Stuff You Should Know - How Silly Putty Works

Episode Date: October 4, 2011

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff stuff that'll piss you off Cops, are they just like looting? Have they just like pillaging they just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or be in Rob they call civil acid Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Hey witches, I'm Ilaria Baldwin and I'm Michelle Campbell Mason and together We host the new iHeart radio podcast witches anonymous So bring your brooms and join us as we tackle why women are pinned against each other and what we can do to stop

This vicious cycle consider this your invitation to witches anonymous because which please we're in this together Listen to witches anonymous on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts Welcome to stuff you should know from house stuff works calm Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant With me as always Looking good. I am yeah. Thank you, Josh That makes this stuff you should know and you were looking good as well sir. Is that a new shirt? No I'm not a new it's a less than six months old. Yeah, I guess it's kind of new. All right

I'm trying to think the most boring way I could start a show those ask you pretty sure 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's bigger in Texas green t-shirt Yeah, we're both in jeans. I have on my Last chance garage hat Yep, anything else. I want that. I want to set the scene for once. Um, I've got a beard now You've had a beard Yeah, I'm clean shaven clean shaven. Yeah, I've started to do the clean shaven thing more than scruffy No, I was doing scruffy for a while. I know 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. Yeah, 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, okay? Back in 1839 there is a man named Charles Goodyear and Charles Goodyear whose last name you might recognize for good reason 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 kind of stickier gooey at warmer temperatures and

rigid at cooler temperatures and Made it much more pliable 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 Sure. All of the stuff that we use rubber for today. This guy is the reason we're able to right the reason It's tough enough. Yes. Now the fact that this came at 1839 means that this innovation 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 the raw material for this vulcanization process

And luckily, I guess you could say at least for the Westerners 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. I am so we went down 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 in rubber for decades until 1876 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 rubber tree. All right, that could Coincidentally thrive in British colonies in Southeast Asia. Perfect It was perfect for the British. Yeah by 1910 the Brazilian stranglehold on the rubber trade Was being challenged and was in real trouble by countries like Malaysia and Sri Lanka and Thailand and

by 1920 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 that 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 for 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. I 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 You did 32 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 a never-say-die attitude. Yeah, they said, you know what? Why don't we commission some? labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber right so they put out the call because they needed this for the wartime demand and all these chemists got to work on it and Invented something called gr-s Which is government rubber styrene and it turned out to be a great replacement for rubber and by 1944 we were producing twice the amount of all the world's rubber

Combined the synthetic rubber and synthetic rubber in the US. Well, so this is like one of the most This is one of the biggest chemical. Yeah chemical engineering accomplishments ever created ever undertaken, right? That's right Um, so GRS huge still in use today, right? Yeah, it's like the standard for synthetic rubber. Uh-huh It changed everything like that was it was like bye-bye Malaysia. Sorry about your your rubber monopoly Following a part you shouldn't have let Japan invade. Well, I'm sure they still had plenty of customers I'm sure they still do they weren't like go. We got all this rubber, right? What are we gonna do? What we chose the wrong team 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 need it an abundant supply. So there are a lot of people working on this Oh, yes, and one of those guys was James Wright of General Electric GE. Mm-hmm. He mixed boric acid with silicon oil and 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 uh GE thought I had some promise GE thought I had some promise, but it did pretty much Wallow away in obscurity at first right for Almost a decade. It's just kind of made the rounds to other places like hey, can you guys do anything like with this? We'll share the patent. Yeah, whatever just like just figure out what we can do with this Yeah, and apparently GE got this 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 cocktail party on New Year's Eve

Great things happen when you get together and drink this guy was at a cocktail party and saw some people playing with this Bouncing putty that James as James Wright called it and said you know what these adults seem fascinated by this I just happen to be working on 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? So either way Peter Hodgson and Ruth Fallgatter who owned the block shop toy store. Yeah

