Play-Doh and Its Unusual Original Purpose

Play-Doh has been loved by kids for years as a way to make just about anything, but Play-Doh’s original purpose wasn’t as modeling clay as it is today. It was supposed to be used as a wallpaper cleaner.

The “later to be fun” dough was first introduced in the 1930s by a company called Kutol. It was made so people could clean coal soot from their walls since coal was used at the time to heat their homes. But a problem arose when the 1950s rolled around. People began using alternatives to coal to heat their homes, such as natural gas and oil, both of which were cleaner to burn. This change would have eventually spelled the end for Kutol’s product if someone hadn’t found a different use for it.

That problem was solved by Joe McVicker, the nephew of one of the original inventors of the Kutol wallpaper cleaning dough. McVicker’s sister-in-law, who was a nursery school teacher, told him she had been using the Kutol product with her students during arts and crafts. It was then that Joe McVicker realized this same dough could be used in other schools.

McVicker began shipping the dough to schools around Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Kutol company was located. The new craft clay got a boost when McVicker took it to an education conference in 1955, and the product began being sold at a department store in Washington, DC. In 1956, the…