Januari 10, 2017
when did we first use rubber ducks? in 1970, everyone’s favorite orange roommatesang a song to his bathtime buddy. “oh, rubber duckie, you’re the one. you make bathtime lots of fun,†cooed ernieto his squeaky yellow friend. while the rubber duckie had been around forat least a century prior to ernie and his mellow melody, this sesame street tune shovedthe bathtime toy into the popular culture lexicon where it has remained ever since. from a chew toy to a piece of art to ernie’sbest friend (sorry, bert), here’s the story of how the world got into the bath with therubber duckie.
in 1839, charles goodyear discovered vulcanizedrubber. legend has it that while in an argument withhis lab partner, he angrily threw a piece of sulfur-covered rubber into a potbelly stove. the rubber charred and, then, hardened. heat had combined the sulfur molecules tothe rubber molecules, creating a rubbery substance that was stronger and more elastic. whether that’s really how it happened ornot, goodyear never reaped the financial rewards that often come with an invention of thismagnitude. in fact, he died $200,000 in debt, or about$5 million today.
(see: the luckless rubber maven: charles goodyear)nevertheless, the vulcanization process and his subsequent patents changed the world. by the mid-1800s, products using vulcanizedrubber started flooding the market, including footwear, sheet rubber, car springs, bicycletires and toys. the first vulcanized rubber toys were availableto consumers around 1850, which included balls, rattles and doll heads. it isn’t definitively known who was thefirst to make a duck-shaped rubber toy, but the first rubber squeaky toy of any type wasinvented around the 1860s and the first rubber duck decoy (which was used for hunting) camein the 1880s.
rubber toys at this time were nothing likewe think of today. hard, unattractive and not malleable, theywere often used as chew toys for teething babies and dogs. like these toys, the early rubber duckie playitem was not meant as a water toy. as noted by toy scholar, charles steiner,it “was cast, solid and did not float well.†it also was most certainly not bright yellow. as the industrial revolution engulfed thecountry, an increased percentage of americans held factory jobs. moving from rural america to urban citiesin search of these jobs, the american urban
population grew rapidly. in 1880, 8.4% of americans were living incities, but by 1890, that percentage increased to 12.7%. living space was limited, so several generationsof family often lived together. this had a direct effect on many normal familyactivities, including bathtime. noting this, former curator at a pittsburgh’stoonseum, joe wos, claims that the rubber duck became affiliated with the bath becauseit was the only way to get kids in the tub. according to his theory on the origin of therubber duckie as a bathtime companion, on saturday nights, everyone in the family wouldbath for sunday church, attempting to rid
themselves of the dirt and grime of the previousweek’s work. of course, there was only one tub with limitedwater. dad would go first, then mom, then the oldestsiblings and so forth until, as wos explains, â€then you get down to the littlest ones,they’ve got to go into that dirty, filthy water that the whole family has used, so youneed a way to get them into the tub – and suddenly the tub becomes playtime.†whether you hold to wos’ speculative theoryor not, it isn’t difficult to see how a toy duck, whether it floated or not, wouldinspire kids to start playing with it in the bathtub, regardless of how dirty the waterpurportedly was.
nevertheless, it would be several decadesafter this era before rubber duckies would hit the mainstream. one of the first relatively popular rubberduck toys came about in 1938 when the seiberling latex products company partnered with thenewly popular movie studio disney (who had just released to great fanfare snow whiteand the seven dwarfs a year earlier), debuting a line of rubber figurines, including theircharacter donald duck. made from solid rubber, like incarnationsbefore it, this rubber duck was not meant for water play. rubber-duckie1a few years prior to disney’sdonald duck toy, a patent was filed by eleanor
shannahan of easton, maryland for what isgenerally considered the first true rubber duck-shaped bath toy. while this rubber duckie wasn’t like today’sversion, it provided amusement nonetheless to “both little children and older personsâ€by shooting jets of water at unsuspecting bathers. as the patent reads, the duck toy was supposedto “to produce an attractive fountain-like effect, and also to enable the playing ofpranks by one person upon another.†little is known about the actual productionand sale of this item, but, in 1941, a los angeles artist and sculptor took this basicdesign and turned it into a fortune.
rubber-duckie2even before his creation ofthe iconic yellow rubber duckie, hollywood artist peter ganine was rather famous. immigrating from russia to the united stateson an art scholarship, he moved to los angeles in the 1930s where his work attracted theattention of longtime los angeles times art critic arthur millier, who helped expose himto the greater art community. ganine hit his apex in the late 1940s whenhe began designing toy sculptures, like a giant grinning whale and a bright yellow rubberduckie. patenting it in 1949, the patent documentfor the “toy duck†was remarkably short and to the point with the drawings of hisdesign doing most of the talking – showing
that it floated, squeaked, possessed a goofysmile and it was yellow. the design was a hit and ganine sold millionsof his yellow rubber duckies. while ganine later also became famous foradding gothic faces to chess pieces, the duck became his most defining work. over the next decades, the rubber duckie becamesynonymous with kids’ bath time, with a major assist from ernie’s song. debuting in 1970, “rubber duckie†wasso beloved that it actually landed on the billboard charts, reaching as high as number11 in 1971. written by sesame street head writer jeffmoss and voiced by legend jim henson, the
song became one of the show’s defining moments,even reenacted by little richard in the 1990s. rubber-ducksince then, the rubber duckie hashad several other pop culture moments, like when 28,000 of them were accidentally dumpedinto the ocean during a storm (to this day, there are still reports of people findingthem around the world). there’s also been several occurrences ofa giant yellow inflatable duck making appearances in major cities, including stops in hong kong,new york and syracuse. and so it is that for over a century now rubberducks, in one form or another, have joined us for bathtime. presumably the now iconic yellow duckie willcontinue to be a mainstay for centuries more.
after all, they are kind of fun to play with while taking a soak.
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