Play-Doh Began Life as a Wallpaper Cleaner

Open a fresh tub of Play-Doh and the first thing that hits you is the smell, sweet, a little musky, faintly like vanilla. For millions of people it is the smell of childhood. It is a little surprising, then, that the dough was not invented for children at all. It started out as a cleaning product, made to wipe dirt off walls.

The story begins in the 1930s with a company in Cincinnati called Kutol Products. At the time many homes were heated by coal, and coal fires left a film of black soot on everything, including the patterned wallpaper that covered many living rooms. Wallpaper could not simply be scrubbed with soap and water, so the company made a soft, non-toxic putty. You pressed it against the wall, rolled it along, and the soot came away with it.

Then homes changed. After the Second World War, more and more households switched from coal to cleaner heating such as gas, and new vinyl wallpapers could be wiped clean with a damp cloth. Around 1950 the soot began to disappear, and the market for a soot-lifting putty disappeared with it. The company had a product that worked perfectly and almost nobody who needed it.

The rescue came from a classroom. A nursery school teacher in New Jersey, a relative of one of the men running the company, tried the putty with her young pupils as a modelling material. It turned out to be ideal: soft, easy to shape, it did not crumble, and it could be squashed and used over and over again. The children loved it, and she persuaded the company to sell it as a toy.

In 1956 the dough was relaunched under a new name, Play-Doh, in red, yellow and blue. Television adverts on children's programmes spread the word, big department stores stocked it, and within two years sales were close to three million dollars. It has barely looked back since. The dough was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, more than three billion cans have been sold, and in 2018 even that famous smell received trademark protection.

It is a neat example of how an invention can outlive the problem it was made to solve. The wallpaper cleaner lost its job when the soot went away, but the qualities that made it good at cleaning, soft, safe and endlessly reusable, turned out to be exactly what a toy needs.

We know this history because it is well documented, from the relaunch in 1956 to the Hall of Fame in 1998, and even the 2018 trademark, which describes the smell in writing. So the next time a small child hands you a lumpy blue dinosaur, you can admire it knowing that its ancestor spent its early career cleaning walls, and that it switched jobs very successfully indeed.