October 4, 2011 • 37 mins
When the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia in World War II, they cut off America's rubber supply. Luckily, American can-do created a synthetic rubber and saved the War. Learn about the inventor, fluid chemistry and more in this episode of SYSK.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant uh with me as always
looking good. I am, yeah, thank you, Josh um that
(00:22):
makes this stuff you should know. And you were looking
good as well, sir. Set a new shirt. No I'm not.
It's I don't know, less than six months old. I
guess it's kind of new, all right. I'm trying to
think it was pouring way I could start a show
as you pretty high up there. Josh is wearing a
lovely stripe blue button up as he has one to do,
(00:44):
and I'm wearing a Everything is Bigger in Texas green
T shirt. We're both in jeans. I have on my
last chance garage hat. Yep, anything else I want to
I want to set the scene for once. I've got
a beard, now you've had a beard. I'm clean shaven,
clean shaven. Yeah, I've started to do the clean shaven
(01:04):
thing more than scruffy. I was doing scruffy for a while.
Are you which way do you like? Hope for you? Yeah,
I think whatever you mean likes, which is clearly not scruffy.
She likes it both ways. Oh yeah, yeah, all right,
that's that's that is the most boring way to ever
start a show. We should all go to sleep. Now
I've got a story for you, all right, all right,
(01:26):
and you know some of this so you don't have
to pretend like you're surprised. Back in eight thirty nine,
there is a man named Charles Goodyear, and Charles Goodyear
whose last name you might recognize for good reason, uh,
figured out a way to make rubber, natural rubber tougher
than leather. It's called vulcanization. Yes, okay, So this process
(01:50):
of vulcanization took rubber, which is naturally um kind of
stickier gooey at warmer temperatures and um rigid at cooler temperatures,
and made it much more a pliable, much more, much
more flexible, but able to stand up to really punishing
conditions like heat, lots of pressure, and force, which made
(02:10):
it perfect for car tires, hoses, fan belts, all of
the stuff that we use rubber for today. This guy
is the reason we're able to write the reason that's
tough enough. Yes. Now, the fact that this came in
nine means that this innovation came during the Industrial Revolution,
which means that all that stuff that the rubber could
(02:31):
be used for could be mass produced, which means that
we needed a vast source of rubber as a raw
material for this vulcanization process. And luckily, I guess you
could say, at least for the Westerners, uh, we knew
where to get vast stores of rubber, the Amazon, which
is where this very specific type of rubber tree is
(02:52):
indigenous and is found in vast supply. Right, all right,
you're with me so far. So we went down on
the Amazon, and as a result, these parts of Brazil
that were just totally impoverished were suddenly suddenly found themselves
at the center of a global rubber boom and just
became decadently wealthy, like almost overnight. Brazil and the Amazon
(03:14):
was the center of this global trade and rubber for
decades until eighteen seventy six. These British guys snuck some
rubber tree seeds out of the Amazon and took them
to the botanical gardens in London, Okay, and they started
to work on forming a hybrid that was even better
than the ones in Brazil. A hybrid plant, a hybrid
(03:37):
rubber tree that could coincidentally thrive in British colonies in
Southeast Asia. Perfect, it was perfect for the British. By
nineteen ten, the Brazilian stranglehold on the rubber um trade
was being challenged and was in real trouble by countries
like Malaysia and Sri Lanka, Um and Thailand, and by
(04:01):
nineteen twenty the Far East held the basically the monopoly
on the rubber market. All right, that's a good background. Thanks,
I'm almost done. So about the time the Southeast Asia
started to dominate rubber, we needed it even more than
when Brazil dominated rubber because cars were being mass produced
(04:23):
in each of those required four rubber tires, right, So
Southeast Asia's hold on rubber was even stronger than than
the one that Brazil had, plus one in the trunk. Yeah,
that's right, five um. And by the time World War
Two rolled around, we'd come to rely on rubber so
much that it was calculated the US military the Pentagon
(04:44):
needed thirty two pounds of rubber for every troop on
the ground for things like tires, boots, anything you need
rubber for, right, every soldier, which makes it a It
was a very very very big deal. When the Japanese
successfully invaded the Pacific theater, including Malaysia in Sri Lanka,
including all these rubber producing places and cut off the
(05:04):
rubber supply to the US, and We're like, we need rubber, yeah,
we need it bad. And they were like, well we've
got it. Yes, And by the way, let's go. When
you win, there's going to be stragglers on these islands.
You will one day podcast about them. Hero. So what happened, Chuck, well, Josh.
Because the US is industrious and bright and has it
(05:28):
never say die attitude, they said, you know what, why
don't we commission some labs and academic institutions to develop
a synthetic rubber. So they put out the call because
they needed this for the wartime demand. And UH, all
these chemists got to work on it, and UH invented
something called g R dash S, which is Government Rubber styrene,
(05:52):
and it turned out to be a great replacement for rubber,
and by we were producing twice the amount of all
all the world's rubber combined, the synthetic rubber and synthetic
rubber in the US. Wow. So this is like one
of the most this is one of the biggest chemical
chemical engineering accomplishments ever created, ever undertaken. Right, um so
(06:15):
g RS huge still in use today. Right, is like
the standard for synthetic rubber. Um it changed everything like
that was it was like bye bye, Malaysia, Sorry about
your your rubber monopoly falling apart. You shouldn't have let
you pain invade. Well, I'm sure they still had plenty
of customers. I'm sure they still did. They weren't like, oh,
(06:35):
we got all this rubber, right, what are we gonna do?
We we we chose the wrong team. Uh So, this,
this synthetic rubber, this triumph of chemical engineering, was not
without setbacks though, Right. Well, no, anytime you're trying to
synthesize something like that, it's gonna there's gonna be some
ups and downs. And this was a nationwide challenge by
(06:55):
the War Production Board. It wasn't just like hey, you
five guys over here. It was like, attention in all
chemical engineers, all chemists, anybody who has anything to do
with chemistry. We need a synthetic rubber, and we needed
an abundant supply. So there are a lot of people
working on this, and one of those guys was James
Wright of General Electric GE. He mixed bork acid with
(07:17):
silicon oil, and uh, so you know that this is
gonna be a great synthetic rubber. Unfortunately it wasn't a
great synthetic rubber. His quote unquote bouncing putty is what
he called it. But Gee thought I had some promise.
Gee thought I had some promise. But it did pretty
much wallow away in obscurity at first, right for um,
(07:41):
almost a decade. It just kind of made the rounds
to other places like, hey, can your guys do anything
like with this, We'll share the patent, whatever, just figure
out what we can do with this, and uh, apparently
GE got this. Uh. It was so widespread that it
made its way to a party that a guy named
Peter Hodgson, who owned an ad agency in New Haven, Connecticut,
(08:04):
attended a cocktail party. Remember spam. That's where spam came from.
Cocktail party in New Year's Eve. Great things happen when
you get together and drink. Uh. This guy was at
a at a cocktail party and saw some people playing
with this um bouncing putty that James as James Wright
called it, and said, you know what, these adults seem
fascinated by this. I just happened to be working on
(08:25):
a catalog for a toy store, and I think this
would make a great adult novelty. So he approached the
lady who owned the Block toy store, right yeah, and
I got there's varying accounts of this story. I think
it's one of those deals where because I saw somewhere
where she was the one that saw it and contacted
him and said, hey, can you put this in my catalog?
(08:47):
So either way, Peter Hodgson and Ruth fall Gadder, who
owned the Block Shop toy store, they they decided to
put it on the pages of their their catalog to
sell as a toy. Right and it was two dollars,
not chump change in nine. No, it's definitely not um
(09:08):
and it was an adult novelty as they reckoned, right, Sorry,
just say adult novelty and a lot of things come
to mind, Spitzer Gifts, I know, I know. It wasn't
that kind of an adult worldly okay, uh no, it
was an adult diversion. It became a big seller, is
(09:28):
what it became. Yeah. So yeah, it was the block
shops biggest seller, one of them. Um. And then this
this I found a little hazy for reasons that remain unclear.
Did you find anything out about why fall got her
stopped backing the product. I couldn't find anything on that,
but I guess even though it sold big for her,
she was just like whatever. Maybe she just had her
thing going and she's like, why don't I want to
(09:49):
start a new product. I'm a toy store owner? Yeah,
why do I want to be a millionaire? Exactly when
he's the root of all evil for her, R. Rubic,
I have no no plans for the exactly so uh so,
the whole, the whole, the whole drive, the whole push
to make this into something big, what we now know
as silly Putty fell completely the Hodgson and he turned
(10:12):
into a whirling dervish. Between nineteen fifty, he borrowed a
hundred and forty seven dollars and bought another batch from
ge hired a Yale student to roll them into uh
twenty eight graham one ounce balls, packaged them in plastic
Easter eggs, and sold them to double Day bookshops and
(10:34):
Neiman Marcus along the way. He also um took them
to some chemical engineers in Schenectady, right yeah, and said, hey,
copy that reverse engineering. It's like that website that has
like all of your favorite recipes from like Applebee's and
Kentucky Fried Chicken. Reverse engineering. First get chicken from a
sealed bag, right, that's pretty sauced exactly, and put it
(10:56):
in a pan. Yes, they're like, do you have Cisco's
phone number? So that's what he did, and you're right,
he did make pretty quick work of it, um, because
after he opened a manufacturing plant. Yes, all this is
in a year he first encountered this stuff in this
is nineteen fifty. He believed in this what would be
Actually he's he had already settled on silly Putty as
(11:17):
the name. Yeah, well, he was an ad agency guy,
so brain storing some names, evaluated fifteen of them, was like,
this is the one he trademarked. It was Nutty Putty one.
I think that was one of them. I think that
would have sold to So he had the silly Putty name.
At this point, opened the manufacturing plant in Connecticut, and
soon after that landed Neeman Marcus in double day bookshops
as customers, which was huge, it was, but it became
(11:40):
even huger when um some writers from the new Yorker
went to Double Day, and they encountered, do you want
to read this part? You're I'm not gonna read it,
Scotch and read this one all right. It was in
the Talk of the Town section in nineteen fifty in
the New Yorker. We went into the Double Day bookshop
at Fifth Avenue and fifty second Street the other day,
(12:00):
intending in our innocence to buy a book, and found
all the clerks busy selling silly putty, a gooey, pinkish,
repellent looking commodity. The commodity I love that that comes
in plastic containers, the size and shape of eggs. We
sought out Mr Lee Weber, the manager of the bookshop,
to ascertain the mysterious link between it and Double Day.
He told us that silly putty is the most terrific
(12:22):
item and that Double Day shops have been privileged to
handle it since forever. Amber yea forever Amber. I looked
it up. It was a bestseller from the forties. It
was about a woman in Restoration England's late seventeenth century
England who, through her sexy wit, went from rags to
riches and became like the favorite mistress of Charles the
second was banned in Boston. Yeah so because of this
(12:45):
um pretentious bit of cynical whimsy that appeared in the
New Yorker, Um, the sales overnight, uh for Silly Putty
just exploded. He got Hodgson got um three hundred, seven
hundred and fifty thousand orders. Two D Man, Why did
(13:06):
I quarter of a mill? You're probably thinking three quarters?
I was. I was thinking about the orders that weren't there, exactly.
He got a quarter of a mill in three days,
a quarter of a million orders, and at two bucks
a pop, that's a lot of money, especially considering that
he only half a million dollars. Yeah, yeah, that's well. Yeah,
I was thinking about the half a million he didn't make.
(14:03):
Uh So it was like basically an overnight success thanks
to Neiman Marcus, Double Day Books and the New Yorker
and GE and the Japanese. But I mean again, this
is all happening in a year that's pretty speedy. This
is a whirlwind year for this guy. I'm happy for him.
Just just looking back on this story, I hope he
was a good guy and he didn't like beat up
little kids on his way to work. He passed away
(14:25):
in nineteen seventy six. I hope before then he didn't
do bad things, but he saw it become a huge
success because when he died in nineteen seventy six, Silly
Putty was in twenty two countries plus the United States,
with sales exceeding five million a year. And that was
in seventy six. Yeah, which I looked it up. That's
nineteen million today, ten dollars, I think. But um, it's
(14:48):
it's pretty it's pretty good. Yeah. Uh yeah, they seem to,
they seem to, Yeah, well he's set up um Arnold
Clark Inc. And I never found out who Arnold Clark kiss.
Maybe that was an alien of his, who knows, um,
But Yeahola apparently owns Silly Putty. Now, now we've just
described the history of Silly Putty. That should be enough. Um,
(15:11):
But I mean, surely there's no one out there who
hasn't played a Silly Putty before. I used to play
with it like crazy when I was a kid. And
one thing I would do, which is something that they
found out. You know, it was originally intended for adults,
and they were kind of surprised to learn that kids
were into it and it didn't take long for the
kids sales to dwarf that of adults. It was nine
(15:34):
sales overtook it. Initially he said, He's like, you know,
this is great for adults because you can come home
and unwind at the end of the day by squeezing
it and just blowing off steam by copying newsprint with it,
May I, And that's what I did with it, was
was copied comic books. So in that New Yorker article
they interviewed Hodgson and he had he had a quote,
(15:55):
it means five minutes of escape from neurosis. It means
not having to worry about career or family difficulties, and
it appeals to people of superior intellect. The inherent ridiculousness
of the material acts as an emotional release to hard
pressed adults. So it obviously worked because we're not in
Korea any longer. It's interesting, though, that he was wrong.
(16:16):
I think it's funny how somebody can be wrong on
something and still be right, you know what I mean,
Like all the uses and the intent was he was
completely wrong, but it's still skyrocketed, and he's like, oh, well,
it's for kids. Then he kind of cast a wide net.
On the patent license, it was for um stress relief
hand therapy for people who needed it. Um it could
(16:37):
be used to block out low frequency noises. Yeah, they
still claim you can do all this stuff today, like
it's good for therapy and for like gumming up holes
and cleaning typewriters key which is a huge use these days.
Well computer keys. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about this,
um but yeah, so the guy was very much focused
on it being uh um for are adults, but kids
(17:01):
kind of took it for themselves, mainly because you could.
One of the great properties of silly putty is you
can stretch it out, push it down on newsprint, and
you have a mirror image of it. That's what I said.
That's what he used to do. Oh you did say that. Yeah, comics, comics,
and you can't it's harder to it's harder to do
that these days because the print they use, like you
literally have to find like a newspaper in order to
(17:25):
do that. Yeah, you can't do it on the Internet
or a magazine. Yeah, you can't do it on a kindle.
You could do it on a magazine. H No, I
think you can know, dude, it's got to pick up
the ink. I know I can't do it on a magazine.
I can tell you from reading Harper's by the Pool
that that's stuff smears. And if it's smears, I guarantee
(17:46):
you can get it on silly putty. Uh. Lucky for
him though, it was non toxic, so when kids started
playing with it and inevitably putting it in their mouth,
there were no issues with that. Right, So how you
should not eat it? We should say that don't eat
anything that's not food or anything that has the name
silly in it, or putty, silly string, silly anything. Um.
(18:06):
So Hodgson made mention of its um inherent ridiculousness of
the material. Right, Um, it has some really strange properties. Uh.