They they decided to put it on the pages of their their catalog to sell as a toy, right? And it was $2 not chump change in 1949. No, it's definitely not And it was an adult novelty as they reckoned, right? Sorry Say adult novelty and a lot of things come to mind. Okay, Spencer gifts. I know I know I wasn't that kind of an adult Worldly, okay. No, it was an adult diversion. It became a big seller is what it became. Yeah So yeah, it was the block shops biggest seller one of them And then this this I found a little hazy for reasons that remain unclear

Did you find anything out about why Fallgatter stopped now backing the product? I couldn't find anything on that but I guess even though it sold big for her. She was just like yeah, whatever Maybe she just had her thing going and she was like, why do I want to start a new product? Yeah, I'm a toy store owner Yeah, why do I want to be a millionaire? Exactly. That is the root of all evil. Good for her. Take this cube, Mr. Rubik I have no no plans for this So so in the whole the whole the the whole drive the whole push to make this Into something big what we now know a silly putty fell completely to Hodgson That is true and he turned into a whirling dervish between 1949 and 1950. He borrowed a hundred and forty seven dollars

Bought another batch from GE. Mm-hmm hired a Yale student to roll them into 28 gram one ounce balls. Yeah packaged them in plastic Easter eggs and sold them to Doubleday book shops and Neiman Marcus along the way. He also Took them to some chemical engineers in Schenectady, right? Yeah, and said hey copy this reverse engineer. Yeah, it's like that website that has like all of your favorite recipes from like Applebee's and Kentucky fried chicken reverse engineered. Yeah first get chicken from a sealed bag That's pre-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 Because after he opened a manufacturing plant. Yes, all this is in a year. Yeah, he first encountered this stuff in 1949 This is 1950. He believed in this what would be actually he's he'd already settled on silly putty as the name Yeah, well, he was an ad agency guy So he brainstormed some names evaluated 15 of them was like this is the one night any trade 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 Neiman Marcus and double-day bookshops as

Customers, which was huge. It was it but it became even huger when some writers from the New Yorker went to double day Yeah, and they encountered do you want to read this part? You're I'm not gonna read it Are you gonna read it? Take a swig of Scotch and read this one All right, it was in the talk of the town section in 1950 in the New Yorker We went into the double-day bookshop at Fifth Avenue and 52nd 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, and forever amber. I looked it up. It was a bestseller from the 40s Okay, it was about a woman in Restoration England's late 17th century England who through her sexy wit Went from rags to riches and became like the favorite mistress of Charles II. It was banned in Boston. Really? Yeah so because of this pretentious bit of a cynical whimsy that appeared in the New Yorker the sales

overnight For silly putty just exploded. He got Hodgson got 300 no 750,000 orders 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 quarter of a million orders and at two bucks a pop That's a lot of money, especially considering that he only tap a million dollars. Yeah Yeah, yeah, that's well. Yeah, I was thinking about the half a million. He didn't make People who don't know Bruce have to understand two things one is he's built like something Michelangelo's card of a piece of marble

This is true. This is true. And number two He's the first person to show you that at every party at every dinner Maybe take it take a shirt off. Sure comes off like before dessert. I'm Bruce Basi You may not know me yet, but you already know most of my launch dates by their first names and voices alone That was George and Julia, but believe it or not My podcast guests see me as more than just a piece of meat like my thoughtful friends Scarlett Bruce Basi I love you so much and I love meeting minds with you What we do on my new podcast table for two is what everyone does when they're at lunch with an old friend

We tell stories. We definitely gossip James Corden winds up kind of ripping off your set. There you go And we always go deep listen to table for two on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Hey everybody, it's your boy Michael Kyle world famous often talked about alleged comedian Some of y'all know me as mr. Whitaker from Martin some of you know me a showboat from house party 3 and yes I have told Jim crackers for everybody and some of you don't know me at all But you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael talks to everybody That's right. They gave my own show y'all whoo whoo whoo

Michael talks to everybody where every week will be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking most importantly We're gonna have a lot of fun when it's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out Everybody I'm telling you it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got T.I. We got oh Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just come back. He's gonna be in for a minute Everybody we gonna be talking to him

