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If you've been reading this silly little blog for any length of time, you know a LOT about Yours Truly. Probably more than you want to know, but no amount of eyeball scrubbing or brain de-programming will allow you to un-know it. Peace that will quell my impulse to over-think and over-worry the joy right out of everything. I'm not quite there yet in the Stitchy Peace department (and not even remotely in the same universe of the others), but one thing I know for sure is that kitting up a project with pretty things, useful tools, and a ton of coordinated crap makes me insanely happy! Mrs Parkman at Hands Across The Sea Samplers just posted a FlossTube video about this very thing, and what struck me about it was the sense of happiness I felt listening to her describe her ritual for kitting up her next project. Her "pretties" and gear are in a different stratosphere than mine, to be sure, but I completely related to her joy while displaying, describing, and using her beautiful tools and treasures. So from now on I'm going to pay particular attention to the assembling of my little kits, and take a minute to enjoy the things in them. I have been the recipient of so many beautiful bits and bobs that I use every day, and I love sending a little prayer and happy vibe out into the world to the people that sent them. Last night's Guild meeting was wonderful, but (as usual) I am pretty sure I sucked the oxygen out of the room again. I'm really trying to get better at not doing that, but I get so excited to be around my GL's that I forget how to act. Cheers to Wednesday! What's giving you oxygen today? Come tell me all about it!
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for Silly Putty, the strange material that ships in an egg and behaves sometimes like a liquid and other times like a solid, necessity came in the form of Imperial Japan. In the early 1940s, as Germany waged war in Europe, the Empire of the Sun invaded rubber-producing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, cutting off supplies to the West. This was more than a minor issue. Japan's invasion of Southeast Asia threatened, literally, the entire war effort. At a loss, the U.S. War Production Board challenged industrial labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber that could be used to meet wartime production demands. Collectively, the chemists working on the problem may have achieved one of the greatest successes in the history of science: They produced a general-purpose synthetic rubber known as GR-S, or government rubber-styrene, in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the U.S.
World War II. One of those wrong turns was made by James Wright in the laboratory of General Electric. Wright mixed boric acid and silicone oil together in the hopes of creating rubber that would make Charles Goodyear proud. General Electric sent Wright's concoction to engineers all over the world, hoping to make something awesome out of the accident. Unfortunately, no one ever discovered a practical use for the "bouncing putty," which seemed destined to fade quietly into history. One man, however, rescued the substance from obscurity. His name was Peter Hodgson, and his vision would eventually lead to Silly Putty, one of the most famous toys in the history of fun and games. In this article, we'll look at the long, strange journey of Silly Putty. We'll also investigate the material's many odd properties -- and the chemistry behind them. Our first order of business: Hodgson's great gamble. World War II had been over for four years, and James Wright's bouncing putty was still in circulation as an invention in search of a practical use.
Unfortunately, no factory or manufacturing plant ever discovered an application for the goop. Peter Hodgson, who owned his own ad agency in New Haven, Conn., was at a cocktail party when he spotted the putty making the rounds. He watched as people spent minutes at a time folding, stretching and squeezing the strange stuff. He approached Ruth Fallgatter, owner of the Block Shop toy store, about listing the putty in an upcoming catalog Hodgson was helping to produce. The bouncing putty became one of the Block Shop's biggest sellers. For reasons that remain unclear, Fallgatter declined to market the product any further, but Hodgson saw its potential. He borrowed $147 to order another batch from General Electric, then hired a Yale student to place 1-ounce (28-gram) wads in plastic eggs. At the same time, Hodgson began to brainstorm names for his product. He evaluated 15 possibilities, but eventually settled on Silly Putty, for which he secured a trademark. Next, he established Arnold Clark Inc. to sell the stuff and contracted with some chemical engineers in Schenectady, N.Y., to derive a recipe based on General Electric's original formula.
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