You can stretch it, bounce it, pull it apart and put it back together again. After going nowhere as a World War II rubber substitute, Silly Putty celebrates its 50th anniversary next year as one of America's classic toys.
"It was a thinking kid's toy," said Peter Hodgson Jr., who teaches Russian literature at UCLA. "The fact that it was a solid liquid, and the way it behaved in your hand. . . . Part of its weirdness is that it had no use at all.""It's hard to imagine any other culture, any other country, in which this could have made sense . . . and nobody less eccentric than my old man could have carried it off."
The "old man" was Peter Hodgson, an advertising copywriter working at the time on a catalog for Ruth Fallgatter, owner of a New Haven, Conn., toy store called The Block Shop.
As with practically everything having to do with Silly Putty, there are conflicting stories about how the senior Hodgson learned about the strange, new substance that had disappointed its inventors.
Hodgson's son said his father was introduced to it at the home of a Harvard physicist. According to Silly Putty maker Binney & Smith, Hodgson and Fallgatter were attending a party hosted by a General Electric executive when the mysterious material was passed around the room.
In 1949, Hodgson and Fallgatter decided to include some of the "bouncing putty" in her catalog. It was packaged in a clear, compact case and sold for $2. It outsold everything in the catalog except a 50-cent box of Crayola Crayons.
Fallgatter lost interest in the new product, but Hodgson didn't. In 1950, he borrowed money to buy a batch of the gooey substance and package 1-ounce wads of it in plastic eggs selling for $1 each. He dubbed it Silly Putty.
Shrugging off advice by marketers at the International Toy Fair in New York to give up on his idea, Hodgson displayed it at book shops. Sales skyrocketed after a New Yorker magazine writer did a story about Silly Putty.
Hodgson eventually created one of the first television advertising campaigns targeting children, with commercials airing on the Howdy Doody Show and Captain Kangaroo.
When Hodgson died in 1976, he left an estate valued at $140 million. Binney & Smith, which also makes Crayola Crayons and Magic Markers, acquired the rights to Silly Putty the following year.
Silly Putty is now one of about 300 products made at Dow Corning's Greensboro plant, which has made the product for more than 20 years. But Binney & Smith, which is owned by Hallmark Cards Inc., has decided to drop the Greensboro plant from its vendor list.
Silly Putty is made in a machine resembling what industrial bakers use to make bread dough. It comes out in basic white and coral, is cooled with dry ice, formed into 50-pound blocks, packed in boxes and sent to Binney & Smith, which jazzes some of it up with special colors and packages it for distribution to toy stores across the country.
Silly Putty still comes in the familiar plastic eggs, and it sells for about $1. And it still works its silly magic - although it doesn't transfer comic strips the way it used to because of improvements in newspaper inks.
Depending on whom you believe, Silly Putty was created during World War II either by Corning Glass Works scientists Rob Roy McGregor and Earl Warrick, or by James Wright, a GE researcher.
All three men were working on developing silicone-based products that could be used as substitutes for rubber, a precious wartime commodity.
"Dr. McGregor and I got the patent," Warrick said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Midland, Mich. "It was five years before General Electric got their patent. . . . They had articles out saying they invented Silly Putty, which wasn't true."
Linda Heuring, a spokeswoman for GE Silicone in Waterford, N.Y., thinks otherwise. "He can say what he likes to, but we think we invented it here," she said.
U.S. Patent Office records show McGregor and Warrick applied in March 1943 for a patent on "treating dimethyl silicone polymer with boric oxide." They received the patent in December 1947.
"The patent was pretty simple," Warrick said. "We just called it a bouncing putty."
Warrick, 86, said the basic recipe for Silly Putty is to mix a silicone derivative with boric oxide.