Play-Doh: Kutol's dying wallpaper-cleaner business is reborn as a children's toy

Play-Doh began as a way to clean walls. Kutol Products, founded in Cincinnati in 1912, became the world's largest manufacturer of wallpaper cleaner — a soft, pliable putty that rolled coal soot off wallpaper without tearing it. That business depended on coal-heated homes, and when American households switched to oil, gas and electricity in the 1950s, demand collapsed and the firm's future looked bleak.

The rescue came from outside the company. Joseph McVicker's sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, ran a nursery school in Dover, New Jersey, and had read that wallpaper cleaner could be used for modeling projects. She tested the nontoxic dough with her students, who loved shaping it, and she urged McVicker to market it as a toy — even suggesting the name Play-Doh when his first attempt, Kutol's Rainbow Modeling Compound, struck her as weak.

McVicker stripped the detergent out of the formula, added food coloring and a mild almond scent, and in 1956 set up a new subsidiary, Rainbow Crafts, to sell it. The first customers were schools, buying gallon cans; department stores Woodward & Lothrop, Macy's and Marshall Field's followed. The national breakthrough came on television: Bob Keeshan, host of the children's show Captain Kangaroo, talked about Play-Doh twice a week in 1958 in exchange for 2 percent of sales, and the product took off.

The pivot was permanent. Sales climbed toward $3 million a year by the early 1960s, Rainbow Crafts was sold to General Mills in 1965, and Hasbro has owned the brand since 1991. Hasbro reports more than 3 billion cans sold since 1956 — more than 700 million pounds of dough — and the National Toy Hall of Fame inducted Play-Doh in 1998.