play dough
Kathryn ‘Kay’ Zufall is the lady we have to thank for the countless hours of delight Play-Doh (or ‘playdough’, if you’re DIY-ing) has brought to the world. She was the 1950s New Jersey nursery school teacher who realised that the soft white putty traditionally used to clean soot off wallpaper had a much higher calling: to be squished, rolled, sculpted and moulded into the magical shapes of children’s imaginations. Kay, in other words, was a bloody genius.
Since 1956, more than 430 million kilograms of it have been rolled into pretend noodles and fashioned into rainbow unicorns and ground into living-room carpets around the world.
She also, as luck would have it, happened to be the sister-in-law of the nephew of Noah McVicker—the guy who’d first invented the wallpaper cleaner for Kutol, the soap company that sold it. This three-degrees-of-separation connection meant Kay had a direct line to the powers-that-be when it came to convincing them that their now obsolete product had a new purpose. (The arrival of vinyl wallpaper, which could be cleaned using soap and water, had seen sales of Kutol’s main product plummet, and the company was on the verge of going out of business.)
The wallpaper cleaner—a simple mix of flour, water, salt, boric acid and mineral oil—was already non-toxic. Given how much of it would end up in children’s mouths, this was a
