Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Silly Putty Works

Episode Date: November 11, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, 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.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Saturday Select Stuff You Should Know, I'm choosing How Silly Putty Works. It originally ran in October, 2011. And as I say in this episode, it has it all.

It has all six pillars of a Great Stuff You Should Know episode, five maybe I don't quite remember. Either way, you'll find out what they are in this thrilling app. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. 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, not that new. It's a, I don't know, less than six months old. No, I guess it's kind of new. All right. I'm trying to think of the most boring way I could start a show. That was pretty high up there. Josh is wearing a lovely striped blue button up.

That's his one to do and I'm wearing a, everything's 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 set the scene for once. 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. I was doing scruffy for a while. I know.

Which way do you like? Hope for you? Yeah. The Umi likes, which is clearly not scruffy. She likes it both ways. Oh yeah? Yeah. All right.

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 was a man named Charles Goodyear. And Charles Goodyear, whose last name you might recognize for good reason, figured out a way to make 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 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 a 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 to Amazon and as a result, these parts of Brazil that were just totally impoverished were 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 that could coincidentally thrive in British colonies in Southeast Asia.

Perfect. It was perfect for the British. 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 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 and each of those required four rubber tires, right?

So Southeast Asia's hold on rubber was even stronger than the one that Brazil had. Plus one in the trunk? Yeah. That's right. And by the time World War II rolled around, we'd come to rely on rubber so much that it was calculated the US military, the Pentagon,

needed 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, 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, 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 engineering accomplishments ever created. Absolutely. Ever undertaken, right? That's right.

So GR-S, huge, still in use today, right? Yeah, picked on. As like the standard for synthetic rubber. It changed everything. Like that was it. It was like, bye-bye Malaysia. Sorry about your rubber monopoly falling apart. 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, oh, we got all this rubber. Right. What are we gonna do? We chose the wrong team. So 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 an abundant supply. So there were a lot of people working on this. Oh, yes. And one of those guys was James Wright of General Electric, GE. 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 GE thought it had some promise. GE thought it had some promise, but it did pretty much wallow away in obscurity at first. Right, for almost a decade,

it just kind of made the rounds to other places like, hey, can you guys do anything like with this? We'll share the patent, whatever. Just figure out what we can do with this. 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 Falgatter, who owned the block shop toy store, yeah, they decided to put it on the pages of their catalog to sell as a toy. Right, and it was $2. Not chump change in 1949 or so? No, no, it's definitely not.

And it was an adult novelty, as they reckoned, right? Sorry, you just say adult novelty and a lot of things come to mind. Spitzer gifts. I know, I know. It wasn't that kind of an adult novelty. I'm a worldly, okay. No, it was an adult diversion.

It became a big seller is what it became. Yeah, so yeah, it was the block shop's biggest seller, one of them. And then this I found a little hazy. For reasons that remain unclear, did you find anything out about why Falgatter stopped backing the product? I couldn't find anything on that,

but I guess even though it sold big for her, she was just like, yeah, whatever. Maybe she just had her thing going and she was like, why don't I want to start a new product? Yeah. I'm a toy store owner. Yeah, why do I want to be a millionaire? Exactly.

My name's the root of all evil. Good for her. Take this cue, Mr. Rubik, I have no plans for this. Exactly, so the whole drive, the whole push to make this into something big, what we now know as silly putty, fell completely to Hodgson. That is true. And he turned into a whirling dervish.

Between 1949 and 1950, he borrowed $147 and bought another batch from GE, hired a Yale student to roll them into 28 gram, one ounce balls, packaged them in plastic Easter eggs and sold them to double day book shops in Neiman Marcus. Along the way, he also took them to some chemical engineers in Schenectady, right? Yeah, and said, hey, copy this.

Reverse engineer it. It's like that website that has all of your favorite recipes from Applebee's and Kentucky Fried Chicken Reverse engineered. You 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. He first encountered this stuff in 1949. This is 1950. He believed in this, what would be,

actually, 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. Nutty Putty. He trademarked it. Was Nutty Putty one? I think that was one of them.