We gonna be talking on this show listen to Michael talks to everybody on December 5th on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast 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 in 1976. I hope before then yeah, he didn't do bad things But he saw it become a huge success because when he died in 1976 silly putty was in 22

countries plus the United States with sales exceeding 5 million a year and that was in 76 Yeah, which I looked it up. That's 19 million today really 2010 dollars. Wow. I think crayola owns it now I but it's it's pretty it's pretty good. Yeah Yeah, they seem to they seem to yeah Well, he set up a Arnold Clark Inc. And I never found out who Arnold Clark is and maybe that was an alias of his Who knows? But yeah, it's weird crayola apparently owns silly putty now Now we've just described the history of silly putty. That should be enough But I mean

Surely there's no one out there who hasn't played with 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 Yeah, and it didn't take long for the kids sales to dwarf that of adults. It was 1955 Yeah, sales overtook it initially he said He was 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 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. I Think it's funny how somebody can be wrong on something and still be right. You know what I mean? Yeah Like all the uses in the intent was he was completely wrong, but it's still skyrocketed and he was like, oh Well, yeah for kids then he kind of cast a wide net on the patent license. It was for

stress relief Hand therapy for people who needed it 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 Gumming up holes and cleaning typewriter keys. Yeah, which is a huge use these days. Well computer keys Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot about those these tough keys. Um, but yeah, so the guy was very much focused on it being 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 a newsprint and you have a mirror image of it. That's what I said. That's what I used to do Oh, you did say that. Yeah comics comics, and you can't it's hard to do 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 magazine. Yeah, you can't do it on a Kindle. You could do it on a magazine. I know I think you can No, dude, it's got to pick up the ink. I know I can't do it on magazine. I can tell you from reading Harper's by the pool that that stuff smears and if it smears

I guarantee you can get it on silly buddy 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 though 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 inherent ridiculousness of the material, right? It has some really strange properties He originally called it so he described it as a solid liquid, right when you when you Stretch it. It's like taffy. It stretches very elastic slowly, right?

If you pull it it just snaps apart if you pull it quickly and with a lot of force If you stick it to like say Bookcase mm-hmm. 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 And when you roll it up into a ball it bounces 25% higher than rubber Yeah, they did a test they they rolled it into like a perfect little ball And they dropped it with no force from three feet and it bounce bounces back two and a half feet Supposedly that is dynamite not bad. Yeah, and if you throw it down real hard, you know

You got yourself a super ball in your hands, right? So what is this stuff? What are 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 Oh, yeah 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. Yeah, 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. Yeah, either way that became the signature That's still used today The buddy full of egg comes right The egg full of silly buddy. I feel silly you could probably get silly putty full of egg But you'd have to do it yourself at home. Yeah All right, so back to what this stuff is yeah

Josh it is a polymer, right? Yeah, it's a Visco elastic polymer No, it basically it's subject to the science of fluid chemistry, right and fluids are not necessarily liquids liquids are fluids But not all fluids are 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. Yeah So I'm fluid You're your gut is at least okay So if so, that's that's the science

that's the part of chemistry and physics that we're looking at fluid chemistry and the Ruling principle of that of fluid chemistry is viscosity Yeah, what do we talk about this? I know we've talked about viscosity. We talked about viscosity in quicksand right shear mayonnaise this class this quassity Josh viscosity is It measures how much a fluid resist flow at a certain temperature. So so viscosity is Resistance to flow if you're like me and you can never remember what's viscosity? What's viscous or what's low 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 that's easy like peanut butter would have a high viscosity water would have a low viscosity

It's pretty easy way to remember it has a high resistance to flow or a low resistance to flow like honey or molasses and Viscosity is often measured in Pascal seconds not so much anymore now It's measured by nine seconds per square centimeter also called poise and ten 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 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 Pascal seconds just didn't cut in it right the guy whose last name was poise Or poiselle I believe that's what I came up with poise

