Silly String

In 1972, inventor Leonard A. Fish and chemist Robert P. Cox patented a "foamable resinous composition" while hunting for something practical — an aerosol spray-on cast for broken limbs. They weren't looking for fun. It took testing dozens of nozzles (somewhere around thirty or forty out of about five hundred types) before one of them ejected not a smooth coat but a thin, wild strand of the stuff clear across the room. In that moment, Fish and Cox realized they weren't holding a medical device. They were holding a toy.

Wham-O wasn't convinced at first. When Fish pitched the company in person and gave a live demo — spraying the string right at the executive — the man got angry and threw him out of the meeting. One day later, a telegram arrived asking him to send twenty-four cans for a market test. Two weeks after that, Fish and Cox had a licensing deal with the company that had just tossed them out the door.

Wham-O sold Silly String in a range of colors — blue, red, green — and over the decades it carved out its true identity: the official weapon of the birthday party and, above all, Halloween. There was a particular anarchic joy in a neighborhood on November 1st, every corner with a costume tangled in streamers, every lawn webbed in neon. The stuff got everywhere, and nobody really had a comeback for it. In 1997 the trademark passed to the Car-Freshner Corporation — yes, the Little Trees air-freshener company — whose Silly String Products division still makes it in North America today.

The Halloween mayhem eventually crossed a line. In 2004, Los Angeles enacted a city ordinance (LAMC Section 56.02) banning aerosol string in Hollywood on Halloween night, backed by posted signs warning of a $1,000 fine. And then there's the strangest chapter: back in 1993, Sergeant First Class David B. Chandler discovered a military use — sprayed ahead of you, the featherweight strings drape over hidden tripwires without setting them off. By 2006, US troops were using it in the Iraq War, and at one point about 80,000 donated cans sat stockpiled in New Jersey while donors worked out how to ship pressurized aerosols to a war zone — a puzzle finally solved in October 2007.

You can still buy Silly String today, can and neon formula basically unchanged. Born by accident as a medical spray, weaponized first by kids on Halloween and then, in earnest, by soldiers — it sits quietly on the party-aisle shelf, waiting for its next burst of chaos.