I think that would have sold too. 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 book shops as customers, which was huge. It was, but it became even huger when some writers from the New Yorker went to double day. Yeah.

And they encountered, do you wanna read this part? 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 book shop 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 book shop 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 the best seller from the 40s. Oh, 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 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. 250,000? Man, why did I? Quarter of a mill. You were probably thinking three quarters. Yeah, I was. I was thinking about the orders that weren't there.

Yeah, 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. 10 million dollars. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was thinking about the half a million

he didn't make. Right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. So it was, like, basically an overnight success, thanks

to Neiman Marcus, Double A 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 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, 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 five million a year. And that was in 1976.

Yeah, which I looked it up. That's 19 million today. Really? 2010 dollars. Wow, I think Crayola owns it now. But it's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, they seem to.

They seem to? Yeah, well, he set up Arnold Clark, Inc. And I never found out who Arnold Clark is. Maybe that was an alias of his? Who knows? But yeah, 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, was originally intended for adults. And they were kind of surprised to learn that kids were into it. And it didn't take long for the kids' sales

to dwarf that of adults. Yeah, it was 1955 when the kids' sales overtook it. Initially, he said, he was like, 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 copied comic books.

So in that New Yorker article, they interviewed Hodgson. And 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 and the intent was he was completely wrong. But it's still skyrocketed.

And he was like, oh, let's 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. It's good for therapy and for gumming up holes and cleaning typewriter keys, which is a huge use these days.

Well, computer keys. Oh yeah, that's right. I forgot about those. These stuff keys. But yeah, so the guy was very much focused on it being for adults. But kids kind of took it for themselves, mainly because one of the great properties of silly putty

is you can stretch it out, push it down on a news print, 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, yeah. And it's harder to do that these days,

because the print they use, you literally have to find 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. I know.

I think you can. No, dude, it's got to pick up the ink. I know. Can't do it on a 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 putty.

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 do you? Although 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. So Hodgson made mention of its inherent ridiculousness of the material, right? It has some really strange properties. He originally called it, he described it as a solid liquid, right?

When you stretch it, it's like taffy. It stretches. It stretches slowly. Right. If you pull it, it just snaps apart. If you pull it quickly. Quickly and with a lot of force. If you stick it to, like, say, 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. And when you roll it up into a ball, it bounces 25% 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 feet. And it 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've got yourself a super ball in your hands. Right. So what is this stuff? What's the science of silly putty, Chuck? The science of silly, 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 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. Yeah.

Either way, that became the signature that's still used today, silly putty full of egg. Comes in an egg. The egg full of silly putty. 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 viscoelastic 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 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. Your gut is, at least. OK.

So 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. Where do we talk about this? I know we've talked about viscosity. We talked about viscosity in quicksand.

Right. Shear, mayonnaise. Viscosity, Josh. Viscosity is it measures how much a fluid resists flow at a certain temperature. 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 high or low viscous,

viscosity is resistance to flow. Actually, the easiest way to remember it 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. It's a pretty easy way to remember it. 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 dine seconds per square centimeter, also called poise. And 10 poise equals one Pascal second. What that means, I couldn't wrap my mind around before then. Every site that I saw took it for granted

that I understood 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 poisel, I believe. That's what came up with poise. But yeah, so that's how viscosity is measured.

And the more Pascal seconds or the more poise there are, the higher the viscosity is. But the thing about viscous fluids, they all, I should say most of them, are subject to temperature. That's what affects their viscosity. 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 at room temperature or if it's warm, 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 toast and they have the heated syrup.

