Wartime chemistry, a toy shop and a catalog.

Silly Putty started as a by-product of the search for synthetic rubber. The Science History Institute’s magazine Distillations, in an August 2015 article by Jacob Roberts, explains that after Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia in 1942 cut the Allies off from natural rubber, chemists were pressed to find a substitute. Two of them, Earl Warrick of Dow Corning and James Wright of General Electric, independently mixed silicone oil with boric acid and produced nearly identical compounds. The material shattered when struck with a hammer, bounced back when thrown and slowly oozed when left alone, but it was no replacement for rubber. Distillations adds that Warrick applied for a patent in 1943, a year before Wright.

The company that now owns the name tells the story through Wright. A Crayola press release titled “Silly Putty History”, archived in June 2008, says Wright, a Scottish engineer at General Electric’s laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, combined boric acid and silicone oil in 1943, and that in 1945 the company sent samples to engineers around the world without finding a practical use. The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play also credits Wright, and notes that the material was passed around as “bouncing putty” or “nutty putty”.

The route from laboratory to toy ran through a shop. Crayola’s timeline says that in 1949 Ruth Fallgatter, owner of the Block Shop toy store in New Haven, hired marketing consultant Peter Hodgson to produce her catalog, and that the pair listed the putty on a page of adult gifts in a clear, compact case. According to the same timeline, Fallgatter chose not to take it further. Distillations says Hodgson paid for a shipment of the putty from the General Electric laboratory and bought the production rights.

A silly name, a plastic egg and a magazine paragraph.

Hodgson’s decisions gave the material its identity. Crayola’s timeline says he studied fifteen possible names before settling on Silly Putty, and both Distillations and The Strong describe one-ounce portions sold inside small plastic eggs in time for Easter 1950. The Strong says Hodgson hired Yale students to fill the colourful eggs. Crayola’s timeline adds that the product was introduced at the International Toy Fair in New York in March 1950, that Hodgson set up a company called Arnold Clark in a converted barn in North Branford, Connecticut, and that the eggs were shipped in surplus egg boxes supplied by the Connecticut Cooperative Poultry Association.

Retail came slowly and then quickly. Distillations says Hodgson persuaded Doubleday bookstores and Neiman-Marcus to stock the eggs, and that a New Yorker writer who went into a Doubleday shop came across the putty and wrote about it in the issue of 26 August 1950. Crayola places that piece in the magazine’s Talk of the Town section and says orders followed from across the country within days. Distillations quotes Hodgson telling the magazine that the putty meant “five minutes of escape from neurosis”.

The audience then changed. Crayola’s timeline says government restrictions on raw materials, silicone among them, during the Korean War almost stopped the business in 1951, and that production resumed when the restrictions were lifted in 1952. It says the novelty had become a plaything mainly for children by 1955, and that from 1956 Hodgson advertised it on television, with commercials on the Howdy Doody Show and Captain Kangaroo. The Strong lists the uses people found for it, from bouncing it to lifting images off the comic pages and cleaning typewriter keys.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are classic toys: simple objects and materials whose names have outlasted the people who first sold them. Classic toy brands in general sit in an unusual place in the trade, because a name that began with a single maker, a small workshop or an inventor’s idea can pass through several owners and end up as one line among many in a much larger toy or craft group.

A toy brand’s identity is often carried less by the object itself, which can be simple to describe, than by a name, a container, a colour and the advertising that first made it familiar. The company behind that name may have changed hands, moved its production or widened the range far beyond the original product, so the useful questions stay plain: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its origin story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a North Branford barn to Crayola.

The egg travelled. Crayola’s timeline says a Silly Putty display drew crowds at the U.S. Plastics Expo in Moscow in 1961, and that the putty then went on sale in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy. Distillations says Hodgson travelled to the Soviet Union that year, and that the Apollo 8 astronauts carried Silly Putty in sterling-silver eggs on their 1968 lunar orbit; The Strong says the crew used it to hold down tools in zero gravity.

Ownership passed to a crayon maker. Crayola’s timeline says Binney & Smith, maker of Crayola products, acquired the rights to Silly Putty in 1977. Crayola’s own history page says Hallmark Cards bought Binney & Smith in 1984 as a wholly owned subsidiary, and that in 2007 the company changed its name to Crayola LLC. The Crayola website, read in October 2026, lists Silly Putty among the brands it sells. Under that ownership the range widened: Crayola says colour-changing putty arrived in 1995 and a metallic gold putty in 2000 for the fiftieth anniversary, while The Strong dates new colours to 1990 and a glow-in-the-dark version to 1991. Crayola also says an early-1950s blue and yellow egg went on display in 2000 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in an exhibition called “Material World”.

The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Silly Putty into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2001.

For a design guide, Silly Putty shows how much a name and a container can do for a material that had no obvious purpose: a laboratory compound became a product once it had a silly name, a plastic egg and a launch timed for Easter, and that package has stayed with it through a change of owner. Compare the modelling compound in our Play-Doh brand guidelines and the spring toy in our Slinky brand guidelines. For this guide we use egg red, Easter yellow and fifties blue with a rounded display sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Silly Putty’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.