Tim Walsh

My name's Tim Walsh.

I am with The Playmakers, which is a toy design firm, and I also write books.

I'm the author of Timeless Toys.

Well, we have to go back to heating our homes with coal to introduce Play-Doh.

Because starting in about 1850, we heated our homes with coal.

And it was great, but coal soot got everywhere.

And non-washable surfaces like wallpaper had to be cleaned with a doughy mixture of borax, salt, flour.

And homemakers would knead this together and press it on their walls like a kneaded eraser.

And there was a tiny little soap company in Cincinnati named Cut All Products that became the largest manufacturer of wallpaper cleaner in the world.

And then, you know, after World War II, when oil furnaces came out and gas furnaces and vinyl wallpaper that you could wash with soap and water, this little soap company was about to go bankrupt because their core product line was obsolete.

Thank you.

So the idea for Play-Doh originates with a school teacher named Kay Zufall.

She was the sister-in-law of Joe McVicker, who was one of the owners of this soap company in Cincinnati.

Kay read a newspaper article that you could make Christmas tree ornaments out of wallpaper cleaner.

So she bought a can of cut-all wallpaper cleaner and played with the kids, and the kids loved it and thought it was great.

So then she called her brother-in-law and said, listen, I think you can turn this into a toy.

And they agreed.

And that was the start of Play-Doh in 1955.

And of course, the formula is very good.

well guarded but it was essentially the same stuff because wallpaper cleaner was non-toxic this was before rubber gloves and and homemakers would use their bare hands to push it on the walls so it wasn't much of a shift but they sold wallpaper cleaner for 25 cents a can and they could sell this new modeling compound for a dollar 50 so it was a big money boost for the company