In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the United States was desperate. Japan had cut off access to the rubber-producing nations of the Pacific, and rubber was the material the war ran on - tires, boots, seals, gaskets. The government asked American scientists for a miracle: invent a synthetic substitute, and invent it fast.
At General Electric, an engineer named James Wright went to work, experimenting with silicone compounds in his lab in New Haven, Connecticut. One day he combined boric acid with silicone oil, and something strange happened in his beaker.
It stretched farther than rubber. It bounced higher than rubber. It could be pulled, pressed, and molded like nothing anyone had seen.
And as a replacement for rubber, it was useless.
It could not hold a shape. You could not make a tire out of it, or a boot heel, or a gasket. Measured against the only assignment that mattered, the experiment was a failure. Wright shipped samples to scientists around the world, asking if anyone could find a practical use for the bouncing putty. Nobody could.
But here is the part of the story worth slowing down for: nobody could throw it away, either. At parties, engineers would pull the putty out and pass it around, and grown adults would spend the evening stretching it, bouncing it, and laughing. The “failure” kept ending up in people's hands.
It took a toy-store owner and a marketer named Peter Hodgson to see what all the scientists had missed. Watching people play with it, he realized the truth that had been bouncing around the room the whole time: this was never failed rubber. It was a toy - and a wonderful one. In 1950, deep in debt, Hodgson borrowed $147, packed the putty into little plastic eggs, and named it Silly Putty.
It became one of the most beloved toys of the twentieth century. Hundreds of millions of eggs have been sold. It went to the moon with the Apollo 8 astronauts. The failed war material outlived the war, outlived the lab, and outlasted almost every product it was supposed to compete with.