SYSK Selects: How Silly Putty 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 makes the Stuff you Should Know, and you were looking good as well. Sort said in is your No, I'm not, it's I don't 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 pretty

high up there. Josh is wearing a lovely stripe blue button up as he has one to do, 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 thing more than scruffy. I was doing scruffy for a while. Are you which

way do you like? I 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, and you know some of this so you don't have

to pretend like you're surprised. Back in eighteen 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 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 appliable, much more, much more flexible, but able to stand up to really punishing conditions like heat, lots of pressure and force, which made 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 at nine means that this in ovation came during the Industrial Revolution, which means that all that stuff that the rubber could be used for could be mass produced, which means that we needed a vast source of rubber as a raw material for this

volcanization 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 indigenous and is found in vast supply, right, all right, you 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 was the center of this global trade and rubber for decades until these British guys snuck some rubber tree seeds out of the Amazon on 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 rubber tree that could coincidentally thrive in British colonies in Southeast Asia. Perfect, it was perfect for the British. By 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 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 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 come to rely on rubber so much that it was calculated the US military the Pentagon 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, including Sri Lanka, including all these rubber producing places and cut off the 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 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, and it turned out to be a great replacement for rubber.

And by n we were producing twice the amount of all the world's rubber combined, the synthetic rubber and synthetic rubber in the US. So this is like one of the most this is one of the biggest chemical chemical engineering accomplishments ever created undertaken right, um So g R S huge still in use today. Right, Yes, it's 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, 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 the War Production Board. It wasn't just like hey, you five guys over here. It was like, attention, 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 were a lot of people working on this. Yes, and one of those guys was James Wright of General Electric GE. He mixed bork acid with silicon oil and uh said, you know what, 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, 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 just figure out what we can

do with this. Yeah, and apparently Gee 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, attended a cocktail party. Remember spam. That's where spam came from a cocktail party on 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 a cattle dog 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? 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. No, that's definitely not um. And it was an adult novelty, as

they reckoned. Right, Sorry, you just say adult novelty, and a lot of things come to mind, Spencer 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 what it became. Yeah. So yeah, it was the blockshops 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's 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 start a new product. I'm a toy store owner? Yeah, why do I want to be a millionaire? Money is the root of all evil for her, Rubic,

I have no no plans for this 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 to Hodgson, and he turned 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 twenty eight Graham one ounce balls, packaged them in plastic Easter eggs, and sold them to Double Day book shops and 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. Yeah, 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 that's pretty sauced exactly and put it 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 he believed in this what would be? Actually he's he had already settled on Silly Putty as the name. Yeah, well, he was an ad agency guy, so should brainstoring some names? Evaluated fifteen of them was like, this is the one that he trademarked. It was Nutty Putty one I think

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 Neemon Marcus and Double Day bookshops as customers, which was huge, it was, but it became 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 and read this one all right. It was in the Talk of the

Town section in ninety in the New Yorker. We went into the Double Day bookshop at Fifth Avenue and fifty two Street the other day, 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 item and that Double Day shops have been privileged to handle it since forever, Amber, Yeah, 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 I was banned in Boston. Yeah.

So because of this 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 hundred. Man, why did I quarter of a mill? You're probably thinking three quarters? Yeah 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 a million dollars. Yeah, yeah, that's well, I was thinking about the half a million he didn't right. Uh So it was like basically an overnight success thanks to Neiman Markets, Double Day Books and the New Yorker and G. E. 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 nine seven 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 dollars, I think. But um, it's 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 alias of his, who knows, um, but yeah, apparently owns Silly Putty. Now, now we've just described the history of Silly Putty. That should be enough. Um, But I mean, surely there's no one out there who

hasn't played the 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 learned that kids were into it, and it didn't take long for the kids sales to dwarf that of adults. It was 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, it means five minutes of escape from neurosis. It means not having to worry about Korea or family difficulties, and it appeals

to people that supure intellect. The inherent ridiculousness of the material acts as an emotional release to hard press adults. So it obviously worked because we're not in Korea any longer. It's interesting though, that he was wrong. 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 in the intent was he was completely wrong, but it's still skyrocket 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 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 guming up holes and cleaning typewriter keys, 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 adults, but kids 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 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 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

you should not eat it. We should say that. Yeah, don't eat anything that's not food or anything that has the name silly in it or putty, silly string, silly anything. Um. 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,

it just snaps apart 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, 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 got yourself a super ball in your hands. So what is the stuff? Well, what are the the what's the 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 a pretty good idea, let's just keep it in the egg. Other people say he got the inspiration while eating eggs

one morning. Eggs are 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 this because this is a pretty good way to put it in there. It's about an ounce, so let's just do that either way. That became the signature that's still used today, silly putty full of eggs, the egg full of silly puddy, 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 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.

