October 14, 2019 • 49 mins
Sometimes, all you have to do to avoid the brink of disaster is to pivot and turn your mistakes into opportunities. This episode is dedicated to three such stories.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and how Stuff Works. Invention doesn't always go
as planned. Sometimes you get unpredictable results, but rather than
stick to the original plan, a wise business owner might
cast about for a new strategy, and before you know it,
(00:26):
you've got a success on your hands. This is a
series of accidental inventions on Business on the Brink, Harry One.
(00:54):
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Arial Casting, And this episode
was sort of done as a whim whom Yeah, I
had been thinking about incidents where someone has come up
with an idea and they have an I you know,
they've got an actual implementation in mind for that idea,
(01:15):
but it turns out whatever that implementation was doesn't work out.
And in most cases, if that happened, you'd say, well,
that's a failed invention, that was a failed experiment. Yeah, exactly, like, well,
I gotta you know, you learn more from failure than
you do from success. Gotta try something else. But occasionally
people are able to take that failure or that miscalculation
(01:37):
and then reposition it to become a success. That became
the genesis for this episode. And there's some stuff I
mean there's a lot of things we could have covered.
We're only going to look at three specific products in
this episode. But one of the ones that was going
to mention that we don't cover in this episode, just
as an example, is the super Soaker. Water guns your
(02:00):
bmiliar with each Ye, yeah, we love these things. Uh.
They came out when I was still young enough to
be able to play with water guns without raising suspicions.
I mean, I still I still play with water guns,
I know, but you're also younger than I am by
a decade. So the super Soaker was actually invented by
a guy who was working on water pump for like
(02:22):
water heaters, and turned out and you figured out how
to use that for a water gun, and it became
a huge deal. That story is its own dramatic up
and down story that we may cover in a future episode.
But the the things we're covering here are smaller, Yeah,
smaller and smaller in size, but not necessarily smaller in success.
(02:46):
Although some you may say we're never made as big
a splash, so to speak, as a super Soker, but
they've been around longer. So yeah, we're gonna talk about
some creative ideas and creative individuals who were able to
take they that initially didn't go as planned and turned
them into successes. And the first on our list is
(03:07):
tall do do do do do do? Shake this and
see it, says a a'ser unclear. Ask again later what
could that mean? It means that you're holding an imaginary
eight ball, magic eight ball in your hands, Jonathan, Okay, yeah,
but your way to break the illusion. It's an audio podcast.
They never know. Yes, we're going to talk about the
magic eight ball. And one thing that I found very fascinating.
(03:31):
These were things that I just sort of looked around
and found a couple of these. It surprised me, and
the magic a ball was one of them. You think
the magic a ball is just kind of a fun
little diversion, right, Yeah, you know, a toy by people
who are inspired by Wegi boards and yeah, that kind
of thing. And Luigi board also is a toy, by
(03:51):
the way, it was created by a board game company.
But the eight ball has its history wrapped up with
the history of mysticism, of seances and and clairvoyance because
the inventor of the magic gate ball, or at least
a co inventor, was Al Carter and I call him
Al because and about half of the references about the
(04:15):
origins of the magic eight ball, his name is given
as Albert, and in the other half it's given as
Alfred and Albert. Yeah, so we're just calling him al
kind of like Chevy Chase and Paul Simon. All right,
But um, it says here that the first eight ball
that al created wasn't even a ball. No, it wasn't
(04:36):
a ball. It certainly wasn't an eight ball. Uh So
his mom worked as a clairvoyant and a mystic, so
essentially a medium or a fortune teller, and he was
inspired by this to create a device, a gimmick. You
might say, if you were a magician, you would call
it a gimmick, and it was a thing to use
sort of as a fortune telling device. And uh he
(05:01):
came up with this concept that he called the psycho
sear psycho is spelled s y c o. And this
would be in the nineteen forties. And this did not
look like a magic eight ball, although it it had
the same purpose. So it looked kind of like, um,
imagine a soda can, but it's taller than a soda can.
(05:21):
So like one of the new diet coke cans, sure,
and it's it's it's it's narrower than a standard coke can.
Right now, I'm calling it coke that you can tell
him from Atlanta, because all soft drinks become coke eventually.
But then the ends of the cylinder are clear, like
a little clear windows. So instead of a solid top
and a solid bottom, it's i mean still solid, but
(05:43):
now it's clear like acrylic. On the inside. He had
a very dark, syrupy liquid. A lot of sources say
it was essentially molasses. Uh. It was apparently divided in
the middle, so it's actually two containers um in one
form factor and the a eye on either one. Well,
because you could put smaller canisters on either end of
(06:03):
it and not have to fill the entire tube necessary. Yes,
and you had die with things written on the faces
of the die, very much like you would with a
magic eight ball, So you would ask yes or no questions,
Give a little bit of shake, turn it up so
that one of the windows is facing up. Wait for
one of those dye to slowly rise to the surface
(06:25):
of some thick old more lashes. If you break it,
you get a snack, that's true, a nice sweet tooth
there and then you get to read the message on
there and find the answer to your yes or no question.
Was one of his messages when he was designing this
Go talk and get a partner. Uh No, but that
is what he did, So it would have been a
very predictive message had that been the case. So yeah,
(06:49):
he decided that he couldn't just go out there with
this idea on his own. He didn't. He lacked the
resources to make it as a big product. It's going
to be kind of a common theme throughout all of
the stories we're telling in this episode. Yeah, and it's
something that you run into a lot when you're talking
about inventors. I mean, most of the time, the people
(07:09):
who are inventing something don't necessarily have access to, say,
a manufacturing facility, and that was the case here. So
depending upon the version of the story that you read,
uh he either went to his cousin Abe Bookman, or
(07:31):
his brother in law Abe Bookman, or he went to
a merchant named Max Levinson who had a brother in
law named Abe Bookman. I mean, I guess technically all
three could be correct. That's creepy. But he went to
a guy named Abe Bookman, who had graduated from essentially
(07:54):
an engineering school, that Ohio Mechanics Institute. And this was
with the hope that Bookman would help him come up
with a way to mass manufacture the psychos here. And
so the two of them went into business together and
they created their own company called a Labe Crafts. And
a Labe is a combination of the names Al and Abe.
(08:16):
That's very clever. Yes, So sometime in that early partnership,
al Carter passed away. Ironically, he didn't see it coming, Jonathan,
but it's a serious thing that I shouldn't joke about.
(08:37):
But I mean, yes, but time and comedy, you know. Alright. Anyhow,
so this wasn't the end of the magic eight ball
A Bookman continued on, Yes, exactly. So even though Carter
had he had patented this idea. UM. The name of
the pattern was really funny too, is like very If
(08:58):
you've ever read titles of patents, you see that they're
very technically describing whatever it is the invention does. They
don't give like a name like that. UM. Anyway, he
did patent it, and so Bookman still continued forward with
the design. He ended up making a shorter version of
the Psycho Sear. It was about half the height of
(09:19):
the original cylinder, still in cylinder. So it wasn't more
short sighted. Yeah, I mean it wasn't more longsighted. It
was just as sited, I guess, is what we can say.
But it was. It was about half the size of
the Psycho Sere and it only had one side of
the cylinder with a window in it. The other side
was solid, and it was called the Psycho slate instead
(09:43):
of the Psycho Sear. I wouldn't think of a slate
is something I could shake and get a fortune out of.
Well here's another interesting the fact that I didn't include
in our notes, But apparently al Carter when he was
first thinking about this, he was inspired by something his
mother is to do, which is that she would take
a slate, like a like a blackboard slate and some chalk,
(10:08):
and the slate would have nothing written on it, and
she would have the chalk and she would put it
out of sight, like in a container of some sort,
and she would have her clients ask a question and
then she would open up the container and the answer
would be written on the slate. Now here's the interesting
thing is that that's an old style stage magic trick.
It is. I've seen it on Penn and Teller. Yes,
(10:29):
Penn and Teller are famous for doing tricks very much
in this very same style. And the argument goes, and
this is a very solid argument, if there is a
non magical way to do it, chances are that's how
it was done, because why go through the trouble of
doing in a magical way, which is, as far as
we know, impossible when you can do it in ordinary
(10:51):
way exactly, But if you play it up with a
lot of theatrics, you can make it seem like it's mystical.
So he got the idea from his mom. So Psycho
sl eight in a way, is almost a throwback to
the original inspiration for this device. Now, Bookman was able
to make these in larger volume than the Psycho sear,
(11:14):
but it didn't exactly take off. I mean, obviously we
don't have it today. We have the magic eight ball. Yeah,
so how do we go from a slate to a ball?
So first it was Bookman saying, you know, these just
aren't going off store shelves. I guess there's not a
lot of mediums at large. But I would flip this
(11:35):
table if I know, and you've got your cup of waters.
So yes, there was. There was not a huge demand
for the psycho slate. So he thought, well, maybe I'll
change up the form factor a bit more and have
something that appeals to that same set of people. And
so he decided, I'll make a crystal ball version where
(11:57):
the cylinder is essentially nestled in the crystal ball. Um
it'll be a dark crystal ball, so it's not like
it's clear acrylic or something, and you'll still turn it
over to read the little message on the uh in
the window, the clear window that's in this crystal ball.
And so he started making those, and these also weren't
(12:18):
going like gangbusters, but they did get the attention of
a Chicago company called Brunswick Billiards. Billiards as in pool tables,
the capital P that rhymes with trouble. Yeah, that doesn't
rhyme with trouble, but it starts anyhow. So he must
have been the one who said, hey, let's take these
(12:39):
and turn them into billiard balls. Yeah, well the billiards
company did. They came up to book exactly. They came
out to book when they said we want to do
a promotional item Essentially, it was a giveaway and we
like this thing you've created. Can you make some that
look like eight balls from the game of pool? And
Bookman said, you bet you anyone about making eight ball
(13:03):
versions of this fortune Teller's crystal ball. And the giveaways
were incredibly popular. People loved the magic eight ball, and
people of free things, people also love free things. That
remains true to this very day. This, by the way,
is still happening in the like early fifties. At this point,
Bookman decides, after this agreement has concluded with Brunswick Billiards,
(13:28):
that he would continue making eight balls as a variation
of this crystal ball one that he had been making,
and he starts kind of giving up a little bit.
