in 2001, Silly Putty was indicted into the National Toy Hall of Fame.

Some of the best things come into this world completely by accident. I remember playing with Silly Putty for hours as a child, pressing images from the Sunday comics onto it, bouncing it, snapping it and attempting to blow bubbles with it, unsuccessfully, I might add. Isn’t it amazing that such a simple toy that nearly everyone has played with at least once in their lifetime, might never have existed if it wasn’t for an engineer’s accidental creation?