Silly Putty

Stretch it, bounce it, squish it, and even use it to make the Sunday comics look really strange.

You can stretch it, bounce it, squish it, and even use it to make the Sunday comics look really strange.

Crack open the little plastic egg and pull out a blob of Silly Putty. Stretch it slowly and it keeps stretching. But if you stretch it quickly, it snaps apart into two pieces. Roll it into a ball and it bounces like a superball. Squish it flat, twist it around, or just keep squeezing it in your hand. It's not just Silly Putty - it's more like amazing putty!

If you grew up when I did, and the Sunday newspapers still had pages of color comics, then Silly Putty had another trick up its sleeve. Flatten the Silly Putty into a disc shape, press it hard against the comic page, peel it off, and you had a reverse image of the comic right on the Silly Putty. Thinking about it now, not a particularly useful thing to have, but it was a lot of fun - you could stretch the putty and contort your favorite comic-strip character into a long, stretched version!

Silly Putty was the result of a search for synthetic rubber during World War II. General Electric engineer James Wright created the putty material in 1943, but it turned out it wasn't particularly useful as a rubber substitute. A few years later, toy marketer Peter Hodgson saw much more potential in it. He packaged one-ounce blobs inside plastic eggs, called it Silly Putty, and started selling them in 1950. After The New Yorker magazine featured Silly Putty that year, orders reportedly topped 250,000 in just three days. So, as the old saying goes, "one man's failed synthetic rubber experiment is another man's million-dollar toy idea."

Silly Putty now comes in several variations, all in the original familiar egg container. You can choose the Classic Silly Putty or a variety pack having glow-in-the-dark, super-bounce, and metallic versions.