James Wright (inventor), Date of Birth, Date of Death

    

James Wright (inventor)

engineer (20th century)

Date of Birth: 25-Mar-1874

Date of Death: 20-Aug-1961

Profession: engineer, inventor

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Aries


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About James Wright (inventor)

  • James Gilbert E.
  • Wright (March 25, 1874 – August 20, 1961) was a Scottish-born inventor, researcher and chemical engineer at General Electric who invented Silly Putty in 1943 while looking for a replacement for rubber. The invention of Nutty Putty, later renamed Silly Putty, happened accidentally.
  • During World War II, the United States couldn't obtain natural rubber from Asian suppliers, who gathered it from rubber trees.
  • The General Electric Company was under a government contract to create an inexpensive substitute for synthetic rubber for the war effort.
  • James Wright, an engineer at General Electric's New Haven laboratory, was working with silicone oil—a clear, gooey compound composed of silicon bonded to several other elements.
  • By substituting silicon for carbon, the main element in rubber, Wright hoped to create a new compound with all the flexibility and bounce of rubber. In 1943, Wright made a surprising discovery.
  • He mixed boric acid with silicone oil in a test tube.
  • Instead of forming the hard rubber material he was looking for, the compound remained slightly gooey to the touch.
  • Disappointed with the results, he tossed a gob of the material from the test tube onto the floor.
  • To his surprise, the gob bounced.
  • The new compound was very bouncy and could be stretched and pulled.
  • However, it was not a good rubber substitute, so Wright and other GE scientists continued their search. Seven years later, a toy seller named Peter Hodgson packaged some of Wright's creation in a small plastic egg and presented his new product at the 1950 International Toy Fair in New York.
  • Its first name was Nutty Putty but was changed later due to marketing concerns.
  • It is now called Silly Putty; more than 300 million eggs containing the material have been sold since.Among Wright's other inventions for the General Electric Company were a method of restoring shrunken celluloid photographic films to their original condition, and a process of treating metals to protect against oxidation and corrosion.

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