He starts selling them as paper weights because he can't
really think of like, people aren't buying them as much
as they were enjoying getting them. Yeah, they weren't. There
(13:50):
just wasn't a market of people who were like, I
want to consult the spirits of beyond, but I just
don't know how to get into that racket. So that's
when thought, hey, Amar, get these two kids. Kidcel fall
for anything pretty much. He saw that kids were playing
with these paperweights and really having a fun time with him,
and he thought, well, maybe that's just the Maybe that's
(14:11):
just it. It's not that the product is bad, I'm
marketing to the wrong audience exactly. And so he decides
he will market it as a toy, and he starts
to do that, and now it actually is starting to
take off. And again it was an unpredictable result. But
by nineteen one, Bookman was ready to retire from this business.
(14:34):
So he sold the company A labor Crafts, which had
been around for twenty years. Of that more than twenty years,
almost almost thirty years at that point, respectable sold it
to a company called the Ideal Toy Company. That's another
company we could do a full episode on. They mainly
were known for doing like doll type stuff. They were
very much in the dull biz. I think Betsy Wetsy
(14:57):
was one of their dolls. Yeah and uh. In nineteen
seventy one, the same year when Ideal Toy Company would
acquire a Lab Crafts that joined the New York Stock Exchange.
At the time, it was one of the largest toy
companies in the United States. Well, they also had toys
like the Rubik's Cube yep, they were the ones that
made the Rubik's Cube famous in the eighties, So that
(15:18):
was from the Ideal Toy company. But by the later
part of the eighties, mid to later part of the eighties,
the company was really starting to struggle that there was
a recession. Um there were some bad business decisions that
led to some financial troubles for Ideal Toy and so
uh CBS Toys, which was a subsidiary of CBS. YEP.
(15:40):
CBS the Broadcasting Company ended up purchasing Ideal Toy and
Magic a Ball went along with it in nineteen two
for fifty eight million dollars. So now Ideal Toy becomes
part of CBS Toys. But that would only last for
a little while because CBS would then sell Ideal Toy
to another company called view Master International. You remember, you
(16:02):
know a Master. I owned a view Masks. Okay, I
didn't know. So v Master are those ones that look
kind of like binoculars. You put in a disc that
has different photographs in it. It has the stereo vision
kind of lenses, so it gives you that sort of
three D yeah, and you just click through and it's
like a slide and then if you click halfway, then
you just try to get these really weird images. Yeah. Anyhow,
(16:24):
so yeah, that becomes the view Master Ideal company. Uh
rolls around. Then you get Tycho Toys, which announces that
it would acquire view Master Ideal for about forty four
million dollars, less than the last acquisition, but not that
not bad. And it also meant that the Magic eight
(16:46):
Ball would go to Tycho Toys, which was famous for
other types of toys like the easy Bake oven, so
very very popular or tasty bake oven, I should say
not easy bake. They did not start putting the lasses
back into the eight balls, no know. At this point
it was rubbing alcohol with blue dye. That was the liquid.
But they weren't done yet. Mattel, another giant in the
(17:10):
toy industry, swoops in to acquire Tycho for seven hundred
fifty five million dollars. Well, I mean, Tycho is a
bigger company. They had a lot more toys exactly. Tycho
was huge. Now that meant that the Magic eate Ball
went with Mattel, and along that whole process, the Magic
(17:31):
eight Ball continued to be a product sold on the market.
So even though ownership was changing hands, multiple times. The
product itself continued to do pretty well. It was you know,
it wasn't like it was flying off store shelves in
particular years, but it was a steady seller. I mean,
about two thousand twelve they had sold a million of
them a year. A million a year's a lot. That's
(17:54):
pretty decent. And uh. Now these days you can find
magic eight balls in all sorts of size, from the
regular size, which is definitely larger than an actual billiard ball,
two key chain versions. You can find a bunch of
them that are licensed. I've got a Simpsons one which
has Simpsons phrases in there, like dough instead of no um.
(18:16):
So there are definitely variations on the magic eight ball. Uh,
and it's interesting. So I have the notes here, so
I'm gonna ask you arial the questions and you can
tell people what the answers are. How many sides does
the die inside of magic eight ball have? Yes? So
(18:38):
it's essentially like a Dungeons and Dragons. A bookman must
have been a secret Dungeons and Dragons. No, No, it's
just so that they could have a lot of sides
with the answer yes, ten of them, a lot with no.
Five of them, and then five more that said maybe yes,
So you weren't just shaking like, well, you can't have
a three sided dice. No, no, The best you could
(19:00):
do is the's a coin. This way it made your
chances more random, right, well, and also meant that you
were twice as likely to get a yes as you
were a no, maybe or a maybe. And Uh, it's
funny because I was looking at a statistic site and
it said, statistically speaking, you would need to ask seventy
two questions at least to see all twenty possible answers
(19:24):
just based on probability, that would be the bare minimum
you would need to to do. Uh, based on probability alone.
Now it is entirely possible to ask twenty questions and
then get each answer in sequence. It's just not likely
to happen. So you've got a note here says well,
that happen every seventy two times. Ask again later, Ask
again later. Now you don't have one here that they have.
(19:47):
Ask again later. That's true unless it's a maybe. That's
that's a maybe. It's it's on there kind of like
answer unclear, Ask again later, that's a maybe. Uh, so
it's it's not an outright yes or no and uh
yeah again, like the licensed versions have different variations for
positive and negative. But yeah, that's to me, that's an
(20:08):
interesting story about an item that originally was marketed more
seriously if you can, if you can, think of it
that way, or at least more earnestly as a fortune
telling device, and then ultimately became a novelty slash toy.
And that's where it found its success. I'm very excited
to get into our next story. But first, let's take
(20:30):
a quick break aerial. Yeah, let's let's talk about rubber
for a minute. It's pretty useful, it is. It's incredibly
useful stuff. I mean, it's so here's the stuff about
rubber that makes it useful, right, It's really resilient, It
resists damage pretty well. It's waterproof material, it's stretchy, it's flexible. Uh.
(20:54):
It is used in tons of stuff, including and this
is important, stuff like wires and boots. But you know
it's not easy to get rubber, right, not not natural rubber. No, no,
not natural rubber because it comes out of trees and
and specifically trees that largely are in Asia. Yes, so
(21:14):
like largely a specific region and to get it, you
have to like cut into the tree and collect sap
like you're getting maple syrup, and and that has latex
in it, and then you're trying to in them that
makes rubber. Yes, So it's a whole process. And then
you have to of course ship it from wherever you're
you're harvesting it to wherever you wanted to go to
use in whatever materials. So rubber. Everyone recognized that rubber
(21:39):
was useful stuff, but it was just it was hard
to get a lot of it at once. So starting
even as early as the eighteen hundreds, you had scientists
who are saying, this is definitely useful, but we need
to figure out a different way to make it, and
so people started to work on formulas to create synthetic rubber. Okay,
but you know, I don't want to start in the
eighteen hundred, skip ahead, Jonathan. Okay, all right, well how
(22:00):
about World War two? That better, because that's that's going
to get to the beginning of where we're going to hear.
World War two. Obviously, the U. S. Military has a
huge need for rubber for stuff like tires and boots,
like I had mentioned a second ago, And on top
of that. In World War Two, one of the powers
that the unit United States was up against was Japan,
(22:20):
which had already attacked or was threatening regions where natural
rubber was coming from. So there was a clear need
to develop synthetic rubber, and only that it needed to
be synthetic rubber that came from materials that were easy
to get to in wartime. So that meant that the
US had to say, who out there can help us
(22:40):
do this stuff? So who did well? There are a
couple of different versions of this story. There was actually
a lot of people working on this problem, and at
least two different groups came up with a similar possible
solution that ended up not being a solution to the
synthetic rubber problem spoiler alert. One of that one of
those groups rather was Earl Warwick and Rob Roy McGregor,
(23:04):
who worked at Corning glass Works, and they took borick,
ox side and silicone oil, mixed it together and they
found that it made this stretchy, bouncy material stuff which
they filed for a pattern in the early forties and
they got the pattern in ninete The other version has
a guy named James Wright, who was an engineer at
General electric. This is the version of the story that
(23:26):
most people tell for the material we're about to cover. Yeah,
it is more fun. He got the assignment to try
and create cheap synthetic rubber, and he dropped some silicone
oil in boric acid, so very similar. He got that
same sort of gooey substance. Discovered that it had some
interesting properties. It bounced. You could, you know, roll it
(23:49):
into a ball and bounce it against the ground. Uh,
if you hit it hard enough it would shatter. You
could stretch it. Uh, you could even press it against
newsprint and pick the newsprint up off the paper. But
you know what, you can't do that replace rubber. Yeah yeah, yeah,
So because you can't use it for as a replacement
(24:12):
for rubber, the military was not interested in it. Yeah,
they said, uh, thanks, but we need something that will
work entires, and this wouldn't even if the only thing
we were driving across was newspaper. So no, thank you.
So at that stage, again, you could say, well shucks,
that didn't work out and you could move on, or
(24:34):
you could try and do what Right tried to do,
which was to market it as a commercial product. I
mean he was having fun with it. Yeah, he found
a whole bunch of interesting things you could do with it.
My favorite is the shattering it. My favorite is picking
up newsprint because I used to do it to use.
I used to do that to comic strips. And when
he tried to market it commercially, he called it nutty putty.
(24:58):
But obviously, you guys i'll there have figured out what
this substance must have been, and nutty putty is not
what we call it. But so we'll skip ahead again.