But yeah, so that's how? Viscosity is measured and the the more Pascal seconds or the more poise there are The more the higher the viscosity is But the thing about viscous fluids they all Well, I should say most of them are subject to Temperature that's what affects their viscosity if you if you have cold honey that you're trying to get out of the bottle Sure, it doesn't flow very well, but if it's at room temperature or if it's warm it flows It's much less viscous right it flows much more easily because it's subject just to temperature

Yeah, 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 toast and they have the heated syrup Oh, I like that you do yeah, I like my syrup thick okay You like it thin and watery like that Yeah, as long as it's warm. It's watery because it's low in viscosity and it's warm But 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-Newtonian fluid Chuck

People who don't know Bruce have to understand two things one is he's built like something Michelangelo's card out of a piece of marble truth This is true and number two. He's the first person to show you that at every party at every dinner I mean take it take a shirt off sure comes off like before dessert. I'm Bruce Bozzi You may not know me yet, but you already know most of my lunch dates by their first names and voices alone That was George and Julia, but believe it or not my podcast guests see me as more than just a piece of meat Like my thoughtful friends Scarlett Bruce Bozzi. I love you so much and I love Meeting minds with you what we do on my new podcast table for two is what everyone does when they're at lunch with an old friend

We tell stories. We definitely gossip James Corden winds up kind of ripping off your set. There you go And we always go deep listen to table for two on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Hey everybody, it's your boy Michael Kyle world famous often talked about alleged comedian Some of y'all know me as mr. Whitaker from Martin some of you know me a showboat from house party 3 and yes I have told Jim crackers for everybody and some of you don't know me at all But you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael talks to everybody That's right. They gave my own show y'all whoo whoo whoo Michael talks to everybody where every week will be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game

Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking most importantly We're gonna have a lot of fun when it's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out Everybody I'm telling you it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got TI We got oh Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just come back. He's gonna be here for a minute Everybody we gonna be talking to him We're gonna be talking on this joke listen to Michael talks to everybody on December 5th on the iHeart radio app

Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Are we at the email point I believe we are Chuck this was pretty neat. Oh, 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 play So it was all just serendipitous just sitting there So I'm just gonna read the whole email and this marks the first time that a listener has actually contributed to the body of the shows information and so this is a

He's a young listener choose. We'll find out Dearest Josh Chuck and Jerry and he spelled Jerry's name correctly right out of the gate 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 11 years young I needed an excuse to email you so I'll tell you a little bit about non-Newtonian fluids. I love this kid Sir Isaac Newton said that fluid 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 Newtonian fluid But non-Newtonian fluids like ketchup blood and yogurt behave differently based on the amount of stress added onto it

Try adding cornstarch 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 Cornstarch and water is called ubleck like the dr. Seuss book Bartholomew Bartholomew and the ubleck 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 your sysk superfan Matthew from New York PS what kind of music do you guys like? I like Pink Floyd Huey Lewis in the news and weird Al Yankovic Awesome, so there's non-Newtonian 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, cuz you know what that means I don't have to do it. Yeah He saved me. Yeah, he did. Oh, he saved both of us funny our favorite little ubleck, right? So 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 solid liquid exactly

the reason why is Because its main ingredient is polydimethylsiloxane, right and that means that's what gives silly putty It's visco elastic visco elastic properties so it changes depending on long flow time meaning say the force of gravity acting on it down a bookcase and Temperatures right so at a long flow time a high temperature it behaves like a highly viscous fluid It it will just kind of slowly flow, right? But at lower temperatures and when it the when when it has short flow times High pressure is applied really quickly. Yeah, 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, you remember that? No, you don't decide live commercial for super happy fun ball It's just like a regular ball, but there are all these warnings like do not stare directly at super happy fun ball It's super happy fun ball begins to smoke run away You got to 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 guide to what you know happiness or whatever I think awesome was in there somewhere and they said no. Yeah simplify 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. Yeah, and 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 you do okay, cuz I don't have this. I know that there's probably some sort of Borax involved there is borax involved or you can use cornstarch for this I'm gonna use borax because I think we should support our friends at 20 mule team borax They've been doing it for a hundred something years and by the way kids 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 Yep, and then they would be mad at us and take away your iPod That's exactly right. We don't want that There was I was listening an old episode and there was one about a kid who wrote in and said that we had We gotten his iPod taken away because his teacher He asked her about alien hand syndrome. I remember that and 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 iPod as a utensil for cheating Yeah, he basically smoked her. Yeah, she was embarrassed