He originally called it so. He described it as a
solid liquid right when you um. When you stretch it,
it's like taffy. It stretches, right. Uh. If you pull it,
(18:28):
it just snaps apart if you quickly and with a
lot of force. Um. If you stick it to like say,
um bookcase, you come back a few days later, it
will have very slowly moved down, very slowly, very which
means it flows, which is weird. But we'll get to
that in a minute. Um. And when you roll it
up into a ball, it bounces higher than rubber. Yeah,
(18:51):
they did a test. They rolled it into like a
perfect little ball, and they dropped it with no force
from three ft and it bounce bounces back two and
a half feet. Supposedly, that is dynamite. Not bad. And
if you throw it down real hard, you know you've
got yourself a super ball in your hands. So what
is the stuff? Well, what are the the what's the
(19:11):
science of silly putty chuck? The science of so? Well,
before we get there, can I say about the egg?
There are several varying accounts on why it was put
in an egg. Some people say it was because his
first batch went out before Easter and then he just said, hey,
it's actually pretty good idea, let's just keep it in
the egg. Other people say he got the inspiration while
(19:33):
eating eggs one morning, good for you. And still other
people say that he couldn't find another container in abundance,
and he had like a line on these plastic eggs,
and I was like, I'll just use desk because this
is a pretty good way to put it in there.
It's about an ounce so I let's just do that
either way. That became the signature that's still used today.
(19:56):
Anybody full of egg carms, right, the egg fill is
silly putty. I feel silly. You could probably get silly
putty full of egg, but you don't have to do
it yourself at home. Um. Alright, So back to what
this stuff is, um, josh, it is a polymer, right, yeah,
it's a visco elastic polymer. Basically, it's subject to the
(20:22):
science of fluid chemistry. Right. And fluids are not necessarily liquids.
Liquids are fluids, but not all fluids or liquids. Gas
can be a fluid, Some semi solid substances can be fluid. Basically,
a fluid is anything that yields to slight pressure and
has no definite shape. Fluid Your your gut is at
(20:48):
least okay. Um. So so that's uh, that's the science.
That's the part of chemistry and physics that we're looking
as fluid chemistry. Um. And the ruling principle of that
of fluid chemistry is viscosity. Where do we talk about this?
I know we've talked about viscosity. We talked about viscosity
in UM quicksand right sheer mayonnaise This quas visquosity, Josh.
(21:12):
Viscosity is uh. It measures how much a fluid resist
flow at a certain temperature. So so viscosity is resistance
resistance to flow. If you're like me and you can
never remember what's viscosity, what's viscous, or what's high or
low viscous, viscosity is resistance to flow. Actually the easiest
way to remember is water is low. That pretty much
says it all, just so, that's easy. Like peanut butter
(21:34):
would have a high viscosity, water would have a low viscosity.
That's pretty easy way to it has a high resistance
to flow or low resistance to flow, like honey or
molasses and um. Viscosity is often measured in pascal seconds,
Not so much anymore now it's measured by dying seconds
per square centimeter, also called poise, and ten poise equals
(21:58):
one pascal second. What that means I cannot. I couldn't
rent my mind around before then every site that I
saw it took it for granted that I understood what
what that measures. But it measures viscosity or flow. As
far as I understand, what I love is that someone
somewhere said, uh, pascal seconds just said and cutting it right.
(22:21):
The guy whose last name was Poise or poisel, I
believe that's what happ came up with poise um. But yeah,
so that's uh how viscosity is measured UM. And the
more pascal seconds are, the more poise there are, the
more the higher the viscosity is UM. But the thing
about viscous fluids, they all well, I should say, most
(22:47):
of them are subject to um temperature. That's what affects
their viscosity. If you if you have cold honey that
you're trying to get out of the bottle, it doesn't
flow very well. But if it's a room temperature or
if it's warm, it flows. It's it's much less viscous, right,
it flows much more easily because it's subject just to temperature.
(23:09):
That makes it a newtonium fluid. That's also a pet peeve.
When you go to a place and get pancakes or
waffles or French toast and they have the heated syrup.
Oh I like that, you do? Yeah? I like my
syrup thick? Okay um, you like it thin and watery
like that? Yeah, as long as it's warm it's watery
because it's low and viscosity and it's warm. Um, but
(23:32):
that's but it's just temperature. There has nothing to do
with force or pressure or anything like that. If a
fluid is subject to not only temperature but also force,
it's what's called a non Newtonium fluid. Chuck, are we
(24:14):
at the email point? I believe we are, Chuck. This
was pretty nato. We got an email from a young
listener just a few weeks ago that seemingly had nothing
to do with this podcast. But Josh and his wisdom
looks back and says, hey, this kid actually described this
Newtonian fluid very well. Yeah, and so let's just read
his description. And it came before we decided to do
(24:36):
silly putties, so it was all just serendipitous, just sitting there.
So I'm just gonna read the holy he and this
marks the first time that a listener has actually contributed
to the body of the show's information. And so this
is a UM. He's a young listener too, as we'll
find out, Dearest Josh, Chuck and Jerry, and he spelled
Jerry's name correctly right out of the gates. Kids on
the Ball, Hi guys, I wanted to say how much
(24:58):
I love your podcast and your thing voices which get
me through long road trips. I may be considered one
of your younger quote listeners since I am eleven years young.
I needed an excuse to email you, so I'll tell
you a little bit about non newtonium fluids. This kid,
Sir Isaac Newton said that fluids such as water flow
continuously regardless of forces that act upon it. So if
(25:21):
you put your hand under a faucet, the water still
flows no matter what, making it a newtonium fluid. But
non newtonium fluids like catch up blood and yogurt behave
differently based on the amount of stress added onto it.
Try adding corn starch to water. If you put your
hand into it, it behaves like a liquid and allows
your hand to go through it. But if you punch
(25:41):
it with a lot of force, it behaves like a
solid and stops your hand from entering. Corn Starch and
water is called you black, like the doctor Seus's book Bartholomew,
Bartholomew and the O Black. Sorry if that was long
boring or not entertaining. I don't write articles as well
as you, guys, anyway, I love the podcast and keep
up the great work. I hope to keep listening to
(26:01):
the podcast and that one day we will hear Jerry
speak together. We will find a way. Your podcast confused
my friends with amazing knowledge and make me sound like
the smartest kid in sixth grade, and for that, I
thank you you'r s y s K super fan Matthew
from New York PS, what kind of music do you
guys like? I like Pink, Floyd Hue, listened the News
and weird Al Yankovic. So there's non Newtonian fluids for you.
(26:26):
And dude, when you came to me and said, hey,
are you cool with us reading this kid's thing to
describe this? I went yeah, because you know what that means.
I don't have to do it. He saved me. Yeah,
he did know. He saved both of us. Funny our
favorite little U Blake, New York. Basically, the non Newtonium fluid,
as as Matthew points out, is basically acts like a
(26:47):
solid and a liquid all at once. So he was
right way back. Hodgson was way back in the day
correct when he said it was a liquid solid or
a solid liquid exactly. Um. The reason Why is because
it's main ingredient is polydime methyl si ox sane, right,
and that means that's what gives silly putty. It's fisco
Alaska fisco elastic properties. So it changes depending on long
(27:13):
flow time meanings, say the force of gravity acting on
it down a bookcase um and temperatures. Right, So a
long flow time a high temperature, it behaves like a
highly viscus fluid. It will just kind of slowly flow,
but at lower temperatures and when um the when when
it has short flow times high pressure is applied really quickly,
(27:36):
it will just break, which is why you can snap it.
I wonder, I guess if you heat it up, does
it become liquid? If you heat it up, it becomes radioactive.
It's like super Happy fun Ball. Okay, remember that you
don't the same live commercial for super Happy Funball. It's
just like a regular ball. But there are all these
warrings like do not stand directly at super happy fun Ball.