There are a couple of different conflicting stories about what
weapons next. No big surprise, We've already got these branching
narratives that have happened. But in one version, you have
a guy named Peter Hodgson who was at a party
(25:20):
in nineteen nine, and he was an admin worked in
the magazine trade and catalogs and stuff like that, and
according to some stories, he was out of work at
that time, and the main entertainment at that party was
people playing with Right's nutty putty, which sounds way worse
when I say it out loud, and it did when
(25:41):
I wrote it down. It definitely sounds worse orally than
on the page. Yes, I think we can agree it
sounds worse orally. Anyhow, he saw that people who are
really amused with this putty, and he was like, hey,
this could be a successful toy. Yeah, And he ended
up deciding that he could use his marketing skill coupled
with this amazing stuff and that would be the key
(26:05):
to success. Now. The other version of this story says
Hodgson was actually working on a catalog for a toy
store that was owned by a woman named Ruth fall Gather,
and they found out about the putty when Hodgson was
visiting a Harvard physicist who had some of the stuff.
There's another version that says both Hodgson and fall Gather
(26:25):
were at that same party where people were passing stuff around.
It's hard to say who is telling the most accurate
story here, but no matter what, they decided to go
to ge and to get the production rights to make
this stuff. Uh and Gee said, sure, we don't know
(26:45):
what to do with it, go ahead. Yeah. They had
no use for it. So Hodgson got the rights to
Nutty putty and he started making it and he would
sell it for two dollars per unit or glow bob
or wad of the stuff. Yeah, and uh, and it
(27:06):
sold really well inside fall Gathers catalog. She she marketed
it in the catalog for her twist. Yeah, it's so
better than everything but crayons. Yes, there was a box
of crayons for fifty cents. That was the top seller,
and the second top seller was this nutty putty stuff.
But then fall Gatter decided to stop selling it. Yeah.
I don't don't know why if it was selling so well.
(27:27):
She didn't have the putty passion. Just what we say
in the business, I see, I follow you. She was.
She felt petty about the putty all right. Anyhow, Hodgson
took out a loan and bought a big batch of
the stuff and rebranded it a silly putty. Yes, yes,
And that as when another idea occurred to him because
at the time where he was launching this secondary attack here, uh,
(27:51):
the launch date was really close to Easter, and that's
what we thought. Hey, you know what, I could package
this stuff in chocolate Easter bunnies might have been his
first thought, but he did not go with that one.
He thought plastic eggs, and that's where the silly putty
in a plastic egg package comes from. And he started
selling it for a dollar per egg. And what really
(28:15):
helped him was not the fact that folks were finding
it so fascinating, but rather a certain magazine published a
short passage about the stuff, and that got it into
the public consciousness. That magazine was The New Yorker. That's impressive. Yeah,
I mean, like it's it's known for two things, launching
(28:37):
silly putty and cartoons that nobody's really sure if they're
funny or not. Yeah, but you can use your silly
play to pull those cartoons right off the New Yorker,
you'd be fine. So if you look at it twice,
maybe you can figure out how twice and backwards. Yeah.
So then Hodgson ends up making television commercials for it.
Some of the earliest TV commercials aimed at children were
(29:00):
for silly Putty. The earliest was for a different toy.
Do you know which toy it was? Mr? Potato Head? Yes?
Do you know what Mr potato Head was like when
it first launched? Uh, it was a real potato. You
supplied the potato and all you got were the like
the lips and the eyes and the feet, and you
shoved into a potato and then you bake it and
then you eat the melted plastic cover potato and then
(29:21):
you lose a customer for life because to the young,
death is what it would be, because you would just
become a potato zombie. Yeah. So his commercials aired during
Captain Kangaroo and How Do You Duty? And like that exactly.
There were specifically geared two shows that kids were watching,
so the kids would see the commercials for Silly Putty
and then say, Mommy, Daddy, buy me that. And it worked.
(29:44):
By the time that Hodgson passed away in nineteen seventy six,
his estate was worth more than a hundred forty million dollars.
Not bad for a guy who was apparently out of
work when he first got the idea. When he when
he's made this stuff the first time, like for Syria,
he had to take out a loan of a hundred
fifty dollars because he didn't have enough money to start
(30:05):
up the production costs. That's a really good return on investment. Yes,
a hundred fifty dollar loan leading to a hundred forty
million dollars state not bad. Yeah. In nineteen seventy seven,
a company called Binny and Smith, which also owned Crayola
Crayons purchased the rights to Silly Putty, and Benny and
(30:26):
Smith still own those rights, although the company changed its
name officially to Crayola Llc. In two thousand seven. It's
nice that the two top sellers in Fall Gathers catalog
can be together once again. Yes, reunited, and it feels
so good. And uh, today you can still buy silly putty.
You can actually buy lots of different variations of silly putty,
(30:47):
including one that I wish didn't exist. Which one was that?
Are you gonna make me say it? Yeah? It's a
poop putty with like fake corn colonels. Yeah, it's called
ugly putty poop version, which to me is a terrible, terrible,
terrible misnaming because you know what I would have called it, No,
(31:09):
silly potty putty. Oh that's that is more clever. You
know what. I understand that you found that painful, painful
item and you share it with me. I didn't just
share it with her, folks, I sent her a picture
of the product. But I'm going to move on. So
silly Putty does actually have some practical uses, oddly enough,
(31:31):
discovered after it was already marketed as a toy. So
what are some of those practical uses. Well, you can
use it to remove lint. Yes, that's actually true. People
have used it as a lint remover on clothing. That's true. Um,
you've ever been to, say, a restaurant, and you sit
down at the table and it's one of those irritating
tables that has one leg slightly the wrong length all
(31:55):
the time. I'm like the irritating table magnet. Yeah, so
there are people who have you still putty to essentially
just you know, wedge some silly putty underneath the wobbly
leg to stabilize the table. Practical use just just keep
a wad in your back pocket and bring it with
you to all restaurants. And then it's also used someplace
I have never been, which is in space. Yes, I
(32:15):
also have never been to space. I was so amused
to hear about this. Yes, people astronauts and space have
used silly putty in order to secure tools to a
particular spot inside the spacecraft. Otherwise they tend to float off.
So if you're working with tools on something in space
and you wanted to be where it was when you
(32:37):
dropped it, you stick it against the wall with some
silly putty because you can just peel the silly putty
off when you're done. So yeah, it actually has that
practical use too. Now granted I would argue that's a
very limited use case scenario. It is, it is. Uh,
this was a really great story. Uh we're going to
talk about something else that was also kind of sticky,
(32:57):
not and not the Pooh putty, And this will be
one that air Old takes the lead on because she
did all the research for it. But we'll talk about
that in just a second. Alright, so we just talked
about rubber, So let's talk about some string. Okay, what
kind of string? Silly string? Silly string? Ariel, did you
(33:20):
know when I first applied to work at How Stuff Works,
one of the articles I got to read early on
before it published was how Silly String Works, written by
Tracy Wilson. I didn't know that, but I did read
that article, and you know Tracy and I know Tracy. Yeah,
so we both are friends with Tracy, and uh that
(33:42):
was It's funny because this takes me back to the
my first year two thousand and seven with How Stuff Works.
So let's talk about silly string. Where does this come from?
All right, So silly string was being developed in Nino,
and it was being developed by Leonard Fish who was
an inventor, and Rob Cox, who was a chemist. And
(34:02):
like our last two stories, they weren't developing a children's toy.
They were trying to create a spray on cast that
would harden in seconds. Okay, so this is like medic
So you've broken you've broken your arm, You're in some
remote location, uh, you may not be anywhere close to
(34:23):
medical help, and this would be a way to stabilize
a broken limb until you can actually get more qualified help.
Exactly exactly. The technical patent for it was foamable resinous Composition.
I'm pretty sure I wrote a few of those when
I was in college. I'd believe it. And the reason
that is is because silly string starts as a liquid
(34:45):
plastic which is made of a little acrylog resin, a
little surficant, which is what kind of makes it sticky.
It makes it it's the same thing that makes your
detergent sticky. Yeah, and a lot of propellant obviously to
push out of the can. Yeah, which originally was free
on twelve it's been replaced since then because it has
(35:05):
been deemed environmentally unsounded, affects the ozone layer. That's one
of those chloral flora carbons that we heard about all
the time in the late eighties. Yes, and so when
you push it out the can, it turns into attack
e string like substance. Now, when you say tacky, you
mean sticky, sticky, not like well, I mean some people
would say that silly string is also, but that wasn't
(35:26):
how it was intended. I mean you'll be like, oh,
look at that cast you're wearing. It's not so tacky. Yeah,
not in the beginning. Anyhow, A little fun fact I
want to put it in hair, just because we're talking
about how silly string is created. It takes less force
to pull the string off a wall than it does
to pull the string apart. So it's so it's stickiness
(35:47):
is less strong than it's tensile string. Yes, you think, well,
this is this is a foam that comes out of
a can, but it's as actually sticky plastic string. Interesting. Okay,
So they created this compound, and then they had to
figure out the best way to distribute it. Since it's
coming out of a can, they need a nozzle. Okay,
So yes. So now they're looking at the practical implementation
(36:09):
of this stuff, and they tried a bunch of nozzles,
and they tested their prototype a ton of times. And
I'm in the wrong job, and i want a job
where I'm testing nozzles, different nozzle designs. I'd imagine it
would get boring after a while, maybe, but that first
day has got to be fun. Anyhow. The nozzle they
(36:30):
landed on, they landed on because it reliably shot the
foam thirty ft across the room in a consistent straight
When your friend has broken their leg and you don't
want to be anywhere near them, like maybe they're covered
in ants, probably because ants would gets stuck inside the
phone cast. That's a bad day. Okay, yeah, yeah, but
you don't want to you don't want to get more
(36:50):
involved than you have to be in that kind of thing.
