#136: Silly Putty – From War Effort To Childs Play Thing

The Empire Builders Podcast

The real liquid solid for adults turned into Silly Putty for the kid inside all of us. Natural rubber was hard to get and Silly Putty was the mistake that created an empire.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

[Irock Plumbing Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders podcast, Dave Young here alongside Stephen Simple. Stephen just whispered the name of today’s topic into my ear, and it’s one that I’ve certainly heard of. It’s one that I have vast amounts of experience with as a child. We’re going to find out if they’re even still around because they must be, they built an empire. I think I know a little bit of the back story. It’s sort of an accidental product called Silly Putty.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, Silly Putty. To give you an idea of how big Silly Putty is, there’s been 350 million eggs sold, which would account to about 4,500 tons of Silly Putty in the world. It’s in the National Toy Hall of Fame, and it’s in the Smithsonian Institute.

Dave Young:

One of my favorite things to do with Silly Putty is probably not something that today’s kids can do much with it because nobody buys newspapers anymore, but used to be able to smash the Silly Putty onto the comic strips. It would lift a little bit of the ink off, and that would be kind of fun.

Stephen Semple:

You could stretch it.

Dave Young:

Yeah. Kind of a goofy product. There’s no legit purpose for it other than just to play with it in your hands.

Stephen Semple:

Invention of Silly Putty is disputed, actually. Some say Earl Warrick from Dow Corning, some say that was the inventor. Most including Crayola, who are now the owners of Silly Putty attribute it to James Wright at GE Labs in New Haven, Connecticut. So most say it was James Wright. So we’re going to go with it being James Wright. Any case, whichever one was the inventor, it was invented in 1943 and today it’s one of the best-selling toys in the world. As we’re talking about, it’s in the National Toy Hall of Fame, in the Smithsonian Institute.

Dave Young:

So 1943 puts it right in the middle of World War II, and we’re fighting to stop the Axis and the Nazi powers. If I recall, if I heard a story once, it was like they were trying to invent something that was part of the war effort.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. In fact, that’s exactly what it was. Again, just give you an idea of Peter Hodgson is the person who ran with Silly Putty and popularized it. In 1976, when he died, his estate was worth $140 million, which is probably in today’s dollars 600 million. He did really well. He did really well by this. You’re right. It was a year after he passed away that it was sold to Crayola. Back to GE Labs in 1941, Japan invades the rubber producing countries at the beginning of World War II creating all sorts of shortages.

If you take a look at the countries that they invaded at the beginning, they were all basically countries that were the source of natural rubber because at the time, rubber came from the sap of trees, rubber was used in tires and rafts and aircraft products, and they were all made from natural rubber. That was the only rubber that was around. So basically companies like GE with the war effort were looking for a substitute. They were trying to find a substitution for natural rubber. James Wright was working on the problem, and he came up with a compound that was soft, sticky, stretchable.

What made it unusual is that it can be compressed and it’s a solid that can be cut, but when it’s balled up, it bounces. When left sitting out, it becomes a liquid. So it had all these really weird properties, because it’s actually both a liquid and a solid. The problem was it didn’t really work as a rubber substitute. So GE developed this thing, they patented it, they set it aside, went on. Eventually vulcanization is what was discovered and all this other stuff. GE tries to market this product. They sit there and go, okay, well, we got this thing, let’s try to market it. They came up with a few ideas. They tried to market it as a tool, as a hand exercising device.

Dave Young:

Okay, sure.

Stephen Semple:

Fixing wobbly furniture. Not much happened with it, and they sort of set it aside.

Dave Young:

I don’t think fixing wobbly furniture turns into a liquid if you leave it. It really is one of these things with no practical purpose.

Stephen Semple:

They tried to find some.

Dave Young:

It’s like a slinky. It’s a spring that doesn’t work well as a spring, but it flops around kind of cool. Let’s call it a toy.