It's super happy Funball begins to smoke, run away. You
(27:59):
gotta look it up. I'll find it for you. We remember,
we fought for that. For the title of our audiobooks
was like the super happy fun guy to what you know,
happiness or whatever. I think awesome was in there somewhere
and they said, now, yeah, simplified. Um, So that's it.
That's the science of silly putty. But let's say, Chuck,
you don't have much money, you're down on your luck
(28:20):
in this economy. It happens you still want some silly putty.
What do you do? You make it? Dude, You can
very easily make your own. I don't know this here,
you do, okay? Because I don't have this. I know
that there's probably some sort of Borax involved. There is
bo x involved, or you can use corn starts for this.
I'm gonna use boor x because I think we should
(28:41):
support our friends at twenty mule team bore Ax hundred
something years. And by the way, kids, Uh, even though
this is a safe thing, you should always get your
parents to help you when you're making stuff like this,
because you might just make a big mess and then
they would be mad at us and take away your iPod.
It's exactly right. We don't want that. Uh. There was
(29:02):
I was listening to an old episode and there was
one about a kid who wrote in and said that
we had um we've gotten his iPod taken away because
his teacher he asked her about alien hand syndrome, and um,
his teacher couldn't answer. So she took his iPod and
said it was a utensil for cheating. And he said,
for the record, I never used my iPods a utensil
(29:23):
for cheating, basically smoked her. She was embarrassed. So, um,
if you wanted to go ahead and gather these things. Um,
there's a white craft glue, Elmer's glue will work. Um
any bor X twenty mule team Borax works very well. Uh.
Some warm water and food coloring if you like, and
we'll we'll wait here while you gather thus, okay Um.
(29:46):
So you want to take your white craft glue, you
want one cup of it sixteen ounces eight ounces sorry, right,
okay um, which I think is the standard size of
just a regular thing of Elmer's glue. You take your
three quarters cut warm water, and you make a nice
glue water mixture, and you're gonna find that the glue
(30:07):
dissolves pretty readily in the warm water, chuck and which
means it has a very low viscosity. Then you take
your borax, just a half of a teaspoon. I've also
seen up to a teaspoon one of those two slowly added,
and you're gonna find very quickly that the viscosity increases dramatically. Okay,
(30:27):
um after a little while when you're stirring it, you're
eventually gonna have to get it to the point where
you just pull it out and you rub it together
with your hands or whatever. And um oh, when you
add the borax, you also want to add the food
coloring to if not yours have white silly putty. Um,
but you roll around in your hands, there's your silly putty.
It's done. And what happened was your the polymer chains,
(30:50):
the molecular chains of water and the glue weren't sticking.
They just slid right past each other, which kept them
in the Newtonian fluid category. Or but the moment you
out of that borax, it came in and said, hey,
let's all just band together. And it took these polymer
chains and linked them so they could no longer slide
past one another. They were turned into a net or web,
(31:13):
and that's what gives the putty it's elastic like qualities,
and these long polymer chains it just hook up and
hook up and hook up. How long does that stuff last?
You know, I don't think humanity has been around long
enough to know how long silly putty will last? I mean,
how made silly putty? I don't know until your little
brother eat it? Because I thought I saw something about
putting it in the fridge. You can store in a
(31:34):
receivable bag or container to keep soft. Well, that nice.
So that's it. And does it does it copy print
the same way? I wonder, or just have the same
elastic properties? I don't know, don't. Let's do it all right, Okay,
that's hey, that's what we're doing this weekend. Okay, weekend.
I'll bring the apron sweet to bring the beer. So
(31:55):
that's it. I would say that this UM this podcast
was a quintessential um Stuff you should Know podcast. It
had an iconic American product. They had a lot of history,
It had science, the the the chemistry behind it, and
it had do do it yourself at home recipes. The
(32:15):
four tenants and a kid and a cute kid. Five pillars,
five pillars, We we nailed this one. And a cocktail
party six pillars. That's it, all right, Go get you
some silly putty. I know they had. I think for
their anniversary they had gold silly putty for the first
time ever. Believe I remember that. And I think they
now have things like glowing the dark and you know
(32:37):
it gets all wacky. It used to just look like, uh,
I guess, pinkish, but sort of a fleshy pinkish. Remember that. Yeah, Um,
I think they still have that too, though the original.
They've got to You can't. You can't forget your roots
like that. So dads can go to the toy store
and say, nah, you're not getting glow in the dark.
You're getting this, You're getting pink. That's what I had
when I was a kid, and I loved it. You're
(32:58):
gonna love it too. Let's get some comics wherever they
sell those and press it against their online all right,
all right, So if you want to learn more about
silly putty type and silly putty, it brings up a
really cool article, um, including a recipe, an extended recipe
even um. So that's s I L L Y Space
p U T T Y and in the search bar
(33:19):
how stuff works dot Com. Since I said search bar,
that means it's time for a listener mail the second
one in this podcast. Indeed, Josh, I'm gonna call this
smart stuff from a lady in Columbia, South Carolina. You know,
sometimes we just get these listeners that just send us
really good, intelligent emails, and I think those are always
(33:40):
worth reading. So here we go. Hey, guys, just finished
listening to the Future of the Internet cast had a
few thoughts about the so called dumbing down of culture. First,
I'm highly skeptical of any claims that uh to assert
a sea change in intellectual ability. Smart and dumb are
culturally and historically relative terms, and it's also true that
(34:01):
people have been bemoaning the intellectual poverty caused by new
technologies ever since writing was invented. Secondly, I'm not actually
sure the utilization of deep memory a good is a
good one in and of itself. Yeah, something might be
lost with those ah ha moments, but I'm much more
impressed by someone's ability to make novel and surprising connections,
(34:22):
something that the Internet actually facilitates, than by the pedantic
memorization of facts, which I would argue wasn't pedantic, but
that's me. Third, and most personally, the ability of the
Internet to store and offer up vast quantities of information
doesn't necessarily wipe out sustained research or thought. I'm finishing
up a dissertation that I could have, uh couldn't have
(34:43):
written without Google Books, and that would have taken me
a lot longer without Google scholar. Yeah, sometimes I find
myself lost and then indefinitely I'm sorry, infinitely expanding more
ass of tabs as I disappeared down some research rabbit hole.
This guy is obvious putting off working on this dissertation
by writing this email. It's a lady, but that's always
(35:05):
been the nature of scholarship. You never know where a
question will take you, and the ability to quickly pursue
various strands and to figure out which ones aren't going
to take you anywhere productive is I think transformative for academia.
All of this to say, the Internet might diminish our
ability to store quantities of facts, but mourning that ability
privileges facts and quantities effects are not necessarily indicative of
(35:27):
a culture's intelligence. Sustained reasoning and interpretation is, of course
something else entirely, and that is from Josephine Are of Columbia,
South Carolina via Los Angeles. So wait, she's I think
currently in Colombia from l A. No, no no, no, from
l A via Columbia. Nope, she's in l A FROMA.
(35:50):
You are right now, man? How funny this follow up
a smart email like that, dumbrie like demitery. All right,
that's it. Thank you Josephine for that. We appreciate it.
That was actually kind of a big topic of UM
dissent people writing in about that after that podcast. But thanks.
(36:12):
I think she summed it up pretty well. Agreed. Um. Also,
we should correct ourselves Cheddar American cheese no English after
the English town of Cheddar, So sorry about that, England,
thanks for taking away one of our American cheeses. I
can't think of any more corrections right now, but we
will figure them out, Yes we will. If you want
(36:34):
to send us a correction, we're always open to that.
