Today, Flubber. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
We've seen the relationship
between movies and product-marketing steadily grow
over the years. When Clark Gable took off his shirt
in the movie It
Happened One Night, back in 1934, he was
wearing only his manly chest -- no undershirt. Two
things happened as a result. First, the sales of
undershirts sharply dropped in the United States.
Second, advertisers sat up and took notice.
Movies and marketing have, ever since, developed a
disturbing intimacy. One example is the display
soft drinks and beer. Attractive actors
smoking cigarettes has been as influential as
Clark Gable's undershirtlessness, and far
more destructive. Then there's the influence of
movies on fashion -- like the Annie Hall look.
Movies have also driven countless new products,
especially toys. Superhero dolls and Star Wars
light swords, but nothing with as strange a history
as Flubber. Flubber was invented onscreen
by Fred MacMurray in the movie The
Absent Minded Professor -- a kind of
antigravity goo that gained energy with each
impact. Flubber stood for flying rubber
for, with it, you could fly.
When a sequel, Son of
Flubber, was made two years later, the
Hasbro Company created a new product called
Flubber, for kids. It was reportedly made of rubber
and mineral oil and it behaved a lot like Silly
Putty. It stretched like bread dough when you
pulled slowly, and resisted like rubber when you
jerked it. It'd bounce if you dropped it, and it
would transfer images from the comics.
Flubber was marketed as nontoxic and non-staining.
But then, certain people's hair follicles proved to
be allergic to it. It caused enough trouble that it
had to pulled from the market. And here the fun
begins. How to get rid of tons of Flubber
balls?
When they tried to burn them, the nearby City of
Providence, Rhode Island, complained of huge clouds
of black smoke. Next they tried next to put the
Flubber balls in the city dump. But kids turned up
trying to steal them.
So they got permission to weight them down and sink
them off the coast. But Flubber balls got loose and
floated to the surface. The Coast Guard had to
collect fifty thousand of them and return them to
Hasbro. Finally, they buried their stock in an area
near their factory and paved it over as a parking
lot.
That worked for thirty-five years. Then employees
began seeing Flubber rising like the undead through
cracks in the pavement. That was just as Disney
released a remake of the old movie. The 1997 movie
Flubber
was roundly panned by three quarters of the major
reviewers. And, although neither reappearance was
welcome, I can recommend one latter-day Flubber
reincarnation.
A widely-circulated recipe tells children how to
make their own Flubber-like material from water,
white glue, and borax. When they're done, they'll
be embryonic chemists who've made their own
long-chain polymeric material. And they'll have
made their own fun as well. I'll post a link on
how-to-do-it, on the Engines web site.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Among the many websites that tell the Flubber story,
I recommend finding it on, http://www.uselessinformation.org/
(This account is also included in the author's book:
S. Silverman, Lindbegh's Artificial Heart,
Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2003, pp.
3-5.)
You can find instructions on how to make your own Flubber-like material in the video below:
