Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2011

SuperBall

In the early 1960s, chemical engineer Norman Stingley accidentally created a plastic that he couldn't stop from bouncing. Wham-O purchased the product, renaming it the SuperBall, and the world's best-selling bouncy ball was born. Made from the compound polymer zectron, which gives it that supreme elasticity, more than 20 million SuperBalls were sold in the 1960s. At the craze's height, Wham-O was producing 170,000 balls per day. They were so popular that McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser to then President Lyndon Johnson, bought them for his staff as stress relievers.