Today in 1970, Ernie from Sesame Street first sang his signature song, “Rubber Duckie.”
So it’s a great time to talk about how so many people became awfully fond of rubber ducks.
Quartz went back through the rubber duck timeline a while ago.
It starts not too long after the birth of the rubber industry, in the second half of the 19th Century.
Initially, companies tried making all sorts of rubber animals, but consumers decided rubber duckie was the one, helped along later by a licensing deal for little rubber Disney characters like Donald Duck,.
By the way, most of these early ducks weren’t bath toys; they for babies and/or pets to chew on.
And they didn’t float, at least not until about the 1930s, when Maryland inventor Eleanor Shannahan came up with a duck toy that could stay upright in the water as well as spray water at you.
In the 1940s, artist and sculptor Peter Ganine started creating a series of sculptures of small toys, including a bright yellow duck that could float and squeak.
Ganine sold millions of his rubber duckies, which became the rubber duckie archetype.
Early childhood toys like these aren’t always the ones that we think of first, so that may not be people’s favorite toys.
Still, they’re everywhere: they’re on TV shows and in songs, like Ernie’s tribute on Sesame Street; they’re in books; and there’s a place in Montreal called Le Petit Duck Shoppe, where you can get rubber ducks of every kind, dressed as historical figures, astronauts, super heroes, Rubik’s Cubes, even celebrities like “Beak-on-say.”
Because life is so boring right now we thought we’d check in on the town of Boring, Oregon.
By the way, the town is not named Boring because it’s a boring place.
It’s named for a person who donated land for the community’s first school, and his name was William Harrison Boring.
Wasn’t that Boring story interesting?
Rubber ducks (Quartz)
No, the town of Boring wasn’t named such because it was a dull place to be (KGW)