think of when your mom would incriminate you of bouncing off the walls ? No ball could bring that sliver of American slang to life story like the SuperBall from Wham - O toy . manufacture in the former sixties , the SuperBall did n’t just bound off walls – it ricocheted with reckless wantonness , make you wonder if the Ping - Pong - sized plaything could somehow defyNewton ’s laws of motion .
you may still find SuperBalls today ( sometimes called Super Balls , too ) , but you require to be suspicious of impersonation . According to Wham - O , which continues to fabricate and commercialise the big bouncer , no natural rubber formal can equal a SuperBall . But what incisively differentiates the Original SuperBall from the knockoffs ? What cognitive operation does the company follow to transform an ordinary ball into something extraordinary ? And what can you do with a SuperBall that you ca n’t do with , say , a lawn tennis or crush orchis ?
Those are the questions this article will resolve . We ’ll deal the science of SuperBalls and small of their sociology , too . For lesson , how did such a simple miniature become such a ethnical phenomenon ? As grounds , consider this passing from an clause release in a 1965 issue of Time magazine :
Part of the SuperBall ’s success can be traced back to Sputnik , the smallsatellitelaunched by the Soviet Union in 1957 . Sputnik catch fire thespace wash , but it also touch off fearfulness among Americans who matte up the Soviets were far ahead of U.S. efforts in technical fields . To shut the spread , U.S. scientists lock themselves in their laboratories and test to out - invent and out - discover their communist counterparts .
One of those scientists was Norman Stingley , a apothecary working for Bettis Rubber Company in Whittier , Calif. Up next , we ’ll examine how Stingley ’s accident led to one of the large fads in the history of Americantoys .
History of SuperBalls
A scientist working for a chemical substance party is sometimes loath to pursue his or her own research interests in a basement laboratory . That ’s because the employer enjoys the right of first refusal on any employee discovery , even one made by fortuity at home . Norman Stingley , a chemical substance engineer working for Bettis Rubber Company , on the face of it had no reservations about run a few experiments in the off - 60 minutes . Working in his spare time in 1965 , Stingley took a gooey , rubbery substance and contract it under 3,500 pounds of insistency [ source : Time Magazine ] . The result was a dense , succinct syntheticrubberwith amazing elastic properties . The material had a terrible reverberate potential , but it tended to dilapidate when struck too firmly .
The engineer honored his employment contract bridge by offering the invention to Bettis . The rubber party happen on the opportunity , citing concerns over the unsound character of the compound . Who would want a fabric , even one with an unbelievable bounce , if it fell asunder after a few hours ? Bettis told Stingley he was free to take his innovation outside the company [ source : The Wham - O SuperBall Operator Manual ] .
Stingley did just that , arriving presently after in the office of Dick Knerr and Arthur " Spud " Melin , possessor of Wham - O. Knerr and Melin had a report for demand goofy inventions and turning them into sensational toy . When Stingley arrive with his synthetic rubber , the Wham - O furious men had already realise millions of dollars with the Frisbee fly phonograph record and the Hula Hoop . The chemic engineer from Bettis feel certain they would be able to take his big idea and make it even bigger .
Wham - O take the challenge and broadcast Stingley back to the lab to make the bouncy sinister material more durable . After several calendar week of tweaking , examination and purification , he was capable to ameliorate the rule enough to satisfy Knerr and Melin . It called for just the right ingredients , as well as the right temperature and pressure . It also need a sure shape – a sphere of about 2 inch ( 5.08 centimeters ) in diameter – for the physical process to work efficaciously . Stingley called his new material Zectron and file for a letters patent in August 1965 . Zectron , of course , did n’t mean anything , but it sound scientific and cool – the perfect intelligence for the post - Sputnik era . Knerr and Melin used the name to full reward . They marketed Stingley ’s bouncing ball as the SuperBall , saying it was " made from amazing Zectron ! "
The SuperBall was an crying hit across all age group . Kids bounced the ink - blackened ball through their neighborhoods , while adult play with them at body of work when their bosses were n’t look . Between 1965 and 1970 , Wham - O betray some 20 million SuperBalls and created a cultural phenomenon that rivaled the Hula Hoop [ rootage : Wham - O ] . Then , as quickly as the frenzy began , it start to ebb . By the seventies , a number of free-enterprise super - bounce bollock glut the market , and the toy was n’t nigh so special .
