Accidental Inventions

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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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,