Rubber duck

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Rubber ducks on Pirnaischer Platz in Dresden

A rubber duck , also Quietscheente , rubber ducky , rubber duck , rubber duck , is a duck figure of elastic plastic , which is usually a toy is used in the bath. When the duckling is squeezed, air flows through a special valve, producing the characteristic squeaking sound. The rubber duck can swim because it forms an air-filled hollow body.

The largest collection to date belongs to Charlotte Lee from Washington , USA . In 2011, her collection comprised 5,631 different ducks, for which she received an entry in the Guinness Book of Records .

Ocean current indicator

In 1992, some containers with almost 29,000 toy animals, including numerous rubber ducks, went overboard on a freighter from Hong Kong , which was on its way to Tacoma, Washington State, in the Eastern Pacific. These have been swimming in the world's oceans since then, and some have now also reached Europe. Researchers can use the sightings of rubber ducks to calculate the extent of the garbage vortex on the world's oceans.

Actions

  • During the I found a duck campaign in London, 500 rubber ducks labeled with a number and a web address were released . The game consisted of discovering a duck and reporting its location on the homepage, preferably with a photo of the place where it was found. The duck was released in as original a place as possible so that the next one could find it.
  • The rubber ducks are particularly used in so-called duck races . Here they are released by the thousands on a flowing body of water.
  • An art campaign by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman from 2007 to 2014 showed oversized "rubber ducks" up to 32 meters high in various ports around the world. They became known under the name Rubber Duck ( English for "rubber duck ").
  • In the United States, January 13th is celebrated as Rubby Ducky Day .

Trivia

The train ends at the Rose Monday parade in Mainz
  • The first composer to use the rubber duck with public appeal as a musical instrument was John Cage in Waterwalk (1960).
  • The rubber duck made popular in Germany a. a. the children's series Sesame Street , broadcast by NDR from 1973 , in which the figure Ernie bathes with a yellow specimen and sings the rubber duck song popular among children . The piece was composed by Jeff Moss .
  • The humorist Loriot lets the protagonists Mr. Müller-Lüdenscheidt and Dr. Klöbner got into an argument about such a bath animal in his sketch Herren im Bad (1978).
  • In the film Condom of Horror , one of the vicious condoms uses a rubber duck as a mount in the bathtub of the American presidential candidate to get to his destination - successfully.
  • The Quietscheentchen also served as a model for the Mainzer "train-ene (d) te", which the pulling end of each of the Monday train marked.
  • A plastic duck race was also held as part of the Paddle Freestyle Rodeo World Championship 2003 at the main bridge in Graz . A large amount of yellow, numbered polyethylene ducks about 9 cm in size were dumped into the Mur.
  • In Perth , Australia, in 2018 an approximately 3 m high yellow-orange duck made for the carnival - presumably an inflatable welded from foil strips - was driven into the Indian Ocean and is wanted.

Health risks

Swiss researchers from the Eawag water research institute examined rubber rubber ducks. The researchers found potentially pathogenic bacteria and germs in four out of five animals. They found between five and 75 million cells per square centimeter, including Legionella , Pseudomonas aeruginosa and various fungi.

Web links

Commons : Rubber Duck  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Spiegel Online: After 15 years at sea. Thousands of rubber ducks set course for England, July 1, 2007
  2. Sven Giese: Day of the Quietscheentchen - the American Rubber Ducky Day (2018) [1] at kuriose-feiertage.de
  3. Ernie's rubber duck song (classic). Retrieved May 24, 2020 .
  4. Giant rubber duck lost in the ocean orf.at, March 18, 2018, accessed March 18, 2018.
  5. Swiss study - rubber ducks in the bathtub are sprouting germs ( memento from September 14, 2018 in the Internet Archive ), br.de from March 28, 2018
  6. https://www.swr.de/marktcheck/gesundheitsgefahr-plastik-spielzeug-keine-panik-vor-bade-enten/-/id=100834/did=21417472/nid=100834/12dp3zk/index.html