Ask anyone who’s admired the aesthetics of a multicolored, vanilla scented Play-Doh ashtray and you may begin to wonder how children ever survived the days of the dreary off-white and finger-numbing pliability of conventional clay. What’s good for pottery is not necessarily good for play!

What few people know is that Play-Doh is actually the offspring of Chinese American tenacity.

In the late 1950s, a Chinese American biochemist named Tin Liu spent countless hours at a makeshift lab in Cincinnati with one single purpose - to make a softer clay for children to play with. Sounds simple, but it was “a problem as big as the Pacific Ocean” according to the late Dr. Liu. The right consistency and texture of reusable toy clay was not so simple to create.

Liu, “a Confucian philosopher and a practical scientist,” took on Play-Doh as a job assignment in 1957 when he met Joseph McVicker, the son of a soap and cleaning product manufacturer in Ohio. McVicker was pondering how to help his sister-in-law, a nursery school teacher who felt that conventional clay was too hard for her students’ little fingers. McVicker hired Liu to solve the problem.

Thru the years of Liu’s dedication, Play-Doh was invented and reinvented. It received an array of different colors and accessories including that distinct vanilla scent that delights tiny digits and noses everywhere.

Dr. Liu is gone now, but his legacy, if measured in a two-inch thick rope of all the Play-Doh ever sold, would cover a distance farther than a round trip to the moon. And that, is an accomplishment few scientists can match.