General Electric sent Wright's concoction to engineers all over the world, hoping to make something awesome out of the accident. 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.

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