Stephen Semple:

Exactly. So Peter Hodgson is an out of work ad writer, and he’s making his rounds at a GE cocktail party, and he sees everyone playing with this putty. It was actually something that the employees at GE played with. They’re bouncing it. They were crafting it. So he approaches GE and he buys it. He buys the rights for Silly Putty from GE for 147 bucks.

Dave Young:

147.

Stephen Semple:

147. Well, they have no idea what to do with it. So he reaches out to Ruth Fallgatter, who has a shop called the Block Shop that does a yearly catalog. They team up and they offer it in the catalog. It’s aimed at adults, and it’s called, a great name, you’re going to love this name, it wasn’t originally called Silly Putty. Great name. The Real Solid Liquid.

Dave Young:

The Real Solid Liquid.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

Trademark.

Stephen Semple:

Even with that name, it does pretty well. Ruth decides to bail on it, and at this point, Peter’s $12,000 in the debt because of what he’s done to try to build this product.

Dave Young:

Bought a train car full of it.

Stephen Semple:

He needs a new approach. So Easter is around the corner, so he decides to sell it as an Easter toy and put it in an egg.

Dave Young:

Nice. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

So that’s where the whole idea of it going into an egg started. In February 1950, he took it to the New York International Toy Fair, and it didn’t sell all that well, but he did get it into Neiman Marcus and Doubleday Books.

Dave Young:

Wow. Okay.

Stephen Semple:

But the real breakout happened when a writer for the New York Magazine came across it and wrote about it in an article called The Talk of the Town, and it immediately, sales took off. Now, it was around this time that he renamed it The Silly Putty. He also learned that you could lift pictures from newspapers and stretch it. So they started to talk about that.

So he changed it to Silly Putty around that time. So sales goes to 250,000 units and he’s making a ton of money. The big success comes in 1955 because up until this point, he had still been marketing it to adults. So in 1955, he pivots to marketing it to kids. TV’s coming on the scene, and in 1957, he advertises on two shows, Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo.

Dave Young:

That ought to do it. Hey, Stephen, I want to interrupt ourselves. That’s not proper grammar, but I did it anyway.

Stephen Semple:

There you go.

Dave Young:

In lieu of our commercial this time, I thought maybe you and I could just chat for a minute.

Stephen Semple:

Absolutely. Sounds great.

Dave Young:

Our goal with the Empire Builders podcast is to talk about business building strategies that have worked for people that started out small and became empires. We want to help you. If you’re a business owner and you’re listening to the Empire Builders podcast because you want to build your own empire, we’ve got a pretty sweet offer for you, and that is to just spend 90 minutes chatting with us. It’s not a sales call on our part. It’s a 90-minute session where beforehand you do a little bit of homework and give us some basic background information about your business, and then we get on a Zoom call and we learn a little bit more about you, and we give you the very best advice we can give in a 90-minute session.

Stephen Semple:

I’m going to say it is miles away from it. I hate these dog and pony sales calls where I’m great, I’m amazing. Here’s samples of our work. You should hire us. Which is part of the reason that makes us different is the fact that there is the scorecard and questionnaire that goes out that the owner sends back to us because it allows us to a couple of days, do some research, put some thought, and come with some solid recommendations. My belief that if we can provide some good insights that somebody may be more interested in hiring us, and certainly that’s a way better experience than meeting with some sales guy who runs you through a dog and pony. It’s lots of fun, it’s great value. People get a recording of it. I highly recommend people take us up on the offer.

Dave Young:

Easy to find us. You’re listening to our podcast, so find a way to request your 90-minute session with us. Looking forward to talking to you. Let’s get back to the story.

Stephen Semple:

Back to the story. So he dies in 1976, states worth, what would today be? Like $600 million. It sells to Crayola, sales hit 300 million units. Here’s the fun thing. The fun thing is you can go on YouTube and you can actually find old commercials from Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody, and it’s actually Peter Hodgson himself playing this ship’s captain.

