What do you think of this fact?
The little cans, that signature smell, the blobs that all eventually turn brownish gray: almost everyone knows Play-Doh from preschool. But the dough had a past life. It was a cleaning product for wallpaper.
Soot on the walls
In the 1930s, lots of American homes were heated with coal. The problem: the stoves left black soot on the wallpaper, and you couldn’t just wash it off. So at Kutol Products in Cincinnati, Noah McVicker developed a soft, putty-like substance, according to Wikipedia. You rolled it over the wallpaper, and the grime stuck to it.
That worked great, until the world changed. After World War II, natural gas heating took over. Less soot meant almost no need for wallpaper cleaner. Kutol was in trouble.
A teacher has an idea
The rescue came from within the family. Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher and Joe McVicker’s sister-in-law, read that wallpaper cleaner could be used for crafts. She tried it with the kids in her class, and they loved it.
Zufall and her husband Robert suggested selling the stuff as a toy. They came up with the name, too: “Play-Doh.” According to Wikipedia, the McVickers would rather have called it “Rainbow Modeling Compound.” Good thing they lost that one.
From cleaner to cult toy
Play-Doh hit the market as a toy in 1956. According to Smithsonian Magazine, more than 3 billion cans have been sold since then. In 1998, it was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Today the brand belongs to toy giant Hasbro, and the main ingredients are still simple: water, salt and flour.
In 2018, Hasbro even trademarked the smell of Play-Doh. It’s described as a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance with slight overtones of cherry.
A product that had basically become useless ended up keeping whole generations busy. The wallpaper still doesn’t stay clean, though.