But here's the thing, Okay, Okay, So Fish looked at
this and he went, well, that was really fun. Uh,
maybe maybe this shouldn't be a medical thing. Maybe it
should be a toy. Because so the idea of being
like this might not have the practical application we were
hoping for when we first set out to do this. Yeah,
(37:12):
they realized they couldn't make a lot of headway in
the medical industry, which is a really I wonder if
they were already doubting their their concept from the early
get go. I would imagine that by the by trying
to apply this stuff in a way that could have
enough surface coverage to be a cast would be a challenge. Well,
(37:33):
especially you'd have to turn the limb to get it
all the way around, or maybe you could spray it
on one side like a splint and then yeah, but
but it wasn't like it was going on like a
mist where you could get a lot because if it's
like a thin spray, then it's almost like you're drawing
with a pencil, right, You have to line after line
after line after line. I mean, if you if you
spray silly string, it comes out and continue as strings.
(37:54):
So you could just get a giant globs. You could
get a giant clo anyhow. So he course, they core
corrected before it even hit market, and Fish, knowing that
he wasn't really a toy mogul, said I'm gonna find
a toy company to help me with this. Ah perfect,
So there he again kind of like al Carter who said,
(38:14):
I don't know how to manufacture on the mass scale.
I'm going to need to find someone to bring in
same sort of approach. Yes, so Fish went to Whemoeoemo.
WAMO is a huge toy manufacturer. Uh. They sold things
like hula hoops, frisbee, slipping slides, all kinds of stuff,
(38:34):
and that same year they issued the pattern for silly string.
But it wasn't just a walk in. Here's our product. Cool,
we love it, let's do it. Okay, So how did
it actually go down? All right? So Fishing Cox decided
the best way to demo the product was to meet
with a toy executive at WAMMO and then to spray
an entire can of this string in the executive's office
(39:00):
to demonstrate it. And the executive was really angry and
had them escorted off the premise. Wow, this actually reminds
me of another story that I'll tell you off microphone,
because it doesn't have anything to do with this episode.
And I'm already tangent man, so let's let's keep on going.
So all right, so it sounds to me like it
was a nonstarter. Then, because the executive is upset, they
(39:22):
get escored off the premises, They're like, don't come back.
So how did things turn around? Well, some other people
went into the office after this executive tried to clean up.
There was still some The story goes, there are still
some silly string hanging off of his lamp and they
saw it and they said, what is this stuff? This
stuff looks like a lot of fun. So the next day,
(39:42):
after all this happened, uh fishing Cox got a request,
got a message for that. They Remma wanted twenty four
cans of the stuff for basically R and D testing,
and then two weeks later the contract was signed. Awesome,
So I see you've got some interesting, like an interesting
(40:03):
fact here about silly string, at least the claim about
a can. So tell everybody how much silly string is
in a can of silly string, according to wammo. According
to wammo, a quarter of a mile of silly string
isn't a can of silly string, which is impressive considering
most of the can is just propellant. Yes. Yeah, it
also makes me think that, you know, if you need
(40:24):
a quarter of a mile of stuff in order to
set your arm, you really do need to seek medical help. Yeah,
I agree. Also, don't use silly string to do that,
it won't work and it might burn your skin. Well
before before, before they sold it to as a toy,
they did adjust the formula so it was less sticky
and less Yeah, it would stick and it wouldn't be
(40:45):
as as it wouldn't harden the same way that the
stuff originally was meant to. I mean, there there's still
some dangerous with it, and we'll get into that in
a little bit. But first, uh, while we should do
an episode on Wammo at some point, because they've also
gone through a lot as a company. I'm just going
to run through some of the changing of hands that
happened with WAMO. So inwo the owners of Wammo retired
(41:11):
and they sold the company to Krantzco. And then Kransco
then sold Wamo to Mattel in everything they do like
silly putty. Was it s like magic eate ball? Yes,
all right. So then Mattel does some restructuring of the company,
including creating a new Wammo, and they put a bunch
(41:33):
of the products into the new Weamo company, and then
they sent some of the products elsewhere and one of
those products was silly string. Sometime between and two thousand one. Yeah,
we love it when we can't nail things down with
our sources. Yeah, WAMO gave the rights for silly String
to Julius Salmon and the car Freshener Corporation Okay, yeah,
(41:56):
who then made and distributed silly string through their toy division,
Chef for Kicks. So wait a minute, there's a car
Freshener Corporation that has a toy division. Yes, okay, but okay,
so there's conflicting reports. So some say that car Freshener
bought Just for Kicks in seven and Just for Kicks
was already making silly string. Other reports say that WEIMO
(42:16):
gave the car Freshener Corporation the patent in or and
then the official Silly String website says they've been manufacturing
millions and millions of cans out of their manufacturing facility
in de Witt, Iowa since two thousand one. It's hard
to pinpoint because Just for Kicks doesn't have their own
website and isn't even mentioned on the Little trees dot
(42:38):
com website, which is the car air fresheners that Car
Freshener Corporation make. Okay, yeah, but so what we're hearing
is there's a shadow organization making silly string. But we
do know that car Freshener Organization. Sorry, car Freshener Corporation
is the parent company that currently owns silly string. It
(42:59):
is on the Silly String website, all right. So in
two thousand six, a few American companies got in trouble
for selling imported silly string, mainly coming out of China.
So these are are knockoff products, especially because they had
propellants that had been banned, So they got confiscated and
destroyed in a way that wouldn't hurt the environment, right,
(43:24):
just thrown into a basement with a bunch of board kids. Yeah,
now that's so mean. It took me a second, that's
I know, because you thought Jonathan just added something material
to this podcast, and then you all know he did not.
I mean, I really do listen to your comments, Jonathan,
they just don't sink in until about later. I'm like,
(43:45):
I'm like a protosaurus. It takes a while for to
get to my brain. Um. Anyhow, despite the fact that
American silly string doesn't have a lot of these dangerous,
dangerous propellants, it is still dangerous. Some of the other
propellants to use other than free on twelve can do
things like catch on fire, or can get too cold
(44:06):
and freeze your skin. Yeah. So, even even allowable cans
of silly string have warnings on them. But they also
are a banned in certain cities for being otherwise environmentally unsound.
They're hard to clean up, they can clog storm drains,
they could be used by jerk wads, Yeah to totally
(44:27):
like vandalize a property. They can go into the ocean.
They don't break down quickly. Again, vandals, I'm guessing that
might be a real big reason behind it. Like it's
hard to clean up. You don't want silly string stuck
to your street forever. But no. One of the things
I think is really interesting here is that you have
a note that silly string has found practical uses in
(44:49):
some very serious applications. Like you wouldn't think of it
with the name silly string, but it's been used to
help military operations. Yeah so, like so, like silly putty,
this does have practical applications. Uh, some stories say as
early as the Vietnam War. We're not exactly sure when
silly string became a thing to use, but apparently people
(45:15):
have been using it for a while. They in the military.
People spray it in areas where they think there might
be trip wires or booby traps or bombs because the
string is sturdy enough to not break when it hits
the wire, so that drapes across and it shows you
where the wire is, Yes, but it's not heavy enough
to actually trip the wire. And in this really made
(45:35):
really big news in two thousand and six two thousand
seven because there was a young soldier who wrote to
his mom for a couple of cans of silly string,
and when she found out what he needed them for,
she's like, I'm going to send him a whole bunch
of cans of silly string. Uh. And then she couldn't
send them because the US Post has restrictions on sending materials.
(45:57):
Yeah yeah, in the mail. And so they ended up
with a stockpile of eighty thousand cans in New Jersey. Wow. Yeah.
And some some were donated by Just for Kicks, the
company that makes it. Yes, Eventually they did find somebody
who could ship them to Iraq, where this soldier was.
So silly string is still around the companies that technically
(46:19):
is distributing making it now is Silly String Products, but
that's part of the car Preessional Corporation. Yes, and they're
based of Waterton, New York. I don't like that. And
they're based out of Waterton, New York. Well it's uh
so that is also a story that I like, I
had read about how it works, but I hadn't really
read too much into the history of it. So this
(46:41):
is all really fascinating to me. And again it shows
how people can take lemons and make lemonade on a
big business scale. And if your lemonade doesn't sell, maybe
you sell it as a skin cleanser to a child
or maybe as mace who knows. But yeah, now this
was this was cool because I think the lessons when
(47:03):
you say lessons learn, Like the lesson here is you
don't necessarily just accept failure as failure. You look and
to see where opportunities are. Now those opportunities may just
be learned from your mistakes so that you don't repeat them.
There are certainly times you need to move on, yeah,
and then there are other times where you're where you
may think, well, I set out to go for goal A,
(47:24):
this did not achieve goal A. But it may turn
out that this could be a stepping stone to goal B,
which is equally valid, and I can still go after
goal A later on if I want to. But if
I use this, I can actually use it as a
way to earn revenue as opposed to it just being
a total loss. And again, obviously that's not applicable in
(47:46):
every situation, but it does remind us to to reevaluate
when we fail, and to say, first of all, this
isn't the end of the world. Second of all, what
can we learn from this? Is there anything that we
can salvage for this or even just apply this to
the next attempt. So I think that that is a
really fun way to do it. Like we we pick
(48:07):
three sort of light and uh and silly silly was
in the name of two of the different products. I'm
gonna start calling it a silly magic gate ball, now
a silly meant just so we can have a nice,
nice collective there. But yes, this was a lot of fun.
And now we'll probably occasionally do a little one off
episodes like this where we step outside of our normal
(48:32):
profile of a specific business at a specific time, but
we'll be going back to that that tried and true formula,
because that is what the show is is mainly about.
But yes, if you have any ideas for things similar
to this that you would like for a very silly
episode of Business on the Brink or an't even not
silly but just outside of our norm, you should send
(48:52):
us an email. Where can they do that aerial well, Jonathan,
they can do that at feedback at the Brink Podcast
dot Show. That's and you can also visit our website
that's also the Brink Podcast dot Show, where you will
find an archive of all of our past episodes and
information about your lovable hosts such as me I have
been Jonathan Strickland and me I've been aerial casting. Bye.
