Plasticine

Plasticine is a putty-like modelling material; the word is trademarked, but in the UK it tends to be used as a generic description. In the US, the term modeling clay is much more widely used, and although the particular brand is available Plasticine is not well known.

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A similar product, "Kunst-Modellierton", was invented by Franz Kolb of Munich, Germany in 1880.

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Plasticine was formulated by art teacher William Harbutt of Bathampton, near Bath, England in 1897. He wanted a non-drying clay for use by his sculpture students. Although the exact composition is a secret, Plasticine is composed of calcium salts (principally calcium carbonate), petroleum jelly, and long-chain aliphatic acids. It is soft, malleable, and does not dry on exposure to air (unlike superficially similar products such as Play-Doh, which is based on flour, salt and water). It is non-toxic, and sterile. A patent was awarded in 1899, and in 1900 commercial production started at a factory in Bathampton.

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The original Plasticine was grey, but the product initially sold to the public came in four colours, and it was soon available in a wide variety of bright colours. Plasticine was popular with children, widely used in schools for teaching art, and found a wide variety of other uses (moulding for plaster casts, for example). The Harbutt company promoted Plasticine as a children's toy by producing modelling kits in association with popular children's characters such as Noddy, the Mr Men and Paddington Bear.

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The original Plasticine factory was destroyed by fire in 1963 and replaced by a modern building, and production in Bathampton by the Harbutt company continued until 1983. It is still manufactured today, but in smaller quantities, and is marketed once more as an art material.

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Plasticine is used in animation, one of its main exponents being Nick Park who used characters modelled in Plasticine to win Oscars for his short films The Wrong Trousers (1992) and A Close Shave (1995). This technique is known as Claymation.

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Plasticine is also used in party games such as Cranium, Rapidough and Barbarossa.

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Putty: PuTTY is a free SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP client. It was originally available only for Windows, but is now also available on various Unix platforms, with work-in-progress ports to Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Other people have contributed unofficial ports to other platforms, such as Symbian ...

Trademark: A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark) is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to set the business and its products or services apart from those of other businesses. A trademark is a type of intellectua...

Franz Kolb: Franz Kolb was a German pharmacien and the inventor of the modelling paste Plastilin. In English-speaking countries this material is also known as "plasticine." Because of different patent rights in Germany and England there are different views about who actually invented plasticine. In England Will...