You can also send us any cute, silly putty stories
that you've got, um let us hear them. You can
tweet to us s y s K podcast. You can
um go on to Facebook dot com slash stuff you
should know, that's our fan page, or you can send
us an old email at Stuff podcast at how stuff
(36:55):
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant uh with me as always
looking good. I am, yeah, thank you, Josh um that
(00:22):
makes this stuff you should know. And you were looking
good as well, sir. Set a new shirt. No I'm not.
It's I don't know, less than six months old. I
guess it's kind of new, all right. I'm trying to
think it was pouring way I could start a show
as you pretty high up there. Josh is wearing a
lovely stripe blue button up as he has one to do,
(00:44):
and I'm wearing a Everything is Bigger in Texas green
T shirt. We're both in jeans. I have on my
last chance garage hat. Yep, anything else I want to
I want to set the scene for once. I've got
a beard, now you've had a beard. I'm clean shaven,
clean shaven. Yeah, I've started to do the clean shaven
(01:04):
thing more than scruffy. I was doing scruffy for a while.
Are you which way do you like? Hope for you? Yeah,
I think whatever you mean likes, which is clearly not scruffy.
She likes it both ways. Oh yeah, yeah, all right,
that's that's that is the most boring way to ever
start a show. We should all go to sleep. Now
I've got a story for you, all right, all right,
(01:26):
and you know some of this so you don't have
to pretend like you're surprised. Back in eight thirty nine,
there is a man named Charles Goodyear, and Charles Goodyear
whose last name you might recognize for good reason, uh,
figured out a way to make rubber, natural rubber tougher
than leather. It's called vulcanization. Yes, okay, So this process
(01:50):
of vulcanization took rubber, which is naturally um kind of
stickier gooey at warmer temperatures and um rigid at cooler temperatures,
and made it much more a pliable, much more, much
more flexible, but able to stand up to really punishing
conditions like heat, lots of pressure, and force, which made
(02:10):
it perfect for car tires, hoses, fan belts, all of
the stuff that we use rubber for today. This guy
is the reason we're able to write the reason that's
tough enough. Yes. Now, the fact that this came in
nine means that this innovation came during the Industrial Revolution,
which means that all that stuff that the rubber could
(02:31):
be used for could be mass produced, which means that
we needed a vast source of rubber as a raw
material for this vulcanization process. And luckily, I guess you
could say, at least for the Westerners, uh, we knew
where to get vast stores of rubber, the Amazon, which
is where this very specific type of rubber tree is
(02:52):
indigenous and is found in vast supply. Right, all right,
you're with me so far. So we went down on
the Amazon, and as a result, these parts of Brazil
that were just totally impoverished were suddenly suddenly found themselves
at the center of a global rubber boom and just
became decadently wealthy, like almost overnight. Brazil and the Amazon
(03:14):
was the center of this global trade and rubber for
decades until eighteen seventy six. These British guys snuck some
rubber tree seeds out of the Amazon and took them
to the botanical gardens in London, Okay, and they started
to work on forming a hybrid that was even better
than the ones in Brazil. A hybrid plant, a hybrid
(03:37):
rubber tree that could coincidentally thrive in British colonies in
Southeast Asia. Perfect, it was perfect for the British. By
nineteen ten, the Brazilian stranglehold on the rubber um trade
was being challenged and was in real trouble by countries
like Malaysia and Sri Lanka, Um and Thailand, and by
(04:01):
nineteen twenty the Far East held the basically the monopoly
on the rubber market. All right, that's a good background. Thanks,
I'm almost done. So about the time the Southeast Asia
started to dominate rubber, we needed it even more than
when Brazil dominated rubber because cars were being mass produced
(04:23):
in each of those required four rubber tires, right, So
Southeast Asia's hold on rubber was even stronger than than
the one that Brazil had, plus one in the trunk. Yeah,
that's right, five um. And by the time World War
Two rolled around, we'd come to rely on rubber so
much that it was calculated the US military the Pentagon
(04:44):
needed thirty two pounds of rubber for every troop on
the ground for things like tires, boots, anything you need
rubber for, right, every soldier, which makes it a It
was a very very very big deal. When the Japanese
successfully invaded the Pacific theater, including Malaysia in Sri Lanka,
including all these rubber producing places and cut off the
(05:04):
rubber supply to the US, and We're like, we need rubber, yeah,
we need it bad. And they were like, well we've
got it. Yes, And by the way, let's go. When
you win, there's going to be stragglers on these islands.
You will one day podcast about them. Hero. So what happened, Chuck, well, Josh.
Because the US is industrious and bright and has it
(05:28):
never say die attitude, they said, you know what, why
don't we commission some labs and academic institutions to develop
a synthetic rubber. So they put out the call because
they needed this for the wartime demand. And UH, all
these chemists got to work on it, and UH invented
something called g R dash S, which is Government Rubber styrene,
(05:52):
and it turned out to be a great replacement for rubber,
and by we were producing twice the amount of all
all the world's rubber combined, the synthetic rubber and synthetic
rubber in the US. Wow. So this is like one
of the most this is one of the biggest chemical
chemical engineering accomplishments ever created, ever undertaken. Right, um so
(06:15):
g RS huge still in use today. Right, is like
the standard for synthetic rubber. Um it changed everything like
that was it was like bye bye, Malaysia, Sorry about
your your rubber monopoly falling apart. You shouldn't have let
you pain invade. Well, I'm sure they still had plenty
of customers. I'm sure they still did. They weren't like, oh,
(06:35):
we got all this rubber, right, what are we gonna do?
We we we chose the wrong team. Uh So, this,
this synthetic rubber, this triumph of chemical engineering, was not
without setbacks though, Right. Well, no, anytime you're trying to
synthesize something like that, it's gonna there's gonna be some
ups and downs. And this was a nationwide challenge by
(06:55):
the War Production Board. It wasn't just like hey, you
five guys over here. It was like, attention in all
chemical engineers, all chemists, anybody who has anything to do
with chemistry. We need a synthetic rubber, and we needed
an abundant supply. So there are a lot of people
working on this, and one of those guys was James
Wright of General Electric GE. He mixed bork acid with
(07:17):
silicon oil, and uh, so you know that this is
gonna be a great synthetic rubber. Unfortunately it wasn't a
great synthetic rubber. His quote unquote bouncing putty is what
he called it. But Gee thought I had some promise.
Gee thought I had some promise. But it did pretty
much wallow away in obscurity at first, right for um,
(07:41):
almost a decade. It just kind of made the rounds
to other places like, hey, can your guys do anything
like with this, We'll share the patent, whatever, just figure
out what we can do with this, and uh, apparently
GE got this. Uh. It was so widespread that it
made its way to a party that a guy named
Peter Hodgson, who owned an ad agency in New Haven, Connecticut,
(08:04):
attended a cocktail party. Remember spam. That's where spam came from.
Cocktail party in New Year's Eve. Great things happen when
you get together and drink. Uh. This guy was at
a at a cocktail party and saw some people playing
with this um bouncing putty that James as James Wright
called it, and said, you know what, these adults seem
fascinated by this. I just happened to be working on
(08:25):
a catalog for a toy store, and I think this
would make a great adult novelty. So he approached the
lady who owned the Block toy store, right yeah, and
I got there's varying accounts of this story. I think
it's one of those deals where because I saw somewhere
where she was the one that saw it and contacted
him and said, hey, can you put this in my catalog?
(08:47):
So either way, Peter Hodgson and Ruth fall Gadder, who
owned the Block Shop toy store, they they decided to
put it on the pages of their their catalog to
sell as a toy. Right and it was two dollars,
not chump change in nine. No, it's definitely not um
(09:08):
and it was an adult novelty as they reckoned, right, Sorry,
just say adult novelty and a lot of things come
to mind, Spitzer Gifts, I know, I know. It wasn't
that kind of an adult worldly okay, uh no, it
was an adult diversion. It became a big seller, is
(09:28):
what it became. Yeah. So yeah, it was the block
shops biggest seller, one of them. Um. And then this
this I found a little hazy for reasons that remain unclear.
