5 Children’s Toys That Were Invented By Government Scientists
The phrase “government scientist” doesn’t exactly bring peaceful imagery to mind. It’s more likely to inspire thoughts of chemical weapons, guided missiles and strange super soldier human-animal hybrids floating in brackish green tanks. But while creations of unpleasant purpose is still their main job, in the pursuit of more efficient killing machines, sometimes they stumble on something delightful. Something so peacefully fascinating that it finds a life in an area usually verboten to military technology: the toy aisle.
Here are five children’s playthings cooked up by the government’s best and brightest…
Silly Putty
Maybe one of the most famous repurposed toys is Silly Putty — partly due to the fact that the military didn’t do much to dress it up. At its base, it’s nothing more than a hunk of weird material in a plastic container. The same sort of thing an unsupervised child might find in a decommissioned government facility, except this one doesn’t kick off a horror film.
This very fun oddity was invented in the midst of a very un-fun time: World War II. The army was in bad need of rubber, what for all those vehicles to roll around on, and cheap substitutes were badly needed. That’s what James Wright was trying to make at the request of the U.S. War Production Board. He handed over what would later be known as Silly Putty, but it wasn’t quite good enough for the war effort. What it was excellent for was goofing off with — and picking up pet hair, but I don’t think that was his intention.
The Slinky
At the same time that land vehicles’ thirst for rubber gave us Silly Putty, the Navy was unintentionally at work on the Slinky. Richard James was a naval engineer, and he was trying to develop a way to keep on-board ship equipment and cargo steady in rough waters. While he was attempting to crack this case, he dropped some coiled wires that were part of his prototypes-to-be. One happened to be coiled in such a way and at such a certain thickness that it started the now iconic Slinky walk right there on the floor of his workshop. He mentioned it to his wife, and together they launched James Industries in 1945. The Slinky was on store shelves shortly thereafter.
Laser Tag
This might not be quite as surprising as the others, given that it’s the quickest way to get even teen minds suddenly clearing corners like they’re masters in urban combat. There’s also a bit of a gap here, given that it wasn’t the military itself that suddenly started putting laser-tag arenas in malls across the country. The first “laser tag” ever played, however, was part of a military training introduced in the 1970s, known as MILES, or the multiple integrated laser engagement system.
Obviously, the military valued a way to drill combat without all the blood. Commercial laser tag would be brought forward a decade or so later in 1984, leading to many years of over-sugared children huffing fog machines and skinning their knees at birthday celebrations.
Super Soaker
The Super Soaker, the genre of squirt gun that introduced income equality to public park water wars, doesn’t seem especially complicated. Water squirts. Make it do that out of the front of a gun-shaped piece of plastic, and presto! But anyone who’s taken a faceful of water from a fully calibrated, high-end Super Soaker can tell you that it’s no ordinary stream.
The force that makes them so super at soaking involves a NASA engineer named Lonnie Johnson. While working on a heat pump, a blunder ended with a stream of water rocketing across the room. Johnson apparently saw it and thought, “Man, what if an about-to-be-furious sleeping father was on the other end of that?”
He had a harder time than you’d think selling his high-power water cannon, but by 1992, the Super Soaker was the top-selling toy in the world.
NERF Guns
Lonnie Johnson has his fingerprints all over NERF guns, too. The man is basically Viktor Bout for 12-year-olds. The folks at NERF were branching into projectiles, saw the Super Soaker and said, “Get me the man who made this glorious weapon.”
Johnson would spend years with NERF racking up a bunch of patents for different ways to scratch a cornea. If he’s the guy who came up with the one that looked like a revolver? My hat’s off to him. Man, that thing was sweet.