Invention is overrated marketing is underrated. In the course of this marketing, the product often changes. You can invent the greatest food, drink, drug or shoe in the history of the world, but it will languish unless there is someone around to take the risk to get it to market. You need marketing to make something wonderful and change the world. Still, after the war, he persisted and adapted to the changing market. Then the Korean War nearly shut him down with its rationing of essential ingredients. He forged ahead in any case, making more millions in the early fifties. Everyone told Hodgson that he was crazy, that this stupid stuff had no use. Hodgson, to push it to the limit and become the first Silly Putty millionaire. It took the marketing executive that she hired, Peter C. Even then, Ruth didn’t quite see the possibilities here. It was a smash hit, selling millions, for adults at first and later to kids. Silly Putty languished in the world of labs and science until the owner of a toy store in New Haven, Conn., Ruth Fallgatter, saw some potential and put it in the catalog.
The only way to discover economic value is to put something out there in the marketplace and see what happens.
2: No man is smart enough to foresee the most highly valued economic contribution of any good or service. The main use of this stuff turns out to be pretty much what it was in the lab: a fun thing to play with. No one ever found such a use, unless you include the desire to make a quick and rubbery copy of your favorite Sunday comic. In any case, the scientists who discovered the initial putty imagine revolutionary uses for the new rubber substitute. Everyone “steals” from everyone else, except that it is not stealing to learn from others, adapt, improve, remix. This is why the lawsuits by Apple against Samsung (among a million other wasteful patent lawsuits) are so pointless. To freeze one stage and isolate one inventor with a government monopoly grant of privilege (the patent) is wholly artificial and injurious to the process of discovery. This applies not only to products, but also to ideas.
#SILLY PUTTY TRIAL#
Researchers in the history of invention have found that innovations occur on the margin and simultaneously over large parts of the world, a bit of improvement here and there, all stemming from trial and error and the targeted purpose of the product. 1: The legend of the lone inventor in his lab is a myth. Patents settle nothing: the bureaucrats approving those items mix things up constantly, and much depends on how the lawyers write them. In fact, if you look at the history of just about anything from the cotton gin to the telephone to flight itself, you find a raging dispute over who was first. It turns out that this is not unusual in human history. More likely, it is a case of simultaneous invention. It appears that James Wright, who was a researcher at General Electric, also has a claim and a patent dated from 1944 to prove it.
But the claim is so uncertain that Warrick’s New York Times obituary even hedged. Warrick, who died in 1992, always claimed that he and a colleague at Dow Corning, Rob Roy McGregor, invented it in 1943. Who invented it? There are several competitors for the title, and at least two patents. The story reinforces the point of Pete Earle and Sean Smith: “innovation rarely (and despite all appearances) follows a pre-ordained path, but rather it progresses in fits and starts, inevitably and invariably bending to the feedback and the will of the marketplace.” How is it that this seemingly ridiculous stuff could become a product that links the generations?Ī closer look reveals that you can learn so much about the way the world works just by looking at the history of this pliable plaything. I have an early memory of getting in big trouble for sticking some on a church pew. It’s about another gloriously viscoelastic substance: Silly Putty. Instead, this melting might make very little difference at all.īut this article isn’t about ice caps. This means that by century’s end, Boston might not be underwater. The same substance if pulled quickly snaps and breaks.Īs part of continuing studies of what happens if Antarctica melts, scientists have begun to test the possibility that polar ice caps are more viscoelastic than they previously believed. It is a substance that seems solid but slowly drips into a puddle over time. Here’s the word of the day: viscoelastic.
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