Did you find anything out about why fall got her
stopped backing the product. I couldn't find anything on that,
but I guess even though it sold big for her,
she was just like whatever. Maybe she just had her
thing going and she's like, why don't I want to
(09:49):
start a new product. I'm a toy store owner? Yeah,
why do I want to be a millionaire? Exactly when
he's the root of all evil for her, R. Rubic,
I have no no plans for the exactly so uh so,
the whole, the whole, the whole drive, the whole push
to make this into something big, what we now know
as silly Putty fell completely the Hodgson and he turned
(10:12):
into a whirling dervish. Between nineteen fifty, he borrowed a
hundred and forty seven dollars and bought another batch from
ge hired a Yale student to roll them into uh
twenty eight graham one ounce balls, packaged them in plastic
Easter eggs, and sold them to double Day bookshops and
(10:34):
Neiman Marcus along the way. He also um took them
to some chemical engineers in Schenectady, right yeah, and said, hey,
copy that reverse engineering. It's like that website that has
like all of your favorite recipes from like Applebee's and
Kentucky Fried Chicken. Reverse engineering. First get chicken from a
sealed bag, right, that's pretty sauced exactly, and put it
(10:56):
in a pan. Yes, they're like, do you have Cisco's
phone number? So that's what he did, and you're right,
he did make pretty quick work of it, um, because
after he opened a manufacturing plant. Yes, all this is
in a year he first encountered this stuff in this
is nineteen fifty. He believed in this what would be
Actually he's he had already settled on silly Putty as
(11:17):
the name. Yeah, well, he was an ad agency guy,
so brain storing some names, evaluated fifteen of them, was like,
this is the one he trademarked. It was Nutty Putty one.
I think that was one of them. I think that
would have sold to So he had the silly Putty name.
At this point, opened the manufacturing plant in Connecticut, and
soon after that landed Neeman Marcus in double day bookshops
as customers, which was huge, it was, but it became
(11:40):
even huger when um some writers from the new Yorker
went to Double Day, and they encountered, do you want
to read this part? You're I'm not gonna read it,
Scotch and read this one all right. It was in
the Talk of the Town section in nineteen fifty in
the New Yorker. We went into the Double Day bookshop
at Fifth Avenue and fifty second Street the other day,
(12:00):
intending in our innocence to buy a book, and found
all the clerks busy selling silly putty, a gooey, pinkish,
repellent looking commodity. The commodity I love that that comes
in plastic containers, the size and shape of eggs. We
sought out Mr Lee Weber, the manager of the bookshop,
to ascertain the mysterious link between it and Double Day.
He told us that silly putty is the most terrific
(12:22):
item and that Double Day shops have been privileged to
handle it since forever. Amber yea forever Amber. I looked
it up. It was a bestseller from the forties. It
was about a woman in Restoration England's late seventeenth century
England who, through her sexy wit, went from rags to
riches and became like the favorite mistress of Charles the
second was banned in Boston. Yeah so because of this
(12:45):
um pretentious bit of cynical whimsy that appeared in the
New Yorker, Um, the sales overnight, uh for Silly Putty
just exploded. He got Hodgson got um three hundred, seven
hundred and fifty thousand orders. Two D Man, Why did
(13:06):
I quarter of a mill? You're probably thinking three quarters?
I was. I was thinking about the orders that weren't there, exactly.
He got a quarter of a mill in three days,
a quarter of a million orders, and at two bucks
a pop, that's a lot of money, especially considering that
he only half a million dollars. Yeah, yeah, that's well. Yeah,
I was thinking about the half a million he didn't make.
(14:03):
Uh So it was like basically an overnight success thanks
to Neiman Marcus, Double Day Books and the New Yorker
and GE and the Japanese. But I mean again, this
is all happening in a year that's pretty speedy. This
is a whirlwind year for this guy. I'm happy for him.
Just just looking back on this story, I hope he
was a good guy and he didn't like beat up
little kids on his way to work. He passed away
(14:25):
in nineteen seventy six. I hope before then he didn't
do bad things, but he saw it become a huge
success because when he died in nineteen seventy six, Silly
Putty was in twenty two countries plus the United States,
with sales exceeding five million a year. And that was
in seventy six. Yeah, which I looked it up. That's
nineteen million today, ten dollars, I think. But um, it's
(14:48):
it's pretty it's pretty good. Yeah. Uh yeah, they seem to,
they seem to, Yeah, well he's set up um Arnold
Clark Inc. And I never found out who Arnold Clark kiss.
Maybe that was an alien of his, who knows, um,
But Yeahola apparently owns Silly Putty. Now, now we've just
described the history of Silly Putty. That should be enough. Um,
(15:11):
But I mean, surely there's no one out there who
hasn't played a Silly Putty before. I used to play
with it like crazy when I was a kid. And
one thing I would do, which is something that they
found out. You know, it was originally intended for adults,
and they were kind of surprised to learn that kids
were into it and it didn't take long for the
kids sales to dwarf that of adults. It was nine
(15:34):
sales overtook it. Initially he said, He's like, you know,
this is great for adults because you can come home
and unwind at the end of the day by squeezing
it and just blowing off steam by copying newsprint with it,
May I, And that's what I did with it, was
was copied comic books. So in that New Yorker article
they interviewed Hodgson and he had he had a quote,
(15:55):
it means five minutes of escape from neurosis. It means
not having to worry about career or family difficulties, and
it appeals to people of superior intellect. The inherent ridiculousness
of the material acts as an emotional release to hard
pressed adults. So it obviously worked because we're not in
Korea any longer. It's interesting, though, that he was wrong.
(16:16):
I think it's funny how somebody can be wrong on
something and still be right, you know what I mean,
Like all the uses and the intent was he was
completely wrong, but it's still skyrocketed, and he's like, oh, well,
it's for kids. Then he kind of cast a wide net.
On the patent license, it was for um stress relief
hand therapy for people who needed it. Um it could
(16:37):
be used to block out low frequency noises. Yeah, they
still claim you can do all this stuff today, like
it's good for therapy and for like gumming up holes
and cleaning typewriters key which is a huge use these days.
Well computer keys. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about this,
um but yeah, so the guy was very much focused
on it being uh um for are adults, but kids
(17:01):
kind of took it for themselves, mainly because you could.
One of the great properties of silly putty is you
can stretch it out, push it down on newsprint, and
you have a mirror image of it. That's what I said.
That's what he used to do. Oh you did say that. Yeah, comics, comics,
and you can't it's harder to it's harder to do
that these days because the print they use, like you
literally have to find like a newspaper in order to
(17:25):
do that. Yeah, you can't do it on the Internet
or a magazine. Yeah, you can't do it on a kindle.
You could do it on a magazine. H No, I
think you can know, dude, it's got to pick up
the ink. I know I can't do it on a magazine.
I can tell you from reading Harper's by the Pool
that that's stuff smears. And if it's smears, I guarantee
(17:46):
you can get it on silly putty. Uh. Lucky for
him though, it was non toxic, so when kids started
playing with it and inevitably putting it in their mouth,
there were no issues with that. Right, So how you
should not eat it? We should say that don't eat
anything that's not food or anything that has the name
silly in it, or putty, silly string, silly anything. Um.
(18:06):
So Hodgson made mention of its um inherent ridiculousness of
the material. Right, Um, it has some really strange properties. Uh.
