Talk:Raychem

Mattel toys connection
If memory serves, Raychem supplied small plastic figures of dinosaurs and the like to Mattel, Inc. in the 1960s, based on cross-linked polymer technology. The figures were molded in various colors, cross-linked and then compressed into a prism shape. Children could put them into a specially-made "oven" to heat them and cause the cross-linked plastic to spring back into shape. The adventure for children was in discovering what figures would come out of the prisms, because they were rather featureless and the color gave no clue as to what shape would emerge. The toy was called the Strange Change Machine. It also had heated molds into which the animal could be compressed, changing it back into a rectangular wafer. The compression-expansion process could be repeated many times, as the plastic retained its shape memory quite well.&mdash;QuicksilverT @ 16:59, 16 August 2010 (UTC)