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Silly Putty
Peter Hodgson. He's "the idea man" in
Silly Putty's meteoric rise to fame.
See, this engineer in General
Electric's New Haven laboratory, James Wright, invented it. Seeking to develop
a synthetic rubber, Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil and got
bouncing putty. Which he called, I swear, Gupp. Well, he wasn't a marketing
man, he was an engineer.
Passed it all around to other GE engineers but
they couldn't figure out what to do with it either. But one of them gave some
to a toy store owner, which is where our Mr. Hodgson discovers it.
In
debt and out of work, Hodgson needed a miracle. And there it was. He was a
marketing man and he had an idea! He gave gupp a newer, sillier name - Silly
Putty - and packaged it in a plastic Easter egg as that holiday was imminent.
Doubleday bought the toy for their stores but things didn't start to
rock until August when New Yorker magazine mentioned Silly Putty in an article.
Four days later Hodgson had a 225,000 orders.
And that dear
friends, is the principle difference between engineering and marketing.
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