He originally called it so. He described it as a
solid liquid right when you um. When you stretch it,
it's like taffy. It stretches, right. Uh. If you pull it,
(18:28):
it just snaps apart if you quickly and with a
lot of force. Um. If you stick it to like say,
um bookcase, you come back a few days later, it
will have very slowly moved down, very slowly, very which
means it flows, which is weird. But we'll get to
that in a minute. Um. And when you roll it
up into a ball, it bounces higher than rubber. Yeah,
(18:51):
they did a test. They rolled it into like a
perfect little ball, and they dropped it with no force
from three ft and it bounce bounces back two and
a half feet. Supposedly, that is dynamite. Not bad. And
if you throw it down real hard, you know you've
got yourself a super ball in your hands. So what
is the stuff? Well, what are the the what's the
(19:11):
science of silly putty chuck? The science of so? Well,
before we get there, can I say about the egg?
There are several varying accounts on why it was put
in an egg. Some people say it was because his
first batch went out before Easter and then he just said, hey,
it's actually pretty good idea, let's just keep it in
the egg. Other people say he got the inspiration while
(19:33):
eating eggs one morning, good for you. And still other
people say that he couldn't find another container in abundance,
and he had like a line on these plastic eggs,
and I was like, I'll just use desk because this
is a pretty good way to put it in there.
It's about an ounce so I let's just do that
either way. That became the signature that's still used today.
(19:56):
Anybody full of egg carms, right, the egg fill is
silly putty. I feel silly. You could probably get silly
putty full of egg, but you don't have to do
it yourself at home. Um. Alright, So back to what
this stuff is, um, josh, it is a polymer, right, yeah,
it's a visco elastic polymer. Basically, it's subject to the
(20:22):
science of fluid chemistry. Right. And fluids are not necessarily liquids.
Liquids are fluids, but not all fluids or liquids. Gas
can be a fluid, Some semi solid substances can be fluid. Basically,
a fluid is anything that yields to slight pressure and
has no definite shape. Fluid Your your gut is at
(20:48):
least okay. Um. So so that's uh, that's the science.
That's the part of chemistry and physics that we're looking
as fluid chemistry. Um. And the ruling principle of that
of fluid chemistry is viscosity. Where do we talk about this?
I know we've talked about viscosity. We talked about viscosity
in UM quicksand right sheer mayonnaise This quas visquosity, Josh.
(21:12):
Viscosity is uh. It measures how much a fluid resist
flow at a certain temperature. So so viscosity is resistance
resistance to flow. If you're like me and you can
never remember what's viscosity, what's viscous, or what's high or
low viscous, viscosity is resistance to flow. Actually the easiest
way to remember is water is low. That pretty much
says it all, just so, that's easy. Like peanut butter
(21:34):
would have a high viscosity, water would have a low viscosity.
That's pretty easy way to it has a high resistance
to flow or low resistance to flow, like honey or
molasses and um. Viscosity is often measured in pascal seconds,
Not so much anymore now it's measured by dying seconds
per square centimeter, also called poise, and ten poise equals
(21:58):
one pascal second. What that means I cannot. I couldn't
rent my mind around before then every site that I
saw it took it for granted that I understood what
what that measures. But it measures viscosity or flow. As
far as I understand, what I love is that someone
somewhere said, uh, pascal seconds just said and cutting it right.
(22:21):
The guy whose last name was Poise or poisel, I
believe that's what happ came up with poise um. But yeah,
so that's uh how viscosity is measured UM. And the
more pascal seconds are, the more poise there are, the
more the higher the viscosity is UM. But the thing
about viscous fluids, they all well, I should say, most
(22:47):
of them are subject to um temperature. That's what affects
their viscosity. If you if you have cold honey that
you're trying to get out of the bottle, it doesn't
flow very well. But if it's a room temperature or
if it's warm, it flows. It's it's much less viscous, right,
it flows much more easily because it's subject just to temperature.
(23:09):
That makes it a newtonium fluid. That's also a pet peeve.
When you go to a place and get pancakes or
waffles or French toast and they have the heated syrup.
Oh I like that, you do? Yeah? I like my
syrup thick? Okay um, you like it thin and watery
like that? Yeah, as long as it's warm it's watery
because it's low and viscosity and it's warm. Um, but
(23:32):
that's but it's just temperature. There has nothing to do
with force or pressure or anything like that. If a
fluid is subject to not only temperature but also force,
it's what's called a non Newtonium fluid. Chuck, are we
(24:14):
at the email point? I believe we are, Chuck. This
was pretty nato. We got an email from a young
listener just a few weeks ago that seemingly had nothing
to do with this podcast. But Josh and his wisdom
looks back and says, hey, this kid actually described this
Newtonian fluid very well. Yeah, and so let's just read
his description. And it came before we decided to do
(24:36):
silly putties, so it was all just serendipitous, just sitting there.
So I'm just gonna read the holy he and this
marks the first time that a listener has actually contributed
to the body of the show's information. And so this
is a UM. He's a young listener too, as we'll
find out, Dearest Josh, Chuck and Jerry, and he spelled
Jerry's name correctly right out of the gates. Kids on
the Ball, Hi guys, I wanted to say how much
(24:58):
I love your podcast and your thing voices which get
me through long road trips. I may be considered one
of your younger quote listeners since I am eleven years young.
I needed an excuse to email you, so I'll tell
you a little bit about non newtonium fluids. This kid,
Sir Isaac Newton said that fluids such as water flow
continuously regardless of forces that act upon it. So if
(25:21):
you put your hand under a faucet, the water still
flows no matter what, making it a newtonium fluid. But
non newtonium fluids like catch up blood and yogurt behave
differently based on the amount of stress added onto it.
Try adding corn starch to water. If you put your
hand into it, it behaves like a liquid and allows
your hand to go through it. But if you punch
(25:41):
it with a lot of force, it behaves like a
solid and stops your hand from entering. Corn Starch and
water is called you black, like the doctor Seus's book Bartholomew,
Bartholomew and the O Black. Sorry if that was long
boring or not entertaining. I don't write articles as well
as you, guys, anyway, I love the podcast and keep
up the great work. I hope to keep listening to
(26:01):
the podcast and that one day we will hear Jerry
speak together. We will find a way. Your podcast confused
my friends with amazing knowledge and make me sound like
the smartest kid in sixth grade, and for that, I
thank you you'r s y s K super fan Matthew
from New York PS, what kind of music do you
guys like? I like Pink, Floyd Hue, listened the News
and weird Al Yankovic. So there's non Newtonian fluids for you.
(26:26):
And dude, when you came to me and said, hey,
are you cool with us reading this kid's thing to
describe this? I went yeah, because you know what that means.
I don't have to do it. He saved me. Yeah,
he did know. He saved both of us. Funny our
favorite little U Blake, New York. Basically, the non Newtonium fluid,
as as Matthew points out, is basically acts like a
(26:47):
solid and a liquid all at once. So he was
right way back. Hodgson was way back in the day
correct when he said it was a liquid solid or
a solid liquid exactly. Um. The reason Why is because
it's main ingredient is polydime methyl si ox sane, right,
and that means that's what gives silly putty. It's fisco
Alaska fisco elastic properties. So it changes depending on long
(27:13):
flow time meanings, say the force of gravity acting on
it down a bookcase um and temperatures. Right, So a
long flow time a high temperature, it behaves like a
highly viscus fluid. It will just kind of slowly flow,
but at lower temperatures and when um the when when
it has short flow times high pressure is applied really quickly,
(27:36):
it will just break, which is why you can snap it.
I wonder, I guess if you heat it up, does
it become liquid? If you heat it up, it becomes radioactive.
It's like super Happy fun Ball. Okay, remember that you
don't the same live commercial for super Happy Funball. It's
just like a regular ball. But there are all these
warrings like do not stand directly at super happy fun Ball.
