Silly Putty recipe 1.Add: 1/2 cup water to 1/2 cup white glue 2.Mix and add 3 drops of food coloring 3.Make Borax solution: Take 2 tablespoons borax (You can buy this at a grocery store) and add to 1 cup of water and stir. 4.Add 1/2 cup of borax solution to water and glue mixture 5.Stir and store in a plastic bag Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 12:32:52 -0800 To: hungry@uidaho.edu Subject: Putty Experiments Sender: owner-hungry@Hungry.COM Precedence: bulk Reply-To: hungry@Hungry.COM Status: RO These are the putty experiments that I have tried thus far: 1. Putty is flammable. The flame is intensly bright white, although it burns slowly. The residual ash left over from the burning putty crumbles easily. 2. Putty can be microwaved. I microwaved the putty in a drinking glass for about 3 minutes. Warm putty is extremely sticky, but when cooled, the putty returns to the same state before the microwaving. 3. Baking the putty. We baked a small, cookie-sized chunk of putty in an oven at 450 degrees F for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, the oven started emitting fumes. We decided to cancel the experiment. (originally, I was going to bake it for 30 minutes). What remained on the cookie sheet was a combination of dried putty (silly-powder (tm)) and ultra-hot and sticky putty. Future work: 1. Silly putty and liquid nitrogen. -Luke This story ran Aug. 2, 1995 in The Courant In a world where sleek, speeding Rollerblades and high-tech video games compete for kids' attention, it may be surprising that a glob of goo known as Silly Putty keeps bouncing along, 45 years after it arrived on the scene. This pliable little plaything was a bit of marketing magic that catapulted Connecticut into the toy-making spotlight in August 1950, shortly after the "gupp," as he called it, was first sold by Peter Hodgson, an out-of-work copywriter from New Haven. It became a craze in the 1950s. Children wouldn't sit still until they got their hands on Silly Putty. Then they sat only long enough to press it against their favorite comics and peel away the impressions. As soon as a kid learned how high Silly Putty bounced, these pinkish, nut-sized balls were ricocheting all around their homes. A '90s kind of thing In 1968 the astronauts on the Apollo 8 moon mission carried Silly Putty into space in a specially designed sterling-silver egg -- to alleviate boredom and help fasten down tools during weightlessness. Students from Pinkerton Academy in Derry, N.H., used Silly Putty to help them prepare for the New England final competition for the annual Science Bowl of the U.S. Department of Energy -- a Q & A match in which the team that pushes the buzzer first gets to answer. "I've been using it to strengthen my thumb and forefinger," said team captain Brad Gagne, a senior. "The Silly Putty is to get quick on the reflexes." Free-lance writer Jama Coomes wrote this year in the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal that she has owned the same Silly Putty for almost five years, and it "has saved me thousands of dollars in psychiatrist's fees." Coomes described the therapeutic values of Silly Putty while kneading it, bouncing it, rolling it, stretching it and lifting impressions of faces of newly engaged couples from newspaper pages; then distorting them to release her anger at a date who stood her up. The Columbus (Ohio) Zoo used it to make casts of the hands and feet of gorillas for educational purposes. Silly Putty can also be used to clean typewriter keys, plug leaks, remove lint from clothing and steady wobbly tables. The 6 million units produced last year are three times what was produced in 1987, says Binney & Smith Inc., the Crayola crayon people who have made Silly Putty for the past 18 years. A market survey in 1990 showed that 97 percent of American households recognize the name Silly Putty and that almost 70 percent of American households have purchased it at some time. In 1990, they added four fluorescent colors -- magenta, orange, green and yellow. In 1991, Glow in the Dark Silly Putty arrived. Most pieces, still packed in plastic eggs, are priced under $2. But Classic Silly Putty is still the best seller. The man who made it all possible was Hodgson. In 1949 he went to work in New Haven for an advertising agency, which folded in six months. Out of work and broke, this restless, energetic 37-year-old was searching for something to do when he met up with "gupp." Gupp also had no place to go. It had been discovered six years earlier by James Wright, an engineer in General Electric's New Haven laboratory. Seeking to develop a synthetic rubber, Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil and got bouncing putty. General Electric sent samples to engineers around the world but nobody could find anything practical to do with it. Hodgson discovered it in a New Haven toy shop, whose owner, Ruth Fallgatter, had gotten the gupp from a friend who was an engineer with GE. Hodgson suggested she make it a toy for adults, but she wasn't interested. "I'm a marketing man," he thought, so he decided to give the gupp a silly name and market it. Already $12,000 in debt, Hodgson borrowed $147 to buy a batch of the stuff. He and some part-time workers from Yale University, balled the putty up in 1-ounce portions and tucked into plastic eggs (Easter was coming. The price was about $1 apiece. Hodgson got Doubleday bookstores to take his product. But Silly Putty sales didn't really roll until August when it was mentioned in The New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town" section Aug. 26. Hodgson's phone rang for four days, and he had a quarter-million orders. He moved his production operation into a converted barn on Totoket Road in North Branford. In the next 17 years, the company expanded into Canada and West Germany, and annual sales reached $5 million. Silly Putty made Hodgson a very wealthy man. He and his wife, Margaret, lived in Madison in a mansion, with a tennis court and swimming pool, on 88 partially wooded acres overlooking Long Island Sound. Their place came to be known as the Silly Putty Estate. Hodgson died there at age 64 in 1976, leaving an estate of $140 million. John Lacy retired from The Courant after 35 years as a columnist and staff writer. Dow Corning 3179 Dilatant (Silicone Polymer) -- virtually nontoxic Toys, use 95% isopropyl alcohol for cleaning. Rebound 80% Plasticity .82 SG 1.14 Slump .5 inches ---------------- Now you can buy even Silly Putty in bulk and save. This is the real deal. The exact same stuff you find in the stores, not some homemade imitation. (no egg though, that you have to provide yourself!) $15 a pound, plus $3 shipping/packing for the first pound, $1 thereafter. ---------------- SILLY PUTTY. Silly Putty can be successfully approximated with Elmer's Glue instead of silicone oil. The recipe below makes a small, palm-sized ball: 1 fluid ounce of 50% Elmer's Glue solution (in water) 5 milliliters of 4% sodium tetraborate (Borax) solution (in water) a few drops of food coloring. Mix the food coloring with the Elmer's Glue solution. Add the 5ml Borax solution and stir for 2 minutes. Roll around the lump in your hands for two minutes, after which time it will cease to be sticky. Store the putty in a clean, covered container.