He’s sitting there smoking a pipe on a commercial on a kid’s show, and he’s talking about how he’s the ship captain and discovered this thing and whatnot. It’s great. You really do need to go to YouTube and look up old Captain Kangaroo Silly Putty commercials, and just think about the fact that, yeah, he’s sitting there, the ship captain smoking a pipe on a show that appears on a kid’s television show.

Dave Young:

I used to really enjoy it. I don’t have any laying around here, but I’ve got all kinds of other things that I think today you would classify as a fidget toy. It’s something that it’s just fun to have in your hand and pull it and stretch it and roll it and lift images and bounce it. It doesn’t make noise unless you pop it. You could pop it. You could stretch it slowly, but if you pulled it fast, it would just snap.

Stephen Semple:

Right. To me, the part that’s interesting about Silly Putty was, first of all, was this thing that GE had invented because they were trying to find a solution for rubber and invented this thing, and they couldn’t find a use for it. GE sold industrial products and consumer products, and because they never sold toys, they could never get their head around it being a toy.

Look, we’ve seen that happen with other companies. Xerox invented the computer mouse, but they could never think about it as… Well, they invented Windows for God’s sakes. They invented so much of the computer technology, but they could never get their head around it because they saw themselves as a photocopying business. Let’s face it, GE was never going to be able to figure out a toy. Even if they saw it as a toy, they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

What was interesting was he immediately saw the GE people playing with it, and so went, oh, this could be a toy for adults. He saw adults playing with it. So that I thought was really, again, really observational. Boy, people are doing this. He approached GE, and of course GE sold it cheap. They were like, “We have no use for it, we don’t know what to do with it.” I thought that that was really interesting. Then even just the little twist he did of, oh Easter’s coming along. How can I make this fit Easter? Oh, let’s put it in an Easter egg.

Dave Young:

What was he packaging it in before that?

Stephen Semple:

You know what? I should have looked that up and I can’t remember what it was packaged in. I think it was just a little, I think again, instead of being an egg, I think it was just like a little box rather than being a colorful egg.

Dave Young:

Just a giant blob sitting on a retail shelf.

Stephen Semple:

Essentially.

Dave Young:

You just slice a piece off.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. The real solid liquid.

Dave Young:

What a weird product. To have it be so successful.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

Because it is. It’s just absolutely useless other than a little bit of entertainment in your hand. That’s it.

Stephen Semple:

He did get his break. He took it to the Toy Fair in the 1950s. He got in Neiman Marcus and Doubleday and then got written about in the New York Magazine, and sales took off. What we also know is when you keep working away at these things, eventually you do eventually get your break, and sometimes that’s just what it takes. His real smart move was the pivoting to kids and advertising on television.

Again, and we’ve heard about this a few times with a couple of other companies, when we go back to the mid-1950s, the whole idea of advertising toys directly to children was also a bit of a new idea. He did a few interesting and innovative things and built an amazing large business based upon a product that actually has no use.

Dave Young:

Well, so actually, Stephen, while we’re talking, I just Googled it, and there’s a story in Science World that says there are other uses. So it does pick up dirt and lint.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

My Silly Putty ended up with dog hair and all kinds of things in it. It just picks that stuff up. Then you can build up hand muscles after injuries. So yeah, that’s useful. Then it says the Apollo astronauts used it to hold tools in zero gravity.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, is that right?

Dave Young:

So maybe that’s the case. I don’t know for sure.

Stephen Semple:

So it went to the moon.

Dave Young:

I don’t know if you want Silly Putty getting into all your equipment either, who knows? What a weird thing it is.

Stephen Semple:

It really is.

Dave Young:

Fun to talk about. Now I’ve got to find myself a little egg full of Silly Putty to add to my growing collection of fidget toys on my desk.

Stephen Semple:

You have permission because it was originally a toy for adults.

Dave Young:

Yes, absolutely. It’s a toy for adults. I don’t buy toys for children, Stephen. I’m an old man now. Thanks for bringing us this Silly Putty story.

Stephen Semple:

All right, thanks, David.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review. If you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to [e-mail].