This development helped not only people but also the environment. Advertisements praised celluloid as the savior of the elephant and the tortoise. Plastics could protect the natural world from the destructive forces of human need. The creation of new materials also helped free people from the social and economic constraints imposed by the scarcity of natural resources.
Inexpensive celluloid made material wealth more widespread and obtainable. And the plastics revolution was only getting started. In Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, meaning it contained no molecules found in nature. Baekeland had been searching for a synthetic substitute for shellac, a natural electrical insulator, to meet the needs of the rapidly electrifying United States.
Bakelite was not only a good insulator; it was also durable, heat resistant, and, unlike celluloid, ideally suited for mechanical mass production. While Hyatt and Baekeland had been searching for materials with specific properties, the new research programs sought new plastics for their own sake and worried about finding uses for them later. World War II necessitated a great expansion of the plastics industry in the United States, as industrial might proved as important to victory as military success.
The need to preserve scarce natural resources made the production of synthetic alternatives a priority. Plastics provided those substitutes. Nylon, invented by Wallace Carothers in as a synthetic silk, was used during the war for parachutes, ropes, body armor, helmet liners, and more. Plexiglas provided an alternative to glass for aircraft windows.
The surge in plastic production continued after the war ended. After experiencing the Great Depression and then World War II, Americans were ready to spend again, and much of what they bought was made of plastic. In the postwar years there was a shift in American perceptions as plastics were no longer seen as unambiguously positive. Plastic debris in the oceans was first observed in the s, a decade in which Americans became increasingly aware of environmental problems. In a major oil spill occurred off the California coast and the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, raising concerns about pollution.
As awareness about environmental issues spread, the persistence of plastic waste began to trouble observers. Join the brightest minds in the food packaging industry as they tackle regulations, both nationally and globally.
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Take a look at the event calendar to discover which events are best suited to your needs. Though the product was not a commercial success, Parkesine represented an important first step in the development of man-made plastic.
While Parkesine was created from organic compounds, specifically cellulose, Dr. This marks the start of the modern plastics industry. Hermann Staudinger proved the existence of what we know today as polymers in Plastics are just one subset of polymers, a broad term that can be used to describe any plastic as well as several other naturally-occurring organic compounds.
Even our own DNA are polymers. A staggering number of plastic and chemical innovations emerged in the period surrounding World War II.
It could be molded into a shape or pressed paper-thin and then cut or sawed into usable forms. It was created from a natural polymer—the cellulose in the cotton—but had a versatility none of the known natural plastics possessed.
Hyatt's brother Isaiah, a born marketer, dubbed the new material celluloid , meaning "like cellulose. While celluloid would prove a wonderful substitute for ivory, Hyatt apparently never collected the ten-thousand-dollar prize.
Perhaps that's because celluloid didn't make very good billiard balls—at least not at first. It lacked the bounce and resilience of ivory, and it was highly volatile. The first balls Hyatt made produced a loud crack, like a shotgun blast, when they knocked into each other. One Colorado saloonkeeper wrote Hyatt that "he didn't mind, but every time the balls collided, every man in the room pulled a gun. However, it was an ideal material for combs.
As Hyatt noted in one of his early patents, celluloid transcended the deficiencies that plagued many traditional comb materials. When it got wet, it didn't get slimy, like wood, or corrode, like metal. It didn't turn brittle, like rubber, or become cracked and discolored, like natural ivory. And while it was sturdier and steadier than most natural materials, it could, with effort, be made to look like many of them.
Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory. It could be mottled in browns and ambers to emulate tortoiseshell; traced with veining to look like marble; infused with the bright colors of coral, lapis lazuli, or carnelian to resemble those and other semiprecious stones; or blackened to look like ebony or jet.
Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet. Celluloid appeared at a time when the country was changing from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Where once people had grown and prepared their own food and made their own clothes, increasingly they were eating, drinking, wearing, and using things that came from factories.
We were fast on our way to becoming a country of consumers. Celluloid was the first of the new materials that would level the playing field for consumption, as historian Jeffrey Meikle pointed out in his insightful cultural history American Plastic.
Like other plastics that would follow, celluloid offered a means for Americans to buy their way into new stations in life. Perhaps celluloid's greatest impact was serving as the base for photographic film. Here celluloid's gift for facsimile achieved its ultimate expression, the complete transmutation of reality into illusion, as three-dimensional flesh-and-blood beings were transformed into two-dimensional ghosts shimmering on a screen.
