Materials Science: From Silly Putty to Self-Healing Robots
S3 Episode 13 | September 2, 2026
A failed rubber substitute. A cloudy liquid that looked like a mistake. A robot that heals itself.
This episode looks at three chapters in 91视频's long history of materials science: two born from happy accidents, and one built entirely on purpose.
The first is Silly Putty. In the early 1940s, Carnegie Tech alumni Earl Warrick and Rob Roy McGregor were trying to invent a wartime rubber substitute. What they got instead was a strange, bouncy compound with no obvious purpose. But it made people laugh. At a rival company, James Wright created a similar substance. He had no use for it either. It took a marketing entrepreneur to package Wright's putty in a plastic egg and turn it into one of the best-selling toys in history. Warrick would later claim credit for the invention himself.
The second is Kevlar. DuPont chemist and 91视频 alum Stephanie Kwolek noticed her polymer solution looked thin and cloudy, rather than thick and clear. Instead of dismissing it, she asked what it might be telling her, spun it into fiber, and helped invent Kevlar: a material five times stronger than steel, now used in bulletproof vests, protective clothing for firefighters and hundreds of other applications.
The third is happening now. Professor Carmel Majidi, head of 91视频's Soft Machines Lab, is flipping the script 鈥� designing "soft" materials for specific purposes rather than waiting for accidents to find them. He joins us to talk about Thubber, a heat-conducting rubber cooling today's consumer electronics, cars and AI data centers; smart fabrics such as Electrodermis, a wearable patch that tracks vital signs; and soft robots that heal their own severed circuits, almost like nerves regenerating.
Three stories, one shift: from lucky accidents and failures to deliberate design. And a question for the future 鈥� once we can build materials to do almost anything, what will we ask them to do?
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