(49:19):
Business on the Brink is a production of I Heart
Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Business on the Brink, a production from I
Heart Radio and how Stuff Works. Invention doesn't always go
as planned. Sometimes you get unpredictable results, but rather than
stick to the original plan, a wise business owner might
cast about for a new strategy, and before you know it,
(00:26):
you've got a success on your hands. This is a
series of accidental inventions on Business on the Brink, Harry One.
(00:54):
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Arial Casting, And this episode
was sort of done as a whim whom Yeah, I
had been thinking about incidents where someone has come up
with an idea and they have an I you know,
they've got an actual implementation in mind for that idea,
(01:15):
but it turns out whatever that implementation was doesn't work out.
And in most cases, if that happened, you'd say, well,
that's a failed invention, that was a failed experiment. Yeah, exactly, like, well,
I gotta you know, you learn more from failure than
you do from success. Gotta try something else. But occasionally
people are able to take that failure or that miscalculation
(01:37):
and then reposition it to become a success. That became
the genesis for this episode. And there's some stuff I
mean there's a lot of things we could have covered.
We're only going to look at three specific products in
this episode. But one of the ones that was going
to mention that we don't cover in this episode, just
as an example, is the super Soaker. Water guns your
(02:00):
bmiliar with each Ye, yeah, we love these things. Uh.
They came out when I was still young enough to
be able to play with water guns without raising suspicions.
I mean, I still I still play with water guns,
I know, but you're also younger than I am by
a decade. So the super Soaker was actually invented by
a guy who was working on water pump for like
(02:22):
water heaters, and turned out and you figured out how
to use that for a water gun, and it became
a huge deal. That story is its own dramatic up
and down story that we may cover in a future episode.
But the the things we're covering here are smaller, Yeah,
smaller and smaller in size, but not necessarily smaller in success.
(02:46):
Although some you may say we're never made as big
a splash, so to speak, as a super Soker, but
they've been around longer. So yeah, we're gonna talk about
some creative ideas and creative individuals who were able to
take they that initially didn't go as planned and turned
them into successes. And the first on our list is
(03:07):
tall do do do do do do? Shake this and
see it, says a a'ser unclear. Ask again later what
could that mean? It means that you're holding an imaginary
eight ball, magic eight ball in your hands, Jonathan, Okay, yeah,
but your way to break the illusion. It's an audio podcast.
They never know. Yes, we're going to talk about the
magic eight ball. And one thing that I found very fascinating.
(03:31):
These were things that I just sort of looked around
and found a couple of these. It surprised me, and
the magic a ball was one of them. You think
the magic a ball is just kind of a fun
little diversion, right, Yeah, you know, a toy by people
who are inspired by Wegi boards and yeah, that kind
of thing. And Luigi board also is a toy, by
(03:51):
the way, it was created by a board game company.
But the eight ball has its history wrapped up with
the history of mysticism, of seances and and clairvoyance because
the inventor of the magic gate ball, or at least
a co inventor, was Al Carter and I call him
Al because and about half of the references about the
(04:15):
origins of the magic eight ball, his name is given
as Albert, and in the other half it's given as
Alfred and Albert. Yeah, so we're just calling him al
kind of like Chevy Chase and Paul Simon. All right,
But um, it says here that the first eight ball
that al created wasn't even a ball. No, it wasn't
(04:36):
a ball. It certainly wasn't an eight ball. Uh So
his mom worked as a clairvoyant and a mystic, so
essentially a medium or a fortune teller, and he was
inspired by this to create a device, a gimmick. You
might say, if you were a magician, you would call
it a gimmick, and it was a thing to use
sort of as a fortune telling device. And uh he
(05:01):
came up with this concept that he called the psycho
sear psycho is spelled s y c o. And this
would be in the nineteen forties. And this did not
look like a magic eight ball, although it it had
the same purpose. So it looked kind of like, um,
imagine a soda can, but it's taller than a soda can.
(05:21):
So like one of the new diet coke cans, sure,
and it's it's it's it's narrower than a standard coke can.
Right now, I'm calling it coke that you can tell
him from Atlanta, because all soft drinks become coke eventually.
But then the ends of the cylinder are clear, like
a little clear windows. So instead of a solid top
and a solid bottom, it's i mean still solid, but
(05:43):
now it's clear like acrylic. On the inside. He had
a very dark, syrupy liquid. A lot of sources say
it was essentially molasses. Uh. It was apparently divided in
the middle, so it's actually two containers um in one
form factor and the a eye on either one. Well,
because you could put smaller canisters on either end of
(06:03):
it and not have to fill the entire tube necessary. Yes,
and you had die with things written on the faces
of the die, very much like you would with a
magic eight ball, So you would ask yes or no questions,
Give a little bit of shake, turn it up so
that one of the windows is facing up. Wait for
one of those dye to slowly rise to the surface
(06:25):
of some thick old more lashes. If you break it,
you get a snack, that's true, a nice sweet tooth
there and then you get to read the message on
there and find the answer to your yes or no question.
Was one of his messages when he was designing this
Go talk and get a partner. Uh No, but that
is what he did, So it would have been a
very predictive message had that been the case. So yeah,
(06:49):
he decided that he couldn't just go out there with
this idea on his own. He didn't. He lacked the
resources to make it as a big product. It's going
to be kind of a common theme throughout all of
the stories we're telling in this episode. Yeah, and it's
something that you run into a lot when you're talking
about inventors. I mean, most of the time, the people
(07:09):
who are inventing something don't necessarily have access to, say,
a manufacturing facility, and that was the case here. So
depending upon the version of the story that you read,
uh he either went to his cousin Abe Bookman, or
(07:31):
his brother in law Abe Bookman, or he went to
a merchant named Max Levinson who had a brother in
law named Abe Bookman. I mean, I guess technically all
three could be correct. That's creepy. But he went to
a guy named Abe Bookman, who had graduated from essentially
(07:54):
an engineering school, that Ohio Mechanics Institute. And this was
with the hope that Bookman would help him come up
with a way to mass manufacture the psychos here. And
so the two of them went into business together and
they created their own company called a Labe Crafts. And
a Labe is a combination of the names Al and Abe.
(08:16):
That's very clever. Yes, So sometime in that early partnership,
al Carter passed away. Ironically, he didn't see it coming, Jonathan,
but it's a serious thing that I shouldn't joke about.
(08:37):
But I mean, yes, but time and comedy, you know. Alright. Anyhow,
so this wasn't the end of the magic eight ball
A Bookman continued on, Yes, exactly. So even though Carter
had he had patented this idea. UM. The name of
the pattern was really funny too, is like very If
(08:58):
you've ever read titles of patents, you see that they're
very technically describing whatever it is the invention does. They
don't give like a name like that. UM. Anyway, he
did patent it, and so Bookman still continued forward with
the design. He ended up making a shorter version of
the Psycho Sear. It was about half the height of
(09:19):
the original cylinder, still in cylinder. So it wasn't more
short sighted. Yeah, I mean it wasn't more longsighted. It
was just as sited, I guess, is what we can say.
But it was. It was about half the size of
the Psycho Sere and it only had one side of
the cylinder with a window in it. The other side
was solid, and it was called the Psycho slate instead
(09:43):
of the Psycho Sear. I wouldn't think of a slate
is something I could shake and get a fortune out of.
Well here's another interesting the fact that I didn't include
in our notes, But apparently al Carter when he was
first thinking about this, he was inspired by something his
mother is to do, which is that she would take
a slate, like a like a blackboard slate and some chalk,
(10:08):
and the slate would have nothing written on it, and
she would have the chalk and she would put it
out of sight, like in a container of some sort,
and she would have her clients ask a question and
then she would open up the container and the answer
would be written on the slate. Now here's the interesting
thing is that that's an old style stage magic trick.
It is. I've seen it on Penn and Teller. Yes,
(10:29):
Penn and Teller are famous for doing tricks very much
in this very same style. And the argument goes, and
this is a very solid argument, if there is a
non magical way to do it, chances are that's how
it was done, because why go through the trouble of
doing in a magical way, which is, as far as
we know, impossible when you can do it in ordinary
(10:51):
way exactly, But if you play it up with a
lot of theatrics, you can make it seem like it's mystical.
So he got the idea from his mom. So Psycho
sl eight in a way, is almost a throwback to
the original inspiration for this device. Now, Bookman was able
to make these in larger volume than the Psycho sear,
(11:14):
but it didn't exactly take off. I mean, obviously we
don't have it today. We have the magic eight ball. Yeah,
so how do we go from a slate to a ball?
So first it was Bookman saying, you know, these just
aren't going off store shelves. I guess there's not a
lot of mediums at large. But I would flip this
(11:35):
table if I know, and you've got your cup of waters.
So yes, there was. There was not a huge demand
for the psycho slate. So he thought, well, maybe I'll
change up the form factor a bit more and have
something that appeals to that same set of people. And
so he decided, I'll make a crystal ball version where
(11:57):
the cylinder is essentially nestled in the crystal ball. Um
it'll be a dark crystal ball, so it's not like
it's clear acrylic or something, and you'll still turn it
over to read the little message on the uh in
the window, the clear window that's in this crystal ball.
And so he started making those, and these also weren't
(12:18):
going like gangbusters, but they did get the attention of
a Chicago company called Brunswick Billiards. Billiards as in pool tables,
the capital P that rhymes with trouble. Yeah, that doesn't
rhyme with trouble, but it starts anyhow. So he must
have been the one who said, hey, let's take these
(12:39):
and turn them into billiard balls. Yeah, well the billiards
company did. They came up to book exactly. They came
out to book when they said we want to do
a promotional item Essentially, it was a giveaway and we
like this thing you've created. Can you make some that
look like eight balls from the game of pool? And
Bookman said, you bet you anyone about making eight ball
(13:03):
versions of this fortune Teller's crystal ball. And the giveaways
were incredibly popular. People loved the magic eight ball, and
people of free things, people also love free things. That
remains true to this very day. This, by the way,
is still happening in the like early fifties. At this point,
Bookman decides, after this agreement has concluded with Brunswick Billiards,
(13:28):
that he would continue making eight balls as a variation
of this crystal ball one that he had been making,
and he starts kind of giving up a little bit.