It's super happy Funball begins to smoke, run away. You
(27:59):
gotta look it up. I'll find it for you. We remember,
we fought for that. For the title of our audiobooks
was like the super happy fun guy to what you know,
happiness or whatever. I think awesome was in there somewhere
and they said, now, yeah, simplified. Um, So that's it.
That's the science of silly putty. But let's say, Chuck,
you don't have much money, you're down on your luck
(28:20):
in this economy. It happens you still want some silly putty.
What do you do? You make it? Dude, You can
very easily make your own. I don't know this here,
you do, okay? Because I don't have this. I know
that there's probably some sort of Borax involved. There is
bo x involved, or you can use corn starts for this.
I'm gonna use boor x because I think we should
(28:41):
support our friends at twenty mule team bore Ax hundred
something years. And by the way, kids, Uh, even though
this is a safe thing, you should always get your
parents to help you when you're making stuff like this,
because you might just make a big mess and then
they would be mad at us and take away your iPod.
It's exactly right. We don't want that. Uh. There was
(29:02):
I was listening to an old episode and there was
one about a kid who wrote in and said that
we had um we've gotten his iPod taken away because
his teacher he asked her about alien hand syndrome, and um,
his teacher couldn't answer. So she took his iPod and
said it was a utensil for cheating. And he said,
for the record, I never used my iPods a utensil
(29:23):
for cheating, basically smoked her. She was embarrassed. So, um,
if you wanted to go ahead and gather these things. Um,
there's a white craft glue, Elmer's glue will work. Um
any bor X twenty mule team Borax works very well. Uh.
Some warm water and food coloring if you like, and
we'll we'll wait here while you gather thus, okay Um.
(29:46):
So you want to take your white craft glue, you
want one cup of it sixteen ounces eight ounces sorry, right,
okay um, which I think is the standard size of
just a regular thing of Elmer's glue. You take your
three quarters cut warm water, and you make a nice
glue water mixture, and you're gonna find that the glue
(30:07):
dissolves pretty readily in the warm water, chuck and which
means it has a very low viscosity. Then you take
your borax, just a half of a teaspoon. I've also
seen up to a teaspoon one of those two slowly added,
and you're gonna find very quickly that the viscosity increases dramatically. Okay,
(30:27):
um after a little while when you're stirring it, you're
eventually gonna have to get it to the point where
you just pull it out and you rub it together
with your hands or whatever. And um oh, when you
add the borax, you also want to add the food
coloring to if not yours have white silly putty. Um,
but you roll around in your hands, there's your silly putty.
It's done. And what happened was your the polymer chains,
(30:50):
the molecular chains of water and the glue weren't sticking.
They just slid right past each other, which kept them
in the Newtonian fluid category. Or but the moment you
out of that borax, it came in and said, hey,
let's all just band together. And it took these polymer
chains and linked them so they could no longer slide
past one another. They were turned into a net or web,
(31:13):
and that's what gives the putty it's elastic like qualities,
and these long polymer chains it just hook up and
hook up and hook up. How long does that stuff last?
You know, I don't think humanity has been around long
enough to know how long silly putty will last? I mean,
how made silly putty? I don't know until your little
brother eat it? Because I thought I saw something about
putting it in the fridge. You can store in a
(31:34):
receivable bag or container to keep soft. Well, that nice.
So that's it. And does it does it copy print
the same way? I wonder, or just have the same
elastic properties? I don't know, don't. Let's do it all right, Okay,
that's hey, that's what we're doing this weekend. Okay, weekend.
I'll bring the apron sweet to bring the beer. So
(31:55):
that's it. I would say that this UM this podcast
was a quintessential um Stuff you should Know podcast. It
had an iconic American product. They had a lot of history,
It had science, the the the chemistry behind it, and
it had do do it yourself at home recipes. The
(32:15):
four tenants and a kid and a cute kid. Five pillars,
five pillars, We we nailed this one. And a cocktail
party six pillars. That's it, all right, Go get you
some silly putty. I know they had. I think for
their anniversary they had gold silly putty for the first
time ever. Believe I remember that. And I think they
now have things like glowing the dark and you know
(32:37):
it gets all wacky. It used to just look like, uh,
I guess, pinkish, but sort of a fleshy pinkish. Remember that. Yeah, Um,
I think they still have that too, though the original.
They've got to You can't. You can't forget your roots
like that. So dads can go to the toy store
and say, nah, you're not getting glow in the dark.
You're getting this, You're getting pink. That's what I had
when I was a kid, and I loved it. You're
(32:58):
gonna love it too. Let's get some comics wherever they
sell those and press it against their online all right,
all right, So if you want to learn more about
silly putty type and silly putty, it brings up a
really cool article, um, including a recipe, an extended recipe
even um. So that's s I L L Y Space
p U T T Y and in the search bar
(33:19):
how stuff works dot Com. Since I said search bar,
that means it's time for a listener mail the second
one in this podcast. Indeed, Josh, I'm gonna call this
smart stuff from a lady in Columbia, South Carolina. You know,
sometimes we just get these listeners that just send us
really good, intelligent emails, and I think those are always
(33:40):
worth reading. So here we go. Hey, guys, just finished
listening to the Future of the Internet cast had a
few thoughts about the so called dumbing down of culture. First,
I'm highly skeptical of any claims that uh to assert
a sea change in intellectual ability. Smart and dumb are
culturally and historically relative terms, and it's also true that
(34:01):
people have been bemoaning the intellectual poverty caused by new
technologies ever since writing was invented. Secondly, I'm not actually
sure the utilization of deep memory a good is a
good one in and of itself. Yeah, something might be
lost with those ah ha moments, but I'm much more
impressed by someone's ability to make novel and surprising connections,
(34:22):
something that the Internet actually facilitates, than by the pedantic
memorization of facts, which I would argue wasn't pedantic, but
that's me. Third, and most personally, the ability of the
Internet to store and offer up vast quantities of information
doesn't necessarily wipe out sustained research or thought. I'm finishing
up a dissertation that I could have, uh couldn't have
(34:43):
written without Google Books, and that would have taken me
a lot longer without Google scholar. Yeah, sometimes I find
myself lost and then indefinitely I'm sorry, infinitely expanding more
ass of tabs as I disappeared down some research rabbit hole.
This guy is obvious putting off working on this dissertation
by writing this email. It's a lady, but that's always
(35:05):
been the nature of scholarship. You never know where a
question will take you, and the ability to quickly pursue
various strands and to figure out which ones aren't going
to take you anywhere productive is I think transformative for academia.
All of this to say, the Internet might diminish our
ability to store quantities of facts, but mourning that ability
privileges facts and quantities effects are not necessarily indicative of
(35:27):
a culture's intelligence. Sustained reasoning and interpretation is, of course
something else entirely, and that is from Josephine Are of Columbia,
South Carolina via Los Angeles. So wait, she's I think
currently in Colombia from l A. No, no no, no, from
l A via Columbia. Nope, she's in l A FROMA.
(35:50):
You are right now, man? How funny this follow up
a smart email like that, dumbrie like demitery. All right,
that's it. Thank you Josephine for that. We appreciate it.
That was actually kind of a big topic of UM
dissent people writing in about that after that podcast. But thanks.
(36:12):
I think she summed it up pretty well. Agreed. Um. Also,
we should correct ourselves Cheddar American cheese no English after
the English town of Cheddar, So sorry about that, England,
thanks for taking away one of our American cheeses. I
can't think of any more corrections right now, but we
will figure them out, Yes we will. If you want
(36:34):
to send us a correction, we're always open to that.
You can also send us any cute, silly putty stories
that you've got, um let us hear them. You can
tweet to us s y s K podcast. You can
um go on to Facebook dot com slash stuff you
should know, that's our fan page, or you can send
us an old email at Stuff podcast at how stuff
(36:55):
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com.
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