The early marketing of Marlex, a revolutionary plastic developed in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, by two Phillips Petroleum Company chemists, would take off, thanks to a simple toy with no moving parts.

Prompted by a post World War II boom in demand for plastics, Phillips Petroleum invested $50 million to bring its own miracle product – Marlex – to market in 1954. The company rightfully thought the new plastic would be perfect for all manner of emerging products trying to keep up with consumer demand.

Marlex, a high-density polyethylene (HDPE), was developed by Phillips chemists Paul Hogan and Robert Banks — who were researching gasoline additives. In the course of their investigations, Hogan and Banks began to study catalysts.

“In June 1951, they set up an experiment in which they modified their original catalyst (nickel oxide) to include small amounts of chromium oxide,” notes the American Chemical Society.

Their experiment was expected to produce low-molecular-weight hydrocarbons. ”As Paul Hogan recalls it, he was standing outside the laboratory when Banks came out saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got something new coming in our kettle that we’ve never seen before.’ Running inside, they saw that the nickel oxide had produced the expected liquids. But the chromium had produced a white, solid material. Hogan and Banks were looking at a new polymer — crystalline polypropylene.”

Only a few years later, when Phillips inroduced Phillips introduced HDPE in 1954, under the brand name Marlex polyethylene, “company marketing executives were wildly optimistic, expecting that the product would be a big hit and that the Phillips would not be able to keep it on the shelves.”

However, the transition from laboratory to mass production was far more difficult than company executives had anticipated. When customers failed to materialize, the dingy, inconsistently sized, off-specification pellets accumulated. Phillips found itself with no buyers and warehouses full of Marlex.

Toy Company Impacts Sales

As Phillips Petroleum stored its unwanted Marlex and seached for new customers, relief came from an unexpected source.

The Wham-O Company was born in a California garage in 1948 when Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spuds” Melin began making 75-cent wooden slingshots using a jigsaw they purchased on an installment plan. The company’s name came from its first product, the “Wham-O Slingshot” – the sound made when a pebble hit a target.

Mail-order business grew rapidly and in 1957 Wham-O added a flying disc toy, the “Pluto Platter” — today’s Frisbee — to their product line. The next year, they introduced a simple Australian amusement to America, the “Hula-Hoop.”

“The great obsession of 1958 — the undisputed granddaddy of American fads…the hoop rewrote toy merchandising history,” noted Richard Johnson in his 1985 book American Fads.

When the hoop craze ignited, Wham-O needed plastic tubing and a lot of it. The company first used a W.R. Grace & Company product called Grex — a petroleum-based plastic produced in the same Pennsylvania county where America’s first successful oil well had been drilled almost 100 years earlier.

In Titusville, birthplace of the U.S. petroleum industry, the Skyline Plastics Company worked overtime extruding Grex into Hula-Hoops as the craze swirled across the nation.

Retired Titusville plant superintendent Robert Poux, 83, remembers 125 employees working three-shifts, seven days a week, just to keep up. Wham-O sold more than 25 million Hula-Hoops in the first four months (at $1.98 each). They sold more than 100 million in two years.

Wham-O’s nationwide daily production ultimately peaked at about 20,000 per day. Soon there wasn’t enough Grex and Phillips Petroleum’s once ignored miracle polypropylene, Marlex, was suddenly very much in demand. Hula-Hoop plants sprang up in Chicago, Newark and Toronto. Canada.

The completely unanticipated demand for Marlex gave Phillips the time necessary to resolve initial production problems and position itself as a prime source of plastic resins. New industrial and consumer uses ensured Phillips Petroleum’s investment in plastics would pay back the $50 million investment many times over.

When the Hula-Hoop fad diminished, Wham-O continued using Marlex for production of Frisbees .

The Frisbee

In 1948, a San Louis Obispo, Calif., newspaper reported: “Two local men, pooling resources after the words ‘flying saucers’ shocked the world a year ago, have invented a new, patented plastic toy shaped like the originally reported saucer.”

Walter Morrison and Warren Franscioni formed Partners in Plastic (Pipco) and sold their “Flyin’ Saucers” for 25 cents each. By 1955, Morrison had split away and was selling his Pluto Platters when Wham-O acquired the rights and launched the first Frisbee.

Editor’s Note – Because many young people fail to recognize that modern plastics are a petroleum product, community museums and energy educations programs often include “petroleum product” displays.

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The Man they called “Mr. Marlex”

Paul Hogan has been linked to Marlex plastics since he and Banks made their famous discovery. With his name on 30 patents relating to Marlex plastics and processes, Hogan has been called “Mr. Marlex.” A farmer’s son from Kentucky, he was known as a modest man who never dwelled on his scientific achievements. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001.

Copyright © 2011 American Oil & Gas Historical Society