He starts selling them as paper weights because he can't
really think of like, people aren't buying them as much
as they were enjoying getting them. Yeah, they weren't. There
(13:50):
just wasn't a market of people who were like, I
want to consult the spirits of beyond, but I just
don't know how to get into that racket. So that's
when thought, hey, Amar, get these two kids. Kidcel fall
for anything pretty much. He saw that kids were playing
with these paperweights and really having a fun time with him,
and he thought, well, maybe that's just the Maybe that's
(14:11):
just it. It's not that the product is bad, I'm
marketing to the wrong audience exactly. And so he decides
he will market it as a toy, and he starts
to do that, and now it actually is starting to
take off. And again it was an unpredictable result. But
by nineteen one, Bookman was ready to retire from this business.
(14:34):
So he sold the company A labor Crafts, which had
been around for twenty years. Of that more than twenty years,
almost almost thirty years at that point, respectable sold it
to a company called the Ideal Toy Company. That's another
company we could do a full episode on. They mainly
were known for doing like doll type stuff. They were
very much in the dull biz. I think Betsy Wetsy
(14:57):
was one of their dolls. Yeah and uh. In nineteen
seventy one, the same year when Ideal Toy Company would
acquire a Lab Crafts that joined the New York Stock Exchange.
At the time, it was one of the largest toy
companies in the United States. Well, they also had toys
like the Rubik's Cube yep, they were the ones that
made the Rubik's Cube famous in the eighties, So that
(15:18):
was from the Ideal Toy company. But by the later
part of the eighties, mid to later part of the eighties,
the company was really starting to struggle that there was
a recession. Um there were some bad business decisions that
led to some financial troubles for Ideal Toy and so
uh CBS Toys, which was a subsidiary of CBS. YEP.
(15:40):
CBS the Broadcasting Company ended up purchasing Ideal Toy and
Magic a Ball went along with it in nineteen two
for fifty eight million dollars. So now Ideal Toy becomes
part of CBS Toys. But that would only last for
a little while because CBS would then sell Ideal Toy
to another company called view Master International. You remember, you
(16:02):
know a Master. I owned a view Masks. Okay, I
didn't know. So v Master are those ones that look
kind of like binoculars. You put in a disc that
has different photographs in it. It has the stereo vision
kind of lenses, so it gives you that sort of
three D yeah, and you just click through and it's
like a slide and then if you click halfway, then
you just try to get these really weird images. Yeah. Anyhow,
(16:24):
so yeah, that becomes the view Master Ideal company. Uh
rolls around. Then you get Tycho Toys, which announces that
it would acquire view Master Ideal for about forty four
million dollars, less than the last acquisition, but not that
not bad. And it also meant that the Magic eight
(16:46):
Ball would go to Tycho Toys, which was famous for
other types of toys like the easy Bake oven, so
very very popular or tasty bake oven, I should say
not easy bake. They did not start putting the lasses
back into the eight balls, no know. At this point
it was rubbing alcohol with blue dye. That was the liquid.
But they weren't done yet. Mattel, another giant in the
(17:10):
toy industry, swoops in to acquire Tycho for seven hundred
fifty five million dollars. Well, I mean, Tycho is a
bigger company. They had a lot more toys exactly. Tycho
was huge. Now that meant that the Magic eate Ball
went with Mattel, and along that whole process, the Magic
(17:31):
eight Ball continued to be a product sold on the market.
So even though ownership was changing hands, multiple times. The
product itself continued to do pretty well. It was you know,
it wasn't like it was flying off store shelves in
particular years, but it was a steady seller. I mean,
about two thousand twelve they had sold a million of
them a year. A million a year's a lot. That's
(17:54):
pretty decent. And uh. Now these days you can find
magic eight balls in all sorts of size, from the
regular size, which is definitely larger than an actual billiard ball,
two key chain versions. You can find a bunch of
them that are licensed. I've got a Simpsons one which
has Simpsons phrases in there, like dough instead of no um.
(18:16):
So there are definitely variations on the magic eight ball. Uh,
and it's interesting. So I have the notes here, so
I'm gonna ask you arial the questions and you can
tell people what the answers are. How many sides does
the die inside of magic eight ball have? Yes? So
(18:38):
it's essentially like a Dungeons and Dragons. A bookman must
have been a secret Dungeons and Dragons. No, No, it's
just so that they could have a lot of sides
with the answer yes, ten of them, a lot with no.
Five of them, and then five more that said maybe yes,
So you weren't just shaking like, well, you can't have
a three sided dice. No, no, The best you could
(19:00):
do is the's a coin. This way it made your
chances more random, right, well, and also meant that you
were twice as likely to get a yes as you
were a no, maybe or a maybe. And Uh, it's
funny because I was looking at a statistic site and
it said, statistically speaking, you would need to ask seventy
two questions at least to see all twenty possible answers
(19:24):
just based on probability, that would be the bare minimum
you would need to to do. Uh, based on probability alone.
Now it is entirely possible to ask twenty questions and
then get each answer in sequence. It's just not likely
to happen. So you've got a note here says well,
that happen every seventy two times. Ask again later, Ask
again later. Now you don't have one here that they have.
(19:47):
Ask again later. That's true unless it's a maybe. That's
that's a maybe. It's it's on there kind of like
answer unclear, Ask again later, that's a maybe. Uh, so
it's it's not an outright yes or no and uh
yeah again, like the licensed versions have different variations for
positive and negative. But yeah, that's to me, that's an
(20:08):
interesting story about an item that originally was marketed more
seriously if you can, if you can, think of it
that way, or at least more earnestly as a fortune
telling device, and then ultimately became a novelty slash toy.
And that's where it found its success. I'm very excited
to get into our next story. But first, let's take
(20:30):
a quick break aerial. Yeah, let's let's talk about rubber
for a minute. It's pretty useful, it is. It's incredibly
useful stuff. I mean, it's so here's the stuff about
rubber that makes it useful, right, It's really resilient, It
resists damage pretty well. It's waterproof material, it's stretchy, it's flexible. Uh.
(20:54):
It is used in tons of stuff, including and this
is important, stuff like wires and boots. But you know
it's not easy to get rubber, right, not not natural rubber. No, no,
not natural rubber because it comes out of trees and
and specifically trees that largely are in Asia. Yes, so
(21:14):
like largely a specific region and to get it, you
have to like cut into the tree and collect sap
like you're getting maple syrup, and and that has latex
in it, and then you're trying to in them that
makes rubber. Yes, So it's a whole process. And then
you have to of course ship it from wherever you're
you're harvesting it to wherever you wanted to go to
use in whatever materials. So rubber. Everyone recognized that rubber
(21:39):
was useful stuff, but it was just it was hard
to get a lot of it at once. So starting
even as early as the eighteen hundreds, you had scientists
who are saying, this is definitely useful, but we need
to figure out a different way to make it, and
so people started to work on formulas to create synthetic rubber. Okay,
but you know, I don't want to start in the
eighteen hundred, skip ahead, Jonathan. Okay, all right, well how
(22:00):
about World War two? That better, because that's that's going
to get to the beginning of where we're going to hear.
World War two. Obviously, the U. S. Military has a
huge need for rubber for stuff like tires and boots,
like I had mentioned a second ago, And on top
of that. In World War Two, one of the powers
that the unit United States was up against was Japan,
(22:20):
which had already attacked or was threatening regions where natural
rubber was coming from. So there was a clear need
to develop synthetic rubber, and only that it needed to
be synthetic rubber that came from materials that were easy
to get to in wartime. So that meant that the
US had to say, who out there can help us
(22:40):
do this stuff? So who did well? There are a
couple of different versions of this story. There was actually
a lot of people working on this problem, and at
least two different groups came up with a similar possible
solution that ended up not being a solution to the
synthetic rubber problem spoiler alert. One of that one of
those groups rather was Earl Warwick and Rob Roy McGregor,
(23:04):
who worked at Corning glass Works, and they took borick,
ox side and silicone oil, mixed it together and they
found that it made this stretchy, bouncy material stuff which
they filed for a pattern in the early forties and
they got the pattern in ninete The other version has
a guy named James Wright, who was an engineer at
General electric. This is the version of the story that
(23:26):
most people tell for the material we're about to cover. Yeah,
it is more fun. He got the assignment to try
and create cheap synthetic rubber, and he dropped some silicone
oil in boric acid, so very similar. He got that
same sort of gooey substance. Discovered that it had some
interesting properties. It bounced. You could, you know, roll it
(23:49):
into a ball and bounce it against the ground. Uh,
if you hit it hard enough it would shatter. You
could stretch it. Uh, you could even press it against
newsprint and pick the newsprint up off the paper. But
you know what, you can't do that replace rubber. Yeah yeah, yeah,
So because you can't use it for as a replacement
(24:12):
for rubber, the military was not interested in it. Yeah,
they said, uh, thanks, but we need something that will
work entires, and this wouldn't even if the only thing
we were driving across was newspaper. So no, thank you.
So at that stage, again, you could say, well shucks,
that didn't work out and you could move on, or
(24:34):
you could try and do what Right tried to do,
which was to market it as a commercial product. I
mean he was having fun with it. Yeah, he found
a whole bunch of interesting things you could do with it.
My favorite is the shattering it. My favorite is picking
up newsprint because I used to do it to use.
I used to do that to comic strips. And when
he tried to market it commercially, he called it nutty putty.
(24:58):
But obviously, you guys i'll there have figured out what
this substance must have been, and nutty putty is not
what we call it. But so we'll skip ahead again.
