On March 6th, 1950, Silly Putty was released in America. The inventor of Silly Putty is heavily disputed, although Crayola, who owns the Silly Putty brand, has said that James Wright, an inventor working for General Electric in New Haven, CT, invented it in 1943. After being discovered in 1949 by a toy store owner, a marketing consultant named Peter Hodgson, who was already $12k in debt, borrowed $147 to buy a batch of putty and packed it in plastic eggs for $1, called it "Silly Putty". The initial sales were poor, but after it was featured by the New Yorker, Hodgson sold over 250,000 eggs in three days. In 1957, Hodgson produced the first televised commercial for the putty, which aired during the "Howdy Doody Show". As of 2005, annual Silly Putty sales exceeded six million eggs.
