Silly Putty

From SgWiki

Silicone Putty or Silly Putty

The origins of Silly Putty are quite interesting. Two researchers, working independently during the same time period, both came upon the product separately. The world may never know who was actually first.

Silly Putty was invented by James Wright of General Electric when he dropped boric acid into silicone oil. He was looking for a substitute for artificial rubber. GE supplied the newly discovered dilatant compound to researchers around the world. None found a use for it, but they all loved playing with it.

In 1943, Dr. Earl Warrick left the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to join the newly formed Dow Corning Corporation. His research was refocused: help the war effort by developing a synthetic rubber substitute. Although he failed to produce a suitable rubber before the end of the war, one result of his experiments was a silicone bouncing putty.

The product was then commercialized by Peter Hodgson in 1949 after the marketing expert attended an informal "nutty putty" party where chemists were playing with the substance after hours. Renamed "Silly Putty" because of its main ingredient, Silicone, the product was a smash hit.

Raw Silly Putty polymer is available as Dow Corning 3179 Dilatant Compound. There are recipes for homemade silly putty using Elmer's Glue and boric acid. These produce a compound which is similar in chemical structure but is different in the elements which form that structure.

Play doe

Silly Putty is sold as a 0.47 oz (13 g) piece of plastic clay inside an egg-shaped plastic container. It is an example of an inorganic polymer, noted for its many unusual characteristics. When pressed on comics pages or other newspaper media, the loose ink transfers to the Silly Putty, which is then able to be stretched out, a source of amusement for many children. It bounces, revealing its rubber roots, it breaks when given a sharp blow, it can flow like a liquid when it is slowly stretched, and will "melt" into a puddle over a long enough period of time.

These unusual flow characteristics occur because Silly Putty is primarily composed of the polymer known as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a viscoelastic liquid. Viscoelasticity is a type of non-Newtonian flow, characterizing material that acts as a viscous liquid over a long time period but as an elastic solid over a short time period. Silly Putty has sometimes been characterized as a dilatant fluid. However, according to the science of rheology, this is not strictly correct and it is more accurate to characterize it as a viscoelastic liquid.

Since the 1980s, Silly Putty has been available in various colors, including glow-in-the-dark and metallic, and colors can be easily combined to make new shades.

The brand is owned by the Binney & Smith company, which also owns Crayola crayons. Today, twenty thousand eggs of Silly Putty are produced daily. Since 1950, more than 300 million eggs of Silly Putty have been sold, or approximately 4500 tons.

[edit] Another recipe for play dough(slime type)

Polyvinyl Alcohol Slime NOTE - This is for older children - Adult supervision is REQUIRED 1. Put 2 tablespoons 4% polyvinyl alcohol solution into a paper cup. 2. Add 2-3 drops of food color and mix. 3. Pour in 4% borax solution into the cup of polyvinyl alcohol solution. 4. Stir constantly while the borax solution is being added. 5. Once the gel has formed, remove it from the cup and knead it in your hands. 6. Place the Slime in a zipper-type plastic bag to prevent it from drying out. 7. A few drops of Lysol can be added to the Slime to minimize the formation of mold and extend the lifetime of the Slime.

[edit] Comical strips