I hardly ever bathe. That’s not to say, she countered quickly, that I’m not clean. I shower quite regularly, and I would suggest that on the majority of days, one could easily stand downwind of me without any discomfort whatsoever. The fact that I don’t sit in a bathtub to perform my frequent ablutions does however mean that I have little to no emotional attachment to cheery yellow rubber duckies, in the way perhaps that Ernie from Sesame Street does. One has precious little time for toys whilst showering.
Ernie didn’t invent the rubber duckie, which sports a gentle smile and big blue eyes (complete with eyelashes), but his little song of admiration for his yellow pal was pivotal in guaranteeing yellow rubber duckies their cultural phenomenon status. No, Ernie didn’t invent rubber duckies and, as we know, his beloved companion wasn’t even being made of rubber by the time he composed his ditty.
The early version of the duck WAS made of actual rubber. It was solid, heavy, and didn’t float, but was given to children at the end of the 1800s as a chew toy. Kids don’t get enough chew toys if you ask me. If they did, they wouldn’t spend so much time biting those around them.
While I can’t for the life of me find any explanation as to why the image of a duck was chosen as the shape that teething (presumably) children preferred to chew on, the toy had been quietly doing the trick ever since the vulcanization (hardening/curing) process for natural rubber had been figured out by chemists. Once rubber had been made stable by this new method of mixing it with sulfur and heating it, the compound was readily adapted to the production of tires (or tyres to be accurate), the waterproofing of boots and rain gear, the transforming of shoe soles, and to make ducks for kids to chew on. (?)
After the Second World War, plastic had supplanted rubber for most manufacturing uses and it was with a flexible vinyl in 1947 that a sculptor by the name of Peter Ganine produced his version of the rubber duckie to be the incredibly yellow, cheery version that we know today. I don’t know why Peter did this. The portfolio of his sculpted pieces is wide and varied but he does seem to lean towards the animal world, so maybe that was just his thing. Apparently, he also had a very popular toy whale which was awarded a design prize by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
Peter’s version of the rubber duckie could float, now that it was no longer a solid mass, and that made it a huge hit with toddlers and their parents. I’m sure the squeaker in the bottom helped quite a bit too. He was smart enough to patent the design and then to somehow sell over 50 million copies of the toy. No word on how well sales of the whale made out. Peter Ganine was later to go on to design a chess set with humanized faces carved on the pieces, which apparently sent the chess world into spasms of delight.
Back to the duck.
It was in the first ever season of Sesame Street, during an episode that aired in February of 1970, that Ernie sang his song to his beloved bathtub cohort. The song went over so well that it was released as a 45rpm single by September of that year. The single would go on to reach Number 16 in the States and shoot all the way to Number 10 in Australia! I’ll bet Jim Henson was pleased.
Riding on the burst of sudden stardom that Ernie’s bathing ode had brought, the simple yellow rubber duckie became a designer’s darling and all manner of clothes, hairstyles, and colours were applied to the familiar toy. It was a media sensation! The 70’s were a trip.
By the 1990s, several toy companies made their own versions of the rubber duckie out of various plastics and a company in China had a line of tub toys that they called Friendly Floatees. This collection included the yellow duck, a red beaver, a blue turtle, and a green frog. These didn’t carry a squeaker or even have a hole in the bottom but apparently they sold and that was why there was a container of them loaded onto a cargo ship leaving Hong Kong to cross the Pacific Ocean on its way to Tacoma, Washington in early 1992. During a fierce storm at sea on January 10th, the container was washed off the ship and, for whatever reason, cracked open, tossing the 28,800 colourful toys into the ocean. What must that have looked like?
At that point, an oceanographer by the name of Curtis Ebbesmeyer got involved. Since they knew exactly where the toys had been dumped into the Pacific, he and his team were able to track the natural routes that the floating toys took, as the currents and winds directed their progress. It only took 10 months for the first of the castaways to make landfall. Ten of them landed in Sitka, Alaska, 3200 kms from where they’d been dumped, and by August of the next year 400 of them had shown up along the Gulf of Alaska.
But that’s not all. Over the next 15 years, Friendly Floatees showed up in Hawaii, Japan, Australia, along the western coast of North America, and there are reports that a small contingent made their way through the Northwest Passage and were found in Newfoundland. The latest guess is that there are still some 2000 unaccounted for, but many of those are thought to be in an endless loop of currents moving them from Asia to Alaska and back, while the rest are presumed to be either frozen in the ice pack along the Bering Strait or stuck in that horrendous North Pacific Garbage Vortex.
While this shipping casualty of lost cargo in 1992 undoubtedly caused an environmental intrusion, it was actually able to demonstrate to oceanographers the pathways that the Floatees took as they toured the world. They (the oceanographers) claimed that what was learned from the journey of these plastic tub toys, was invaluable to their research and to expanding their knowledge base.
The rubber duckie evolved from being something as simple as a solid rubber teething toy from the late 1800s into becoming an oceanic research aid—only Ernie could have imagined that success!
