When was play doh created

Sales skyrocketed, and Rainbow Crafts struggled to keep up with the overwhelming demand for this new toy. In , accessories became part of the Play-Doh line when McVicker hired two engineers to develop a product that could be used in multiple ways. The result was the hugely popular opens in a new window Fun Factory that, with minimal force, would extrude Play-Doh into various shapes and designs. By , Rainbow Crafts was shipping more than one million cans of Play-Doh per year.

General Mills purchased the company one year later. Currently Hasbro continues to manufacture and sell Play-Doh. It is estimated that since the product was officially introduced in , more than two billion cans of Play-Doh have been sold worldwide. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. All rights reserved.

JulNichols via Getty Images. FARGO — Play-Doh has entertained children for more than 60 years, but did you know the colorful dough started out as wallpaper cleaner?

Monday, Sept. In , the Kutol Products soap company was in financial hot water when an enterprising employee named Cleo McVicker found out the Kroger grocery store chain was looking for a ready-made wallpaper cleaner to sell in their stores.

According to the National Museum of Play blog, Kutol had never made wallpaper cleaner before, but McVicker and his brother Noah, a product developer, took on the challenge and came up with a claylike compound made from flour, salt and water that was also non-toxic and malleable. But by the s, sales lagged, in part, because Americans were changing the way they heated their homes. Prior to World War II, homes were heated with coal-based furnaces, which in turn caused a soot buildup on wallpaper.