Rubber duck
Arubber duckor arubber duckieis a toy shaped like aduck,that is usually yellow with a flat base. It may be made of rubber or rubber-like material such asvinyl plastic.[1]Rubber ducks were invented in the late 1800s when it became possible to more easily shape rubber,[2]and are believed to improve developmental skills in children during water play.[3]
The yellow rubber duck has achieved an iconic status inWesternpop cultureand is often symbolically linked tobathing.Various novelty variations of the toy are produced, and many organisations use yellow rubber ducks inrubber duck racesfor fundraising worldwide.
History
The history of the rubber duck is linked to the emergence of rubber manufacturing in the late 19th century. The earliest rubber ducks were made from harder rubber when manufacturers began usingCharles Goodyear's invention,vulcanized rubber.Consequently, these solid rubber ducks were not capable of floating and were instead intended as chew toys.[4]
SculptorPeter Ganinecreated a sculpture of a duck in the 1940s. He thenpatentedit and reproduced it as a floating toy, of which over 50 million were sold.[5]
Besides the ubiquitous yellow rubber duck with which most people are familiar, there have been numerous novelty variations on the basic theme, including character ducks representing professions, politicians, or celebrities, a concept introduced by Mark Boldt'sRubba Ducks.[6]There are also ducks that glow in the dark, quack, change color, have interiorLEDillumination, or include a wind-up mechanism that enables them to "swim". In 2001,The Sun,a British tabloid reported thatQueen Elizabeth IIhad a rubber duck in her bathroom that wore an inflatablecrown.The duck was spotted by a workman who was repainting her bathroom.[7]The story prompted sales of rubber ducks in the United Kingdom to increase by 80% for a short period.
Rubber ducks are collected by enthusiasts. The 2011Guinness World Recordfor World's Largest Rubber Duck Collection stood at 5,631 different rubber ducks, and was awarded to Charlotte Lee.[8]In 2013, the rubber duck was inducted into theToy Hall of Fame,a museum inRochester, New York,along with the game ofchess.[9]Toys are selected based on factors like icon-status, longevity, and innovation.[10]
In popular culture
Ernie,a popularMuppetfrom the television seriesSesame Street,has performed the song "Rubber Duckie"multiple times since the series began. Ernie frequently spoke to his duck and carried it with him in other segments of the show. On a special occasion,Little Richardperformed the song.[11]
C. W. McCall's hit song "Convoy"(and the movie and novel it inspired) are narrated from the viewpoint of a character who replaced the bulldog hood ornament on his Mack truck with a bathtub toy and used the on-air handle of" Rubber Duck ".
TheAkron RubberDucksminor league baseball team, formerly known as the "Aeros", officially adopted the nickname on October 29, 2013.[12]The nickname pays tribute to the city's history in the rubber industry, particularly as the birthplace of companies such asGoodyear,Firestone,B.F. Goodrich,andGeneral Tire.
Protest symbol
Rubber ducks have also become a protest symbol simultaneously in Belgrade, Brazil, and Moscow in 2017,[13]and in Bangkok in 2020.[14]
World's largest rubber duck
The world's largest rubber duck was created by Dutch artistFlorentijn Hofmanin 2007, measuring 16.5 m × 20 m × 32 m (54 ft × 66 ft × 105 ft) and weighing about 600 kilograms (1,300 lb).[15][16]Since 2007, several ducks of various sizes created by Hofman have been on display in countries and territories such as Amsterdam, Netherlands; Lommel, Belgium; Osaka, Japan; Sydney, Australia; São Paulo, Brazil; Hong Kong, China; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; and Seoul, Korea; until 14 November 2014,[17]and went on display in the United States after 20 October 2013.[18]
In 2013, China's "Great Firewall"blockedsearches for "big yellow duck"because Chinese activists were photo-shopping theRubber Ducksculpture into theTank Manphoto of theTiananmen Square Massacre.If the term "Big Yellow Duck" were searched, a message appeared stating that according to relevant laws, statutes, and policies, the results of the search could not be shown.[19]
Races
Rubber duck races,also known as derby duck races, have been used as a method of fundraising for organizations worldwide. People donate money to the organization by sponsoring a duck. At the end of the fundraising drive, all of the ducks are dumped into a waterway, with the first to float past the finish line winning a prize for its sponsor.
Scientific studies
Oceanography
During a Pacific storm on 10 January 1992, three 40-foot (12 m) containers holding 28,800Friendly Floateesplastic bathtub toys from a Chinese factory were washed off a ship, containing 7,200 each of blue turtles, yellow ducks, red beavers, and green frogs.[20][21]Two-thirds of the toys floated south and landed three months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia, and South America. The remaining 10,000 toys headed north to Alaska and then completed a full circle back near Japan, caught up in the sameNorth Pacific Gyrecurrent as the so-calledGreat Pacific Garbage Patch.Many of the toys then entered theBering StraitbetweenAlaskaand Russia and were trapped in theArcticice. They moved through the ice at a rate of one mile (1.6 km) per day, and in 2000 they were sighted in the NorthAtlantic.The movement of the toys had been monitored by AmericanoceanographerCurtis Ebbesmeyer.[22]Bleached by sun and seawater, the ducks and beavers had faded to white, but the turtles and frogs had kept their original colors.
