Posted on 04/25/2012 8:53:37 PM PDT by Silentgypsy
Cracking open its egg-shaped packaging, exploring its bizarre, mushy properties, and inevitably leaving it on top of the heater and letting it melt all over the carpet, playing with Silly Putty is a rite of passage for every child.
But there's an impressive amount of history, chemistry, and trivia behind these odd, polymer nuggets -- and a few surprising facts.
It was a war-time accident.
World War II, in fact.
(Excerpt) Read more at games.yahoo.com ...
Seriously!
Never seen it, what is sily putty?
I used to play with mercury too. Wouldn’t last too long, though - it tended to disappear in the cracks in the floor.
And we used to have a high old time using the long school break to blow up fish with quarter dynamite sticks :).
Iodine and ammonia come to mind
Fun with a super cooled liquid which was replaced by beer in college.
I want this for the new balloting system if we are going to only have silly candidates.
**there’s a lot in common between a liberal and a slinky — they’re not much good for anything but they sure are fun to watch when you push them down the stairs.**
It’s almost Zen-like: “Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.”
~ Zen proverb
Ha. What you called “blob materiel” is also known as napalm!
interesting.
Thnx.
Is that Katie Couric?
“It was cool to pick up images and “photoshop” them with silly putty”
If you press a wad of SP onto a pic of Obama in the newspaper, you can make his ears stick out even further.
about 15 years ago it was almost impossible to find it in the stores. Either it was Caterpillar or Cummins that was buying it to pump at high pressure through some of their parts to clean and polish the insides and was buying up all of it being manufactured.
I hear you get some spectacular results when you mix some powdered aluminum and iron oxide (thermite) with silly putty.
My best Silly Putty moment.
I was in high school and had discovered that the color of Silly Putty almost perfectly mimics flesh. So, I spent the better part of a class period fashioning a fake thumb out of the stuff, complete with “knuckle wrinkles” and a thumbnail.
I made a fist and tucked my real thumb inside my four fingers and “grafted” the silly putty thumb onto my hand, making it look like I was giving a thumbs-up.
I got a giant pair of scissors that my journalism teacher kept at one of our workstations. They were used for cutting blocks of text that came out of the typesetter so they could be placed on the layout for the newspaper.
I walked up to my teacher’s desk, with all the impulsiveness of a 16 year old, and got her attention. When she looked at me, I raised my hand with the doctored appendage, and, scissors in the other hand, proceeded to cut my thumb off right in front of her.
Of course, being so impulsive, I never gave a thought to the fact that she was eight months pregnant at the time. Fortunately, she didn’t go into labor right there, but boy, did she go ballistic.
I wasn’t allowed to use the scissors for two weeks and all Silly Putty was banned from the class for the rest of the year.
Flubber was created by accident too......
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