There are a couple of different conflicting stories about what
weapons next. No big surprise, We've already got these branching
narratives that have happened. But in one version, you have
a guy named Peter Hodgson who was at a party
(25:20):
in nineteen nine, and he was an admin worked in
the magazine trade and catalogs and stuff like that, and
according to some stories, he was out of work at
that time, and the main entertainment at that party was
people playing with Right's nutty putty, which sounds way worse
when I say it out loud, and it did when
(25:41):
I wrote it down. It definitely sounds worse orally than
on the page. Yes, I think we can agree it
sounds worse orally. Anyhow, he saw that people who are
really amused with this putty, and he was like, hey,
this could be a successful toy. Yeah, And he ended
up deciding that he could use his marketing skill coupled
with this amazing stuff and that would be the key
(26:05):
to success. Now. The other version of this story says
Hodgson was actually working on a catalog for a toy
store that was owned by a woman named Ruth fall Gather,
and they found out about the putty when Hodgson was
visiting a Harvard physicist who had some of the stuff.
There's another version that says both Hodgson and fall Gather
(26:25):
were at that same party where people were passing stuff around.
It's hard to say who is telling the most accurate
story here, but no matter what, they decided to go
to ge and to get the production rights to make
this stuff. Uh and Gee said, sure, we don't know
(26:45):
what to do with it, go ahead. Yeah. They had
no use for it. So Hodgson got the rights to
Nutty putty and he started making it and he would
sell it for two dollars per unit or glow bob
or wad of the stuff. Yeah, and uh, and it
(27:06):
sold really well inside fall Gathers catalog. She she marketed
it in the catalog for her twist. Yeah, it's so
better than everything but crayons. Yes, there was a box
of crayons for fifty cents. That was the top seller,
and the second top seller was this nutty putty stuff.
But then fall Gatter decided to stop selling it. Yeah.
I don't don't know why if it was selling so well.
(27:27):
She didn't have the putty passion. Just what we say
in the business, I see, I follow you. She was.
She felt petty about the putty all right. Anyhow, Hodgson
took out a loan and bought a big batch of
the stuff and rebranded it a silly putty. Yes, yes,
And that as when another idea occurred to him because
at the time where he was launching this secondary attack here, uh,
(27:51):
the launch date was really close to Easter, and that's
what we thought. Hey, you know what, I could package
this stuff in chocolate Easter bunnies might have been his
first thought, but he did not go with that one.
He thought plastic eggs, and that's where the silly putty
in a plastic egg package comes from. And he started
selling it for a dollar per egg. And what really
(28:15):
helped him was not the fact that folks were finding
it so fascinating, but rather a certain magazine published a
short passage about the stuff, and that got it into
the public consciousness. That magazine was The New Yorker. That's impressive. Yeah,
I mean, like it's it's known for two things, launching
(28:37):
silly putty and cartoons that nobody's really sure if they're
funny or not. Yeah, but you can use your silly
play to pull those cartoons right off the New Yorker,
you'd be fine. So if you look at it twice,
maybe you can figure out how twice and backwards. Yeah.
So then Hodgson ends up making television commercials for it.
Some of the earliest TV commercials aimed at children were
(29:00):
for silly Putty. The earliest was for a different toy.
Do you know which toy it was? Mr? Potato Head? Yes?
Do you know what Mr potato Head was like when
it first launched? Uh, it was a real potato. You
supplied the potato and all you got were the like
the lips and the eyes and the feet, and you
shoved into a potato and then you bake it and
then you eat the melted plastic cover potato and then
(29:21):
you lose a customer for life because to the young,
death is what it would be, because you would just
become a potato zombie. Yeah. So his commercials aired during
Captain Kangaroo and How Do You Duty? And like that exactly.
There were specifically geared two shows that kids were watching,
so the kids would see the commercials for Silly Putty
and then say, Mommy, Daddy, buy me that. And it worked.
(29:44):
By the time that Hodgson passed away in nineteen seventy six,
his estate was worth more than a hundred forty million dollars.
Not bad for a guy who was apparently out of
work when he first got the idea. When he when
he's made this stuff the first time, like for Syria,
he had to take out a loan of a hundred
fifty dollars because he didn't have enough money to start
(30:05):
up the production costs. That's a really good return on investment. Yes,
a hundred fifty dollar loan leading to a hundred forty
million dollars state not bad. Yeah. In nineteen seventy seven,
a company called Binny and Smith, which also owned Crayola
Crayons purchased the rights to Silly Putty, and Benny and
(30:26):
Smith still own those rights, although the company changed its
name officially to Crayola Llc. In two thousand seven. It's
nice that the two top sellers in Fall Gathers catalog
can be together once again. Yes, reunited, and it feels
so good. And uh, today you can still buy silly putty.
You can actually buy lots of different variations of silly putty,
(30:47):
including one that I wish didn't exist. Which one was that?
Are you gonna make me say it? Yeah? It's a
poop putty with like fake corn colonels. Yeah, it's called
ugly putty poop version, which to me is a terrible, terrible,
terrible misnaming because you know what I would have called it, No,
(31:09):
silly potty putty. Oh that's that is more clever. You
know what. I understand that you found that painful, painful
item and you share it with me. I didn't just
share it with her, folks, I sent her a picture
of the product. But I'm going to move on. So
silly Putty does actually have some practical uses, oddly enough,
(31:31):
discovered after it was already marketed as a toy. So
what are some of those practical uses. Well, you can
use it to remove lint. Yes, that's actually true. People
have used it as a lint remover on clothing. That's true. Um,
you've ever been to, say, a restaurant, and you sit
down at the table and it's one of those irritating
tables that has one leg slightly the wrong length all
(31:55):
the time. I'm like the irritating table magnet. Yeah, so
there are people who have you still putty to essentially
just you know, wedge some silly putty underneath the wobbly
leg to stabilize the table. Practical use just just keep
a wad in your back pocket and bring it with
you to all restaurants. And then it's also used someplace
I have never been, which is in space. Yes, I
(32:15):
also have never been to space. I was so amused
to hear about this. Yes, people astronauts and space have
used silly putty in order to secure tools to a
particular spot inside the spacecraft. Otherwise they tend to float off.
So if you're working with tools on something in space
and you wanted to be where it was when you
(32:37):
dropped it, you stick it against the wall with some
silly putty because you can just peel the silly putty
off when you're done. So yeah, it actually has that
practical use too. Now granted I would argue that's a
very limited use case scenario. It is, it is. Uh,
this was a really great story. Uh we're going to
talk about something else that was also kind of sticky,
(32:57):
not and not the Pooh putty, And this will be
one that air Old takes the lead on because she
did all the research for it. But we'll talk about
that in just a second. Alright, so we just talked
about rubber, So let's talk about some string. Okay, what
kind of string? Silly string? Silly string? Ariel, did you
(33:20):
know when I first applied to work at How Stuff Works,
one of the articles I got to read early on
before it published was how Silly String Works, written by
Tracy Wilson. I didn't know that, but I did read
that article, and you know Tracy and I know Tracy. Yeah,
so we both are friends with Tracy, and uh that
(33:42):
was It's funny because this takes me back to the
my first year two thousand and seven with How Stuff Works.
So let's talk about silly string. Where does this come from?
All right, So silly string was being developed in Nino,
and it was being developed by Leonard Fish who was
an inventor, and Rob Cox, who was a chemist. And
(34:02):
like our last two stories, they weren't developing a children's toy.
They were trying to create a spray on cast that
would harden in seconds. Okay, so this is like medic
So you've broken you've broken your arm, You're in some
remote location, uh, you may not be anywhere close to
(34:23):
medical help, and this would be a way to stabilize
a broken limb until you can actually get more qualified help.
Exactly exactly. The technical patent for it was foamable resinous Composition.
I'm pretty sure I wrote a few of those when
I was in college. I'd believe it. And the reason
that is is because silly string starts as a liquid
(34:45):
plastic which is made of a little acrylog resin, a
little surficant, which is what kind of makes it sticky.
It makes it it's the same thing that makes your
detergent sticky. Yeah, and a lot of propellant obviously to
push out of the can. Yeah, which originally was free
on twelve it's been replaced since then because it has
(35:05):
been deemed environmentally unsounded, affects the ozone layer. That's one
of those chloral flora carbons that we heard about all
the time in the late eighties. Yes, and so when
you push it out the can, it turns into attack
e string like substance. Now, when you say tacky, you
mean sticky, sticky, not like well, I mean some people
would say that silly string is also, but that wasn't
(35:26):
how it was intended. I mean you'll be like, oh,
look at that cast you're wearing. It's not so tacky. Yeah,
not in the beginning. Anyhow, A little fun fact I
want to put it in hair, just because we're talking
about how silly string is created. It takes less force
to pull the string off a wall than it does
to pull the string apart. So it's so it's stickiness
(35:47):
is less strong than it's tensile string. Yes, you think, well,
this is this is a foam that comes out of
a can, but it's as actually sticky plastic string. Interesting. Okay,
So they created this compound, and then they had to
figure out the best way to distribute it. Since it's
coming out of a can, they need a nozzle. Okay,
So yes. So now they're looking at the practical implementation
(36:09):
of this stuff, and they tried a bunch of nozzles,
and they tested their prototype a ton of times. And
I'm in the wrong job, and i want a job
where I'm testing nozzles, different nozzle designs. I'd imagine it
would get boring after a while, maybe, but that first
day has got to be fun. Anyhow. The nozzle they
(36:30):
landed on, they landed on because it reliably shot the
foam thirty ft across the room in a consistent straight
When your friend has broken their leg and you don't
want to be anywhere near them, like maybe they're covered
in ants, probably because ants would gets stuck inside the
phone cast. That's a bad day. Okay, yeah, yeah, but
you don't want to you don't want to get more
(36:50):
involved than you have to be in that kind of thing.