So fluid your your gut is at 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, shear maynaise this visquosity, Josh. Viscosity is uh. It measures how much a fluid resists flow at a certain temperature.

So so viscosity is resistant 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 it's easy. Like peanut butter 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 tien. Poise equals one pascal second. What that means I cannot. I couldn't rant my mind around before then. Yeah, 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, tascal seconds just said and cutting it right. 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 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 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. That makes it a Newtonian fluid. That's also a pet peeve. When you go to a place and get pancakes or waffles or French dose 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 water you like that as long as it's warm. It's watery because it's low and viscosity and it's warm. Um. But that's but it's just temperature there had it 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 Newtonian fluid. Chuck, are we at the email point? I believe we are, Chuck.

This was pretty neato. 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 silly Place, so it was all just serendipitous, just sitting there. So I'm just gonna read the Holy hemis.

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 game Kids on the Ball. Hi, guys, I wanted to say how much I love your podcast and your soothing 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 you put your hand under a faucet, the water still flows no matter what, making it a newtonium flu it. 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 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 Dr 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 the podcast and that one day we will hear Jerry speak together. We will find a way your podcast confuse 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 que Loosened the News and Weird Al Yankovic. So there's

non newtonium fluids for you. 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 Newtonian fluid, as as Matthew points out, is basically it acts like a 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 siloxane, right, and that means that's what gives silly putty. It's fisco Alaska fisco elastic properties. So it changes depending on long flow time meanings say the force of gravity acting on it down a bookcase, um, and temperatures right, So along 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, it'll 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 fun Ball.

It's just like a regular ball. But there are all these warnings like, do not stand directly at super Happy fun Ball. It's super happy fun Ball begins to smoke, run away. You 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 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

stars for this. I'm gonna use bo X because I think we should support our friends at twenty Mule Team bore X' doing it for a 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. That's exactly right,

and we don't want that. Uh. There was 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 sendrame, remember that, 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 for cheating. He basically smoked her. She was embarrassed. So, um,

if you want 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, 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 cup warm water, and you make a nice glue water mixture, and you're gonna find that the glue dissolves pretty readily in the warm water. Chuck, and which means it has a very low viscosity. Right. Then you take your borax, just a half of a teaspoon I've also seen up to a teaspoon one of those two. Slowly add it, and you're gonna find very quickly that the viscosity increases.

Dramatic claim. Okay, 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 sure if not yours have white silly putty. Um, but you you roll around in your hands, there's your silly putty. It's done. And what happened was your the polymer chains, 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. But the moment you added 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 a web. And that's what gives the putty. It's elastic like qualities and these long polymer chains that 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? Mean homemades everybody. I don't know until your little brother eats it. Because I thought I saw something about putting it in the fridge. You can store in a 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 had the same

elastic properties? I don't know. It makes you 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 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, It 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 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, I believe, I remember that. And I think they now have things like Glow in the Dark and you know 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

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 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 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 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. Yes, 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, something that the Internet actually facilitates, than by the pedantic memory reization of facts, which I would argue isn'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 couldn't have written without Google Books, and that would have taken me a lot longer without Google scholar. Yeah, sometimes I find myself lost and the indefinitely I'm sorry, infinitely expanding more ass of tabs as I disappeared down some research rabbit hole. This guy is obviously putting off working on his dissertation

by writing this email. It's a lady, but that's always 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

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. Wait so wait, she's I think currently in Colombia. Okay, so from l A. No, no, no from l A. VIA's Columbia. Nope, she's in l A. From you are right then? Man? How funny this follow up a smart email that with dum marie like dem witery. All right, well 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. But thanks. I think she summed it up pretty well. I 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 takeing in a way one of our American cheese is. I can't think of any more corrections right now, but we will figure them out, Yes we will. If you want 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 onto 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 works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com