So if you want to go ahead and gather these things there's a white craft glue Elmer's glue will work Any borax 20 mule team borax works very well Some warm water and food coloring if you like and we'll wait here while you gather this Okay, so you want to take your white craft glue you want one cup of it 16 ounces eight ounces, sorry Right, okay 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, okay, and which means it has a very low viscosity That's right, then you take your borax just a half of a teaspoon. I've also seen up to a teaspoon One of those two all right slowly add it and you're gonna find very quickly that the viscosity increases dramatically, okay after a little while you 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. Yeah, and oh when you add the borax you also want to add the food coloring, too Sure, if not, you'll just have white silly putty

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 just hook up and hook up and hook up

How long does that stuff last you know? I I don't think humanity's been around long enough to know how long silly putty will last no I mean homemade silly buddy. I don't know until your little brother eats it cuz I thought I saw something about putting it in the fridge You can store it in a resealable bag or container to keep soft So that's it and does it does it copy a print the same way I wonder or just have the same elastic properties I don't know. We should make some. I don't know. Let's do it. All right. Okay. That's hey That's what we're doing this weekend. Okay. You're making a really big weekend. I'll bring the aprons sweet I'll bring the beer. So that's it. I would say that this this podcast was a quintessential

A 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. Oh and a kid and a cute kid five pillars five pillars We we nailed this one and a cocktail party six pillars awesome. That's it. All right. Go get you some silly putty. I know they had 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 glow in the dark and you know It gets all wacky. It used to just look like I guess pinkish, but sort of a fleshy pinkish

I remember that. Yeah, um, I think they still have that too though the original they've got to sure 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 there online. All right. All right, so if you want to learn more about silly putty type in silly putty It brings up a really cool article including a recipe an extended recipe even

So that's si lly space putty and in the search bar how stuff works comm since I said search bar That means it's time for a listener mail the second one in this podcast Indeed Josh are 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

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 Yeah, something might be lost with those aha moments But I'm much more impressed by someone's ability to make novel and surprising connections Something that the internet actually facilitates then by the pedantic memorization of facts. Okay, which I would argue isn't pedantic 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 then indefinitely. I'm sorry infinitely expanding Morass of tabs as I disappear down some research rabbit hole This guy is obviously putting off working on this 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 of facts 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 Columbia, South Carolina Via Los Angeles

Wait, does that cookie so wait? She's I think currently in Columbia. Okay, so from LA. Oh, no, no from LA via Columbia. Nope. She's in LA from Columbia. You were right man That was funny to just follow up a smart email like that with Dumbery like dimwitery dimwitery All right. Well, that's it. Thank you Josephine for that. We appreciate it. That was actually kind of a big topic of Descent people writing in about that after that. Yeah, so thanks. I think she summed it up pretty well agreed 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. Yeah, 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 Let us hear them. You can tweet to us sysk podcast. You can Go on to facebook.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 visit how stuff works calm

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff stuff that'll piss you off the cops Are they just like looting? They just like pillaging. They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a Jackmove or being Robbed they call civil asset work Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast On the podcast howler back now with Holland Roden Take a trip back to Beacon Hills for the ultimate Teen Wolf rewatch with the cast and crew Because as if a hundred episodes wasn't enough. I am bringing you all the behind the scenes

There's gonna be so much more of me each episode. Nothing is off limits and oh, that's right Well, we talked about Teen Wolf the movie Listen to howler back now with Holland Roden on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts