![]() Instead, he created a substance he would eventually call "bouncing putty". ![]() Wright mixed boric acid and silicone oil together in the hopes of creating rubber that would make Charles Goodyear proud. One of those wrong turns was made by James Wright in the laboratory of General Electric. Individually, there were a few setbacks and wrong turns in the quest for synthetic rubber. Collectively, the chemists working on the problem may have achieved one of the greatest successes in the history of science: They produced a general-purpose synthetic rubber known as GR-S, or government rubber-styrene, in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the U.S. War Production Board challenged industrial labs and academic institutions to develop a synthetic rubber that could be used to meet wartime production demands. Japan's invasion of Southeast Asia threatened, literally, the entire war effort.Īt a loss, the U.S. soldier that went into battle, the military needed 32 pounds (nearly 15 kilograms) of rubber - for boots, tires, clothing and other equipment. In the early 1940s, as Germany waged war in Europe, the Empire of the Sun invaded rubber-producing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, cutting off supplies to the West. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for Silly Putty, the strange material that ships in an egg and behaves sometimes like a liquid and other times like a solid, necessity came in the form of Imperial Japan. It was made to stretch your imagination anyway.Image courtesy Elizabeth Johnston/ “The understanding deepens as you play more.” So go ahead-try as many twists on Silly Putty as you want. If you’re still scratching your head over this chemical reaction, Walters suggests testing out some other non-toxic mixtures. “They help us stabilize orange juices and non-dairy milks so that the foods don’t separate into liquids and gross oils,” Walters says.” They’re in our ice cream and condiments, and our cosmetics and toothpaste.” (Flour, she explains, is way more processed, so if you substitute it for starch in this experiment, the putty will fall apart.) With a little water to help fire up the bonding process, the soap and starch form a sometimes-liquid, sometimes-solid that consistently snaps back to its shape.īesides dish soap, surfactants are found in a number of things you eat, drink, and put on your body. This causes it to stick to compounds such as oil and link up with the long carbon chains found in cornstarch, says Keisha Walters, a polymers scientist at the University of Oklahoma. Dish soap is a surfactant, meaning its molecules have polar opposite ends-a positively charged head and a negatively charged tail. ![]() In terms of chemistry, dish soap and cornstarch are perfect partners they’re like a couple that hits it off after the first blind date. When you’re done, store it in a cool, dark place until you’re ready to mess with it again. If the mixture is too liquid, sprinkle in some more starch.ģ. If the mixture is too dry and crumbly, squeeze in some extra soap. Mold the putty with your hands until most of the starch and soap is used up. Note: Your putty will have a slight hint of color if you choose dish soap that’s green, yellow, or another hue.Ģ.Add a few drops of water to help the goop bind, then fold it all together with a spoon. Pour the cornstarch and dish soap into a container. Instructions Green dish soap will give your putty a light mint tint. What you’ll need You might need to tweak the balance of dish soap and corn starch. This experiment lets you turn two common goods (cornstarch and dish soap) into endless hours of non-Newtonian fun. The list is long and includes tongue twister-like names like polydimethylsiloxane and boric acid. Pinch it, bounce it, stretch it, slap it on the side of your face-it does whatever you want it to do, with little complaint.īut the chemical properties that make Silly Putty so bendy and durable are shockingly complex, as are its ingredients. ![]() Silly Putty is a toy most anyone can appreciate. Show us how it went by tagging your project on social media using #popsciprojects. On weekdays at noon, we’ll be posting new projects that use ingredients you can buy at the grocery store. Welcome to PopSci ’s at-home science projects series.
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