Here, too, celluloid had a powerful leveling effect in several ways. Film offered a new kind of entertainment, available to and shared by the masses. A dime bought anyone an afternoon of drama, romance, action, escape. Audiences from Seattle to New York roared at the antics of Buster Keaton and thrilled to hear Al Jolson speak the first words in a talkie: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet.
With film, an old elite was dethroned; the glamour once associated with class and social standing was now possible for anyone with good cheekbones, some talent, and a bit of luck.
Ironically, the world opened by celluloid film nearly killed the celluloid- comb industry. In , Irene Castle, a ballroom dancer turned movie star, decided to cut her long hair into a short bob, prompting female fans across the country to take scissors to their own hair. Nowhere did those shorn locks fall harder than in Leominster, Massachusetts, which had been the country's comb capital since before the Revolutionary War and which was now the cradle of the celluloid industry, much of it devoted to combs.
Nearly overnight, half of the comb companies in town were forced to shut down, throwing thousands of comb makers out of work. Sam Foster, owner of Foster Grant, one of the town's leading celluloid-comb companies, told his workers not to worry.
He hit on the idea of making sunglasses, creating an entirely new mass market. With a quick trip to the local drugstore, anyone could acquire the same glamorous mystique. For all its significance, celluloid had a fairly modest place in the material world of the early twentieth century, limited mainly to novelties and small decorative and utilitarian items, like the comb.
Making things from celluloid was a labor-intensive process; combs were molded in small batches and still had to be sawed and polished by hand. And because the material was so volatile, the factories were like tinderboxes.
Workers often labored under a constant spray of water, but fires were still common. It wasn't until the development of more cooperative polymers that plastics truly began to transform the look, feel, and quality of our lives. By the s, we had both the plastics and the machines to mass-produce plastic products. Injection-molding machines—now standard equipment in plastics manufacturing—turned raw plastic powders or pellets into a molded, finished product in a one-shot process. A single machine equipped with a mold containing multiple cavities could pop out ten fully formed combs in less than a minute.
DuPont, which bought one of the original celluloid companies in Leominster, released photos in the mids showing the daily output of a father-and-son pair of comb makers. In the photos, the father is standing next to a tidy stack of three hundred and fifty celluloid combs, while ten thousand injection-molded combs surround the son.
And although a single celluloid comb cost one dollar in , by the end of the decade one could buy a machine-molded comb of cellulose acetate for anywhere from a dime to fifty cents. With the rise of mass-production plastics, the fanciful decorative combs and faux ivory dresser sets so popular in the celluloid era gradually disappeared.
Combs were now stripped down to the most essential elements—teeth and handle—in service of their most basic function. Bakelite, the first truly synthetic plastic, a polymer forged entirely in the lab, paved the way for successes like that of DuPont's injection-mold-comb-making son. As with celluloid, Bakelite was invented to replace a scarce natural substance: shellac, a product of the sticky excretions of the female lac beetle.
Demand for shellac began shooting up in the early twentieth century because it was an excellent electrical insulator. Yet it took fifteen thousand beetles six months to make enough of the amber-colored resin needed to produce a pound of shellac.
To keep up with the rapid expansion of the electrical industry, something new was needed. As it turned out, the plastic Leo Baekeland invented by combining formaldehyde with phenol, a waste product of coal, and subjecting the mixture to heat and pressure was infinitely more versatile than shellac. Though it could, with effort, be made to mimic natural materials, it didn't have celluloid's knack for imitation. Instead, it had a powerful identity of its own, which helped encourage the development of a distinctively plastic look.
Bakelite was a dark-colored, rugged material with a sleek, machinelike beauty, "as stripped down as a Hemingway sentence," in writer Stephen Fenichell's words.
Unlike celluloid, Bakelite could be precisely molded and machined into nearly anything, from tubular industrial bushings the size of mustard seeds to full-size coffins. Contemporaries hailed its "protean adaptability" and marveled at how Baekeland had transformed something as foul-smelling and nasty as coal tar—long a discard in the coking process—into this wondrous new substance.
Families gathered around Bakelite radios to listen to programs sponsored by the Bakelite Corporation , drove Bakelite-accessorized cars, kept in touch with Bakelite phones, washed clothes in machines with Bakelite blades, pressed out wrinkles with Bakelite-encased irons—and, of course, styled their hair with Bakelite combs.
The creation of Bakelite marked a shift in the development of new plastics. From then on, scientists stopped looking for materials that could emulate nature; rather, they sought "to rearrange nature in new and imaginative ways.
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