Good Design: Silly Putty

It squishes, it bounces, it breaks, and it occupies a spot in the Smithsonian museum!? Most of us have played with Silly Putty, the iconic pink goop, but few know its origin story and the lessons it has for designers and engineers.

Silly Putty has been around for a stunning 80 years [1]! It was originally invented as a potential replacement for rubber during WWII, when rubber was in short supply. It was created by a simple reaction between boric acid and silicone oil. The new material had encouraging properties such as being stretchy and not going moldy or drying out. However, some of its 1 properties were stranger and less helpful. Silly putty is made of silicone polymers, including polydimethylsiloxane, which makes it a viscoelastic substance. This means that it behaves like a solid if manipulated quickly (i.e. it can bounce, break, and snap), but if left by itself, it slowly flows or takes the shape of its container like a liquid. This was intriguing, but it made Silly Putty a poor candidate for making tires or other traditionally rubber-based products, so it was shelved [2, 3].

Silly Putty with the BYU logo written and then stretched.

In 1949, the substance was given new life by Peter Hodgson, an ad-agency owner from Conneticut. At a cocktail party, he watched with interest as people passed around and played with a putty sample that someone had brought. Hodgson was working on a catalog for toy store owner Ruth Fallgatter at the time, and he convinced her that the gooey material could be sold as a novelty. She agreed, and the product sold well, but eventually Fallgatter decided to focus on other things [4].

After the toy store dropped the product, Hodgson resolved to take up selling it himself. He borrowed money to purchase more putty, and because it was around Easter time, he packaged the putty in egg-shaped containers (see Figure 1). At first, he hardly sold anything, but when it was mentioned in an article in the New Yorker, Hodgson sold 250,000 eggs of Silly Putty within a week [5]!

Silly Putty and the classic egg container.

Although it was originally marketed towards adult consumers, it was found that the majority of those interested in Silly Putty were children. Hodgson recognized this trend and pivoted his strategy towards marketing to children, even creating one of the first televised children’s commercials [3].

As a toy, Silly Putty is excellent. It’s inexpensive, long-lasting, and whimsical. As well as being fun to stretch and bounce, generations of kids have had fun lifting newspaper comics and pencil drawings with its adhesive properties. Despite being 80 years old, it fits perfectly into the fidget toy craze.

Silly Putty has enjoyed other uses besides simple amusement. It was brought into space during the Apollo program, and along with amusing the astronauts, it was found to be very useful for securing tools in zero gravity [6]. It was also picked up by physical therapists who use it to help those recovering from hand trauma, generating spinoffs like TheraPutty with more specialized properties [7]. It is also the basis for magnetic putty [8] and another magnetic variation called the ”magnetic slime robot” which is being developed for use in noninvasive surgery to remove swallowed objects from the digestive tract [9].

After Hodgson’s death, the rights to Silly Putty were acquired by the Crayola company, and by 2005 six million eggs of silly putty were being sold each year. In recognition of Silly Putty’s success, it has been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame and has a place in the Smithsonian Museum [3, 10].

As design engineers, what can we learn from the story of Silly Putty? To me, there are two main lessons.

First of all, Silly Putty’s success comes from ways of using it that the people who invented it never imagined. The engineers who formulated Silly Putty did not achieve their goal of creating a synthetic alternative to rubber. They created a viscoelastic substance that could not be used to make tires, and thought they had failed. Despite not accomplishing the goal they set out to accomplish, they created an amazing and enduring product. It is constantly finding new uses! As design engineers, it may be tempting to throw out our ideas when they don’t work the way we imagined. Silly Putty teaches us to look at things from different perspectives and think outside the box when things don’t go our way.

The second lesson is that design is not just about creating new technical innovations, it is about presenting those innovations in an appealing way. None of the R&D engineers who worked on Silly Putty during WWII ultimately found the application that made their creation successful, the toy market. It took an observant marketing guru, a toy store owner, and multiple packaging and marketing iterations for Silly Putty to take off. The lesson for designers is that creating a product is more than just a technical achievement! We need to involve people in the design process who understand how to sell things, like marketers, businessmen, and advertisers, and we need to develop some of those skills ourselves.

Overall, Silly Putty is far from the failure it was originally thought to be. It has become an iconic product that delights the kid in all of us, and it is constantly finding new uses, both hi-tech and mundane. Next time you have a chance to squish, snap, and bounce a piece of Silly Putty, remember that your seeming failures might just be a squish, snap, and bounce away from changing the world.

References

[1] Rob Roy McGregor and Earl Leathen Warrick. Treating dimethyl silicone polymer with boric oxide. https://patents.google.com/patent/US2431878.

[2] Jacob Roberts. A Successful Failure. https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-successful-failure/. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[3] Silly Putty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_Putty. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[4] William Harris. How Silly Putty Works. https://people.howstuffworks.com/silly-putty.htm. (accessed: 07.22.2023).

[5] Ann Thayer. What’s That Stuff? Silly Putty. https://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/whatstuff/stuff/7848scit3.html. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[6] Will Stefanski. Our Favorite Putty Is Not Just A Toy Anymore! https://dustyoldthing.com/silly-putty-robots/. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[7] TheraPutty Exercise Material. https://www.fab-ent.com/brands/theraputty/. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[8] Magnetic Putty. https://nationalmaglab.org/magnet-academy/plan-a-lesson/magnetic-putty/. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[9] Researchers in Hong Kong create ’soft robot’ made of magnetic slime. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-60961184. (accessed: 07.06.2023).

[10] Jennifer Rosenberg. A Short History of the Ball of Goo Called Silly Putty. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-history-of-silly-putty-1779330. (accessed: 07.06.2023).