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On this day in engineering history, the Green Bay Packers
defeated the Kansas City Chiefs by a score of 35 – 10 in the first AFL-NFL
World Championship Game, an American football contest which later came to be
known as the Super Bowl. The game, which pitted the champion Packers of the
National Football League (NFL) against the champion Chiefs of the rival
American Football League (AFL), was notable not merely as a sporting event, but
as a testament to the role of rubber in American life.
What's in a Name?
According to NFL Films President Steve Sabol, then NFL
Commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted to the call the AFL-NFL World Championship
Game "The Big One". During discussions about the proposed AFL-NFL merger,
however, AFL founder and Kansas City Chief owner Lamar Hunt began referring to
the inter-league championship game as the "Super Bowl". Hunt's name stuck, in
part because of it was consistent with college football championship-style
games that had long been called "bowls", a reference to the bowl-shaped
stadiums in which they were played. But there was more to the story.
As Sabol explains, Lamar Hunt came up with the name "Super
Bowl" after watching his children play with a popular toy called the Super Ball.
Wham-O Manufacturing, maker of the famed Hula Hoop and flying Frisbee, bounced back into the popular imagination in 1965 with a supercharged sphere
that was about the size and color of a plum. Dropped from shoulder level, the
Super Ball bounced back to its point of origin. Thrown down against the ground,
it could leap over a building in a single bound.
Bart Starr and Norman
Stingley
Bart Starr, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, won a Most
Valuable Player (MVP) award for his skillful play in Super Bowl I, but Normal
Stingley may deserve an honorable mention. Stingley, the California chemist who invented
the Super Ball, compressed a synthetic rubber material under 3,500 pounds of pressure
per inch. Stingley offered his invention to his employer, Bettis Rubber, but the company declined his offer because the rubber hard-pack quickly decomposed.
Fortunately for Stingley, Wham-O Manufacturing agreed to
work with the chemist. After spending several months seeking a more durable
(but still super-resilient) substance, Stingley developed a synthetic rubber material that he called Zectron. Although
some speculated that the material was really a
naturally-occurring rubber made by crossing an East Indian rubber plant with an
Outer Mongolian plum tree, the truth was far less exotic.
Norman Stingley's patent, issued in March 1966, revealed
that the main component of a Super Ball was polybutadiene, with a small amount of sulfur added for
reinforcement (and to serve as a vulcanizing agent). Molded under 1000 pounds of pressure per
square inch at a temperature of about 320-degrees Fahrenheit, the Super Ball became
one of America's hottest-selling toys during the mid-1960s. Today, it lends its name to both the Super Bowl itself, and to a quasi-holiday in America called Super Bowl Sunday.
Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_I
http://www.nfl.com/superbowl/history
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/superball.htm
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