But here's the thing, Okay, Okay, So Fish looked at
this and he went, well, that was really fun. Uh,
maybe maybe this shouldn't be a medical thing. Maybe it
should be a toy. Because so the idea of being
like this might not have the practical application we were
hoping for when we first set out to do this. Yeah,
(37:12):
they realized they couldn't make a lot of headway in
the medical industry, which is a really I wonder if
they were already doubting their their concept from the early
get go. I would imagine that by the by trying
to apply this stuff in a way that could have
enough surface coverage to be a cast would be a challenge. Well,
(37:33):
especially you'd have to turn the limb to get it
all the way around, or maybe you could spray it
on one side like a splint and then yeah, but
but it wasn't like it was going on like a
mist where you could get a lot because if it's
like a thin spray, then it's almost like you're drawing
with a pencil, right, You have to line after line
after line after line. I mean, if you if you
spray silly string, it comes out and continue as strings.
(37:54):
So you could just get a giant globs. You could
get a giant clo anyhow. So he course, they core
corrected before it even hit market, and Fish, knowing that
he wasn't really a toy mogul, said I'm gonna find
a toy company to help me with this. Ah perfect,
So there he again kind of like al Carter who said,
(38:14):
I don't know how to manufacture on the mass scale.
I'm going to need to find someone to bring in
same sort of approach. Yes, so Fish went to Whemoeoemo.
WAMO is a huge toy manufacturer. Uh. They sold things
like hula hoops, frisbee, slipping slides, all kinds of stuff,
(38:34):
and that same year they issued the pattern for silly string.
But it wasn't just a walk in. Here's our product. Cool,
we love it, let's do it. Okay, So how did
it actually go down? All right? So Fishing Cox decided
the best way to demo the product was to meet
with a toy executive at WAMMO and then to spray
an entire can of this string in the executive's office
(39:00):
to demonstrate it. And the executive was really angry and
had them escorted off the premise. Wow, this actually reminds
me of another story that I'll tell you off microphone,
because it doesn't have anything to do with this episode.
And I'm already tangent man, so let's let's keep on going.
So all right, so it sounds to me like it
was a nonstarter. Then, because the executive is upset, they
(39:22):
get escored off the premises, They're like, don't come back.
So how did things turn around? Well, some other people
went into the office after this executive tried to clean up.
There was still some The story goes, there are still
some silly string hanging off of his lamp and they
saw it and they said, what is this stuff? This
stuff looks like a lot of fun. So the next day,
(39:42):
after all this happened, uh fishing Cox got a request,
got a message for that. They Remma wanted twenty four
cans of the stuff for basically R and D testing,
and then two weeks later the contract was signed. Awesome,
So I see you've got some interesting, like an interesting
(40:03):
fact here about silly string, at least the claim about
a can. So tell everybody how much silly string is
in a can of silly string, according to wammo. According
to wammo, a quarter of a mile of silly string
isn't a can of silly string, which is impressive considering
most of the can is just propellant. Yes. Yeah, it
also makes me think that, you know, if you need
(40:24):
a quarter of a mile of stuff in order to
set your arm, you really do need to seek medical help. Yeah,
I agree. Also, don't use silly string to do that,
it won't work and it might burn your skin. Well
before before, before they sold it to as a toy,
they did adjust the formula so it was less sticky
and less Yeah, it would stick and it wouldn't be
(40:45):
as as it wouldn't harden the same way that the
stuff originally was meant to. I mean, there there's still
some dangerous with it, and we'll get into that in
a little bit. But first, uh, while we should do
an episode on Wammo at some point, because they've also
gone through a lot as a company. I'm just going
to run through some of the changing of hands that
happened with WAMO. So inwo the owners of Wammo retired
(41:11):
and they sold the company to Krantzco. And then Kransco
then sold Wamo to Mattel in everything they do like
silly putty. Was it s like magic eate ball? Yes,
all right. So then Mattel does some restructuring of the company,
including creating a new Wammo, and they put a bunch
(41:33):
of the products into the new Weamo company, and then
they sent some of the products elsewhere and one of
those products was silly string. Sometime between and two thousand one. Yeah,
we love it when we can't nail things down with
our sources. Yeah, WAMO gave the rights for silly String
to Julius Salmon and the car Freshener Corporation Okay, yeah,
(41:56):
who then made and distributed silly string through their toy division,
Chef for Kicks. So wait a minute, there's a car
Freshener Corporation that has a toy division. Yes, okay, but okay,
so there's conflicting reports. So some say that car Freshener
bought Just for Kicks in seven and Just for Kicks
was already making silly string. Other reports say that WEIMO
(42:16):
gave the car Freshener Corporation the patent in or and
then the official Silly String website says they've been manufacturing
millions and millions of cans out of their manufacturing facility
in de Witt, Iowa since two thousand one. It's hard
to pinpoint because Just for Kicks doesn't have their own
website and isn't even mentioned on the Little trees dot
(42:38):
com website, which is the car air fresheners that Car
Freshener Corporation make. Okay, yeah, but so what we're hearing
is there's a shadow organization making silly string. But we
do know that car Freshener Organization. Sorry, car Freshener Corporation
is the parent company that currently owns silly string. It
(42:59):
is on the Silly String website, all right. So in
two thousand six, a few American companies got in trouble
for selling imported silly string, mainly coming out of China.
So these are are knockoff products, especially because they had
propellants that had been banned, So they got confiscated and
destroyed in a way that wouldn't hurt the environment, right,
(43:24):
just thrown into a basement with a bunch of board kids. Yeah,
now that's so mean. It took me a second, that's
I know, because you thought Jonathan just added something material
to this podcast, and then you all know he did not.
I mean, I really do listen to your comments, Jonathan,
they just don't sink in until about later. I'm like,
(43:45):
I'm like a protosaurus. It takes a while for to
get to my brain. Um. Anyhow, despite the fact that
American silly string doesn't have a lot of these dangerous,
dangerous propellants, it is still dangerous. Some of the other
propellants to use other than free on twelve can do
things like catch on fire, or can get too cold
(44:06):
and freeze your skin. Yeah. So, even even allowable cans
of silly string have warnings on them. But they also
are a banned in certain cities for being otherwise environmentally unsound.
They're hard to clean up, they can clog storm drains,
they could be used by jerk wads, Yeah to totally
(44:27):
like vandalize a property. They can go into the ocean.
They don't break down quickly. Again, vandals, I'm guessing that
might be a real big reason behind it. Like it's
hard to clean up. You don't want silly string stuck
to your street forever. But no. One of the things
I think is really interesting here is that you have
a note that silly string has found practical uses in
(44:49):
some very serious applications. Like you wouldn't think of it
with the name silly string, but it's been used to
help military operations. Yeah so, like so, like silly putty,
this does have practical applications. Uh, some stories say as
early as the Vietnam War. We're not exactly sure when
silly string became a thing to use, but apparently people
(45:15):
have been using it for a while. They in the military.
People spray it in areas where they think there might
be trip wires or booby traps or bombs because the
string is sturdy enough to not break when it hits
the wire, so that drapes across and it shows you
where the wire is, Yes, but it's not heavy enough
to actually trip the wire. And in this really made
(45:35):
really big news in two thousand and six two thousand
seven because there was a young soldier who wrote to
his mom for a couple of cans of silly string,
and when she found out what he needed them for,
she's like, I'm going to send him a whole bunch
of cans of silly string. Uh. And then she couldn't
send them because the US Post has restrictions on sending materials.
(45:57):
Yeah yeah, in the mail. And so they ended up
with a stockpile of eighty thousand cans in New Jersey. Wow. Yeah.
And some some were donated by Just for Kicks, the
company that makes it. Yes, Eventually they did find somebody
who could ship them to Iraq, where this soldier was.
So silly string is still around the companies that technically
(46:19):
is distributing making it now is Silly String Products, but
that's part of the car Preessional Corporation. Yes, and they're
based of Waterton, New York. I don't like that. And
they're based out of Waterton, New York. Well it's uh
so that is also a story that I like, I
had read about how it works, but I hadn't really
read too much into the history of it. So this
(46:41):
is all really fascinating to me. And again it shows
how people can take lemons and make lemonade on a
big business scale. And if your lemonade doesn't sell, maybe
you sell it as a skin cleanser to a child
or maybe as mace who knows. But yeah, now this
was this was cool because I think the lessons when
(47:03):
you say lessons learn, Like the lesson here is you
don't necessarily just accept failure as failure. You look and
to see where opportunities are. Now those opportunities may just
be learned from your mistakes so that you don't repeat them.
There are certainly times you need to move on, yeah,
and then there are other times where you're where you
may think, well, I set out to go for goal A,
(47:24):
this did not achieve goal A. But it may turn
out that this could be a stepping stone to goal B,
which is equally valid, and I can still go after
goal A later on if I want to. But if
I use this, I can actually use it as a
way to earn revenue as opposed to it just being
a total loss. And again, obviously that's not applicable in
(47:46):
every situation, but it does remind us to to reevaluate
when we fail, and to say, first of all, this
isn't the end of the world. Second of all, what
can we learn from this? Is there anything that we
can salvage for this or even just apply this to
the next attempt. So I think that that is a
really fun way to do it. Like we we pick
(48:07):
three sort of light and uh and silly silly was
in the name of two of the different products. I'm
gonna start calling it a silly magic gate ball, now
a silly meant just so we can have a nice,
nice collective there. But yes, this was a lot of fun.
And now we'll probably occasionally do a little one off
episodes like this where we step outside of our normal
(48:32):
profile of a specific business at a specific time, but
we'll be going back to that that tried and true formula,
because that is what the show is is mainly about.
But yes, if you have any ideas for things similar
to this that you would like for a very silly
episode of Business on the Brink or an't even not
silly but just outside of our norm, you should send
(48:52):
us an email. Where can they do that aerial well, Jonathan,
they can do that at feedback at the Brink Podcast
dot Show. That's and you can also visit our website
that's also the Brink Podcast dot Show, where you will
find an archive of all of our past episodes and
information about your lovable hosts such as me I have
been Jonathan Strickland and me I've been aerial casting. Bye.
(49:19):
Business on the Brink is a production of I Heart
Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
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