Oh, I like that. You do? Yeah. I like my syrup thick. OK. 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 it's just temperature. 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. MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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, in 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 plays. So it was all just serendipitous. It was just sitting there. So I'm just going to read the whole email. 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. This kid's 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 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 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 ublek, like the Dr. Seuss book, Bartholomew and the ublek. 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 confused 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, because 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, buddy. Our favorite little ublek for New York. Basically, the non-Newtonian fluid, as Matthew points out, is basically, it acts like a solid and a liquid all at once. So he was right. 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 its viscoelastic properties. So it changes depending on long flow time, meaning, say, the force of gravity acting on it

down a bookcase and temperatures. So a long flow time, a high temperature, it behaves like a highly viscous fluid. It will just kind of slowly flow. But at lower temperatures, and 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. You remember that? No. You don't, the live commercial for super happy fun ball, it's just like a regular ball, but there are all these warnings. It's like, do not stare directly at super happy fun ball.

If super happy fun ball begins to smoke, run away. You got to look it up. I'll find it for you. Remember we fought for that for the title of our audiobooks, was like the super happy fun guide to 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 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. You do? OK, because I don't have this. I know that there's probably some sort of borax involved. There is borax involved, or you can use corn starch. For this, I'm going to use borax because I think

we should support our friends at 20 mule team borax. They've been doing it for 100-ton 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. I was listening to an old episode, and there was one about a kid who wrote in and said that we had gotten his iPod taken away because his teacher he asked her about alien hand syndrome. Oh, 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. She was embarrassed. So if you wanted to go ahead and gather these things, there's 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. So you want to take your white craft glue. You want one cup of it, 16 ounces, 8 ounces, sorry. Right? OK. Which I think is the standard size of just a regular thing

of Elmer's glue. You take your 3 quarters cup warm water, and you make a nice glue water mixture. And you're going to find that the glue dissolves pretty readily in the warm water, Chuck. OK. 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. Slowly add it. And you're going to find very quickly that the viscosity increases dramatically. OK. After a little while, when you're stirring it,

you're eventually going to have to get it to the point where you just pull it out and you rub it together with your hands or whatever. 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 roll it around in your hands.

There's your silly putty. It's done. And what happened was 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 its 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 don't think humanity's been around long enough

to know how long silly putty will last. No, I mean homemade silly putty. 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 it in a resealable bag or container to keep soft. Oh, well, isn't that nice.

So that's it. And does it copy print the same way, I wonder? Or just have the same elastic properties? I don't know. We should make some. Let's do it. OK. That's what we're doing this weekend.

OK. Me and Josh are making silly putty. Big weekend. I'll bring the aprons. Sweet. I'll bring the beer. So that's it. I would say that this podcast was a quintessential stuff

you should know podcast. It had an iconic American product. It had a lot of history. It had science, the chemistry behind it. And it had do-it-yourself-at-home recipes. The four tenants. Oh, and a cute kid. And a cute kid.

Five pillars. Five pillars. 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, I think for their anniversary, they had gold silly putty for the first time ever. I believe I remember that. And I think they now have things like glow in the dark and it gets all wacky. It used to just look like, I guess, pinkish, but sort of a fleshy pinkish color. I remember that.

I think they still have that too, though, the original. They've got to. Sure. 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 going to love it, too. Let's get some comics wherever they sell those and press it against it. They're online. All right, so if you want to learn more about silly putty and type in silly putty, it brings up a really cool article,

including a recipe, an extended recipe, even. So that's S-I-L-L-Y, space, P-U-T-T-Y. And in the search bar, howstuffworks.com, since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail, the second one in this podcast. Indeed. Josh, I'm going to call this smart stuff from a lady in Columbia, South Carolina.

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 is a good one in and of itself.

Yes, 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 than by the pedantic memorization of facts, which I would argue isn't pedantic, but that's me. The 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 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 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 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 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 R. of Columbia, South Carolina, via Los Angeles.

Nice. Wait, does that cookie? So wait, she's, I think, currently in Columbia. OK, so. From LA. Oh, no, no, no. From LA via Columbia. Nope.

She's in LA from Columbia. Yeah, you were right there. Man, how funny to follow up a smart email like that with dummary like this. Dimwittery. Dimwittery. All right, well, that's it. Thank you, Josephine, for that.

We appreciate it. That was actually kind of a big topic of dissent. People writing in about that after that podcast. 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, S-Y-S-K 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 stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lacher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.