Between July and December 2003, The First Years Inc. offered a $100 USsavings bondreward to anybody who recovered a Floatee inNew England,Canada or Iceland. More of the toys were recovered in 2004 than in any of the preceding three years. However, still more of these toys were predicted to have headed eastward past Greenland and make landfall on the southwestern shores of the United Kingdom in 2007.
These toys were the subject ofDonovan Hohn's 2011 bookMoby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea.
Glacial melting
In August 2008,NASA'SJet Propulsion Laboratoryundertook studies ofGreenland'sJakobshavn Glacierto determine how interior glacial meltflow during the summer influenced its movement. A sophisticated football-sized probe that had a GPS device, pressure sensor, thermometer and accelerometer was lowered by rope into one of the glacier'smoulins.The probe's equipment was designed to find structures such as waterfalls inside the ice. Unfortunately the probe went silent, so ninety rubber ducks marked in English, Danish, and Inuit with the text "science experiment" and "reward", along with an email address to contact if found, were also put into the moulins and it was hoped that the ducks would eventually exit and be found by hunters or fishermen aroundBaffin Bay.[23][24]As of 2012, none of the ducks were found or returned, possibly due to being trapped in large aquifers later discovered inside the ice.[25]
Germ study
A 2019 article in the scientific journalEnvironmental Science: Water Research & Technologydetails how rubber ducks were used to expand knowledge on how potable water interacts with flexible plastic materials in relation to microbial and nutrient contamination. Particularly how these microbes could affect potentially vulnerable end users. The bathroom, despite being the place for the family to bathe and become clean, is surprisingly good at creating the perfect conditions for microbial growth and so the researchers wished to see if these soft plastic toys could potentially pose a risk. They determined that, although some bacteria and microbes can be absorbed into the toys, only under specific laboratory conditions did they become dangerous to human beings and so are largely safe.[26]
See also
References
- ^"Rubber Duck".National Toy Hall of Fame.Retrieved30 September2014.
- ^"The history of rubber duck".St Neots Museum. 13 January 2021.Retrieved31 March2021.
- ^"Rubber Duck | National Toy Hall of Fame".toyhalloffame.org.Retrieved20 February2020.
- ^"Rubber Duck".National Toy Hall of Fame.Retrieved31 March2016.
- ^"Peter Ganine; L.A. Sculptor".Los Angeles Times.Los Angeles, California. 13 August 1974.
- ^Mike Blahmik. "Rubber Duck Dreams."Star Tribune.Retrieved 2021-09-10.
- ^"Queen Goes Quackers at Bath Time".BBC News.5 October 2001.Retrieved17 August2009.
- ^"Largest collection of rubber ducks".Guinness World Records Limited. 10 April 2011.Retrieved8 January2019.
- ^D'Zurilla, Christie (7 November 2013)."Toy Hall of Fame inducts chess, rubber duck; snubs Army men, 8-Ball".Los Angeles Times.Retrieved13 February2018.
- ^Gallman, Stephanie (7 November 2013)."Chess, rubber duck squeak into National Toy Hall of Fame".CNN.Retrieved13 February2018.
- ^"Sesame Street: Little Richard Sings Rubber Duckie".Children's Television Workshop.2 January 2010.Retrieved18 January2010.
- ^"You're the one: Akron RubberDucks".
- ^"Yellow Rubber Duck is a Potent Protest Symbol".Bloomberg.Bloomberg. 28 March 2017.Retrieved12 August2021.
- ^"Yellow Rubber Duck becomes a Symbol of Thai Protests".SCMP.Retrieved12 August2021.
- ^"Reuze gele badeend".De Standaard. 2 May 2013.Retrieved3 May2013.
- ^Sophia Sun (25 April 2013)."Rubber Duck".Hk.lifestyle.yahoo.Retrieved1 May2014.
- ^"First Day of Florentijn Hofman's Rubber Duck Exhibition in Hong Kong".
- ^"Giant Rubber Duck Makes Splash in Hong Kong Harbor".ABC News.Retrieved1 May2014.
- ^Didi Kirsten Tatlow (4 June 2013)."Censored in China: 'Today,' 'Tonight' and 'Big Yellow Duck'".The New York Times.
- ^"What connects the 'Ever Given', the Suez Canal and 7,200 rubber ducks loose in the Pacific?".The National.1 April 2021.Retrieved27 October2021.
- ^Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer and W. James Ingraham Jr. (October 1994)."Pacific Toy Spill Fuels Ocean Current Pathways Research".Earth in Space.7(2): 7–9, 14.Bibcode:1994EOSTr..75..425E.doi:10.1029/94EO01056.Archived fromthe originalon 5 October 2006.Retrieved15 November2006.
- ^CBS (31 July 2003)."Rubber Duckies Map The World".CBS.Retrieved4 May2013.
- ^Zabarenko, Deborah (1 September 2008)."Can rubber ducks help track a melting glacier?".Reuters.Retrieved9 December2016.
- ^Klotz, Irene (13 July 2010)."Rubber duckies to the rescue in glacial research".NBC News.Archived fromthe originalon 10 March 2014.Retrieved9 December2016.
- ^Mohan, Geoffrey (12 January 2015)."Ice researchers capture catastrophic Greenland melt".Los Angeles Times.Retrieved9 December2016.
- ^Hammes, Frederik (2019)."Editorial Perspectives: Using bacteria in rubber ducks to improve scientific literacy, advance citizen science, and expand fundamental science".Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology.5(3): 442–443.doi:10.1039/C9EW90008J.S2CID159043529.