"It's a Bird, It's a Plane..."

What bounces higher than a bad check, picks up English faster than a Berlitz student, and drags kids away from the dinner table quicker than Soupy Sales? Super Ball, America's newest plaything.

A dark purple sphere about the size of a plum, Super Ball has already bounced into millions of U.S. homes, shows no signs of slowing down. McGeorge Bundy bounces Super Balls in his Washington basement, brokers on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange throw them about the floor during slack hours, Manhattan executives dribble them on their desks, and kids around the country are bouncing them down sidewalks and school corridors.

The ball is super because it has more bounce to the ounce than any other in history. Dropped on a hard floor from shoulder level, it will bounce almost all the way back, continue bouncing for a full minute (a tennis ball lasts ten seconds). It has such friction that, given reverse English, it will change direction each time it bounces. Thrown forward, it picks up so much forward spin when it hits the ground that it leaps ahead with almost twice the speed on the second bounce.

Like many new products, it came about almost by accident. Norman Stingley, a chemist for Bettis Rubber Co. in Whittier, Calif., was playing around with a high-resiliency synthetic rubber in his spare time. He fashioned a crude ball of the goo by compressing it under some 3,500 lbs. of pressure per square inch, discovered that it had a fantastic bounce. But Bettis Co. was not interested, mostly because the ball tended to fall apart after five minutes. So Stingley took it to Wham O Manufacturing Co. in San Gabriel, Calif., the company that made juvenile history by producing the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop. For the next year, Stingley and Wham-O worked to make the ball more durable (it is still apt to chip or shatter on rough surfaces), then dyed it purple for no particular reason, fixed a 98-c- price tag on it, and threw it out to the public four months ago.

Since then, inventing Super Ball games has become as big a fad as the ball itself. Little girls have taken to Super-Balling the jacks (it is hardly a contest), office workers place bets to see who can bounce the ball into a wastepaper basket, and skateboarders now bounce Super Balls as they roll along. Another popular game is giving the ball lots of spin, bouncing it against the wall, and seeing how many times it will bounce back to the wall before stopping. The unofficial record: five hits.

As for Wham-O, it is simply crossing its collective fingers. Well aware that fads are a sometime thing (where are the Hula-Hoops of yesteryear?), Executive Vice President Richard P. Knerr optimistically comments: "Each Super Ball bounce is 92% as high as the last. If our sales don't come down any faster than that, we've got it made." And if they do--well, that is the way the ball bounces.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.