November 11, 2017 • 37 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M 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 two thousand and eleven,
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,
(00:21):
you'll find out what they are in this thrilling enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
(00:47):
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
(01:10):
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.
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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,
(02:14):
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.
(02:34):
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,
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:40):
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,
(04:05):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:11):
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,
(05:34):
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.
(05:57):
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
(06:20):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:25):
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,
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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.
(08:29):
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
(08:49):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:31):
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,
(09:53):
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
(10:13):
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,
(10:36):
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
(10:58):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:41):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:24):
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
(12:47):
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,
(13:08):
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,
(13:28):
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,
(13:50):
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
(14:38):
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.
(14:58):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:45):
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
(16:08):
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
(16:29):
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
(16:50):
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
(17:12):
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
(17:35):
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
(17:58):
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
(18:18):
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.
(18:40):
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,
(19:02):
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
(19:22):
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
(19:44):
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.
(20:05):
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.
(20:26):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:34):
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?
(23:55):
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,
(24:48):
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
(25:10):
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
(25:32):
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.
(25:54):
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
(26:15):
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
(26:35):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:19):
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.
(27:40):
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,
(28:02):
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.
(28:24):
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,
(28:46):
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,
(29:07):
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
(29:28):
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,
(29:49):
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.
(30:11):
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
(30:35):
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,
(30:56):
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,
(31:19):
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
(31:40):
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
(32:02):
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
(32:23):
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
(32:46):
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,
(33:07):
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.
(33:28):
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
(33:49):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:35):
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,
(34:56):
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
(35:17):
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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
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.
(36:23):
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.
(36:46):
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,
(37:07):
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
(37:36):
this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff
works dot com
M 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 two thousand and eleven,
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,
(00:21):
you'll find out what they are in this thrilling enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
(00:47):
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
(01:10):
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.
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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,
(02:14):
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.
(02:34):
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,
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:40):
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,
(04:05):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:11):
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,
(05:34):
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.
(05:57):
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
(06:20):
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
(06:41):
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
(07:04):
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
(07:25):
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,
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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.
(08:29):
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
(08:49):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:31):
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,
(09:53):
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
(10:13):
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,
(10:36):
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
(10:58):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:41):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:24):
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
(12:47):
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,
(13:08):
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,
(13:28):
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,
(13:50):
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
(14:38):
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.
(14:58):
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
(15:22):
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,
(15:45):
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
(16:08):
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
(16:29):
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
(16:50):
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
(17:12):
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
(17:35):
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
(17:58):
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
(18:18):
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.
(18:40):
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,
(19:02):
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
(19:22):
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
(19:44):
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.
(20:05):
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.
(20:26):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:34):
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?
(23:55):
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,
(24:48):
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
(25:10):
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
(25:32):
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.
(25:54):
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
(26:15):
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
(26:35):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:19):
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.
(27:40):
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,
(28:02):
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.
(28:24):
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,
(28:46):
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,
(29:07):
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
(29:28):
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,
(29:49):
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.
(30:11):
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
(30:35):
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,
(30:56):
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,
(31:19):
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
(31:40):
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
(32:02):
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
(32:23):
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
(32:46):
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,
(33:07):
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.
(33:28):
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
(33:49):
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
(34:11):
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
(34:35):
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,
(34:56):
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
(35:17):
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
(35:39):
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
(36:01):
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.
(36:23):
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.
(36:46):
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,
(37:07):
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
(37:36):
this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff
works dot com
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Josh Clark
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