I just recently learned the story of John Wesley Hyatt, an American engineer and inventor who is credited with creating the first true commercially viable plastic: celluloid. He was inspired to do so by Michael Phelan, an Irish immigrant who became “the father of American billiards”. Mr. Phelan created a $10,000 prize awarded to whomever could come up with a replacement for ivory for billiard balls. (This also is a great example of the power of an inducement prize contest.)
While Mr. Hyatt’s invention didn’t have the desired properties to replace ivory in billiard balls, it did kick off the age of plastics. And it found a use in places where ivory had also typically been used previously: combs, buttons, collars and other fashion products. And it led other inventors to experiment with plastic materials, including Leo Baekeland who developed Bakelite in 1907, which was a superior material (cheaper, more consistent, and higher quality) and finally supplanted ivory as the preferred material in billiard balls.
A promotional pamphlet for the new material by the Albany Billiard Ball Company proclaimed (and rightfully so), “As petroleum came to the relief of the whale, so too has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.”
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