James Gilbert E. Wright (March 25, 1874 – August 20, 1961) was a Scottish-born inventor, researcher and chemical engineer at

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

who invented Silly Putty in 1943 while looking for a replacement for rubber. The invention of Nutty Putty, later renamed Silly Putty, happened accidentally. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, the United States could not obtain natural rubber from Asian suppliers, who gathered it from

rubber trees ''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family Euphorbiaceae originally native to the Amazon basin, but is now pan ...

. The General Electric Company was under a government contract to create an inexpensive substitute for

synthetic rubber A synthetic rubber is an artificial elastomer. They are polymers synthesized from petroleum byproducts. About 32-million metric tons of rubbers are produced annually in the United States, and of that amount two thirds are synthetic. Synthetic rubbe ...

for the war effort. James Wright, an engineer at General Electric's

New Haven New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,02 ...

laboratory, was working with

silicone oil A silicone oil is any liquid polymerized siloxane with organic side chains. The most important member is polydimethylsiloxane. These polymers are of commercial interest because of their relatively high thermal stability, lubricating, and Liquid di ...

—a clear, gooey compound composed of

silicon Silicon is a chemical element with the symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic luster, and is a tetravalent metalloid and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic tab ...

bonded to several other elements. By substituting silicon for

carbon Carbon () is a chemical element with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent In chemistry, the valence (US spelling) or valency (British spelling) of an element is the measure of its combining capacity with o ...

, the main element in rubber, Wright hoped to create a new compound with all the flexibility and bounce of rubber. In 1943, Wright made a surprising discovery. He mixed boric acid with silicone oil in a test tube. Instead of forming the hard rubber material he was looking for, the compound remained slightly gooey to the touch. Disappointed with the results, he tossed a gob of the material from the test tube onto the floor. To his surprise, the gob bounced. The new compound was very bouncy and could be stretched and pulled. However, it was not a good rubber substitute, so Wright and other GE scientists continued their search. Seven years later, a toy seller named Peter Hodgson packaged some of Wright's creation in a small plastic egg and presented his new product at the 1950

International Toy Fair The North American International Toy Fair (formerly the American International Toy Fair and also known as Toy Fair New York) is an annual toy industry trade show held in mid-February in New York City's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and at t ...

in New York. Its first name was Nutty Putty but was changed later due to marketing concerns. It is now called Silly Putty; more than 300 million eggs containing the material have been sold since. Among Wright's other inventions for the General Electric Company were a method of restoring shrunken celluloid

photographic film Photographic film is a strip or sheet of transparent film base coated on one side with a gelatin photographic emulsion, emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of th ...

s to their original condition, and a process of treating metals to protect against

oxidation Redox (reduction–oxidation, , ) is a type of chemical reaction in which the oxidation states of substrate change. Oxidation is the loss of electrons or an increase in the oxidation state, while reduction is the gain of electrons or a d ...

and

corrosion Corrosion is a natural process that converts a refined metal into a more chemically stable oxide. It is the gradual deterioration of materials (usually a metal) by chemical or electrochemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion engine ...

References

External links

MIT Inventor of the Week: Silly Putty
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wright, James American inventors