Still , anyone who had the Original SuperBall know there was a difference . Up next , we ’ll take a smell at the characteristics that tell apart the SuperBall from the competitor .
The Original SuperBall
A heap of companies tried to capitalise on the SuperBall craze of the belated sixties and early 1970s . They made knockoff super - bouncer that came in a motley of sizes and colors . Most were the sizing of large marble and could often be found in bubblegum machines . For a mere stern , a kid could walk off with arainbow - colored ball that did indeed jump off higher than the average orb .
truthful lover of the gravid spring , however , would square up for nothing less than the Original SuperBall . as luck would have it , it was easy to tell the dispute between a Wham - oxygen - made product and its imitator . The Original SuperBall was larger for one affair . About the sizing of plum , it value 1.875 inch ( 4.76 cm ) in diameter . Its gloss was reminiscent of a plum , as well . It come in midnight black or recondite purple , like any self - respecting Space Age plaything should . And , of trend , it gestate the prescribed Wham - O Zectron embossing .
The Original SuperBall sold for 98 cents , but the extra centime bought a much more energetic bounce . Wham - O claimed that the orb could rebound six sentence higher than , say , a tennis ball drip from the same tallness . Throw it at the ground with some force , and it could leap over a three - taradiddle edifice . Hurl it within a lowly way , and it would ricochet off the walls numerous clip before stopping . The arcanum of the big bounce could be found in the tightly bundle rubber , which preserved more of the target ’s elastic energy . As a result , each SuperBall bounce retained about 90 pct of the energy of the antecede bounce .
They were n’t indestructible , however . Even with Stingley ’s revised preparation , the SuperBall was prostrate to disintegration if thrown at the ground or struck with too much power . But with a little concern , the plaything could last a farsighted fourth dimension . In fact , some people still carry their Original SuperBalls , either as a way to relive childhoodmemoriesor to yield homage to post - Sputnik skill . In the next section , we ’ll examine some of this science to understand what Zectron is and how it wreak .
Science of SuperBalls
Ask any well - stock science lab to give you a small sampling of Zectron , and you ’d get nothing in yield but a blank stare . Possibly a chortle . That ’s because it does n’t subsist . Norman Stingley coin the terminal figure to discover the syntheticrubberhe invented on behalf of Wham - O. If you were to identify a real substance behind the Zectron façade , it would be polybutadiene , the main element of a SuperBall . Now you’re able to revalue why Stingley devise the Zectron sobriquet . He feared no one would want to buy a ball with " made with amazing polybutadiene " print on its side .
He might have been right-hand , but the literal science behind Zectron is at least a little interesting . Take the name polybutadiene , for instance . It ’s made up of three clear-cut role that offer cue about the stuff ’s chemical nature :
Butadiene , then , describe a chemical compound built with a four - atomic number 6 chain control two double bonds . A pill pusher would write this social organization as CH₂=CHCH = CH₂ , where the parallel lines indicate the duple chemical bond . The final part of the name – the prefix " poly- " – separate you that there are many butadiene corpuscle draw together to work what chemist call apolymer . The polymerization cognitive operation begins when an unpaired electron on one butadiene fractional monetary unit slip an negatron from an adjacent butadiene subunit , bonding the two together . This sequence of events occurs repeatedly until a farseeing chain of molecules forms .
By itself , polybutadiene does n’t produce an efficacious textile . It becomes gooey at mellow temperatures and brittle at low temperatures . To transform it into a lively , stable India rubber , Stingley take up a page from the research lab manual of Charles Goodyear , who get word that sulfur added to safety made it flexible and bouncy at any temperature . Goodyear call thisvulcanization , and Stingley postulate to vulcanise his unexampled material , too . He mixed 100 share by weight of polybutadiene with 0.5 to 15 parts by weight of sulfur . Then he direct the mix in a mold and fix it at 285 to 340 degrees Fahrenheit ( 140.56 to 171.11 degree Celsius ) while at the same time compressing it at a pressing of 500 to 3,000 pounds per substantial inch .
The result was the one , the only , the Original SuperBall – the amazing toy dog that still enjoy anyone interested in bound off the wall .
