This article was first published inÂ
I have a set of billiard balls sitting on my desk in a box with a partially torn label on which the words “Hyatt” and “Billiard Ball Company” are clearly visible. That makes these balls, purchased years ago in Warrensburg, N.Y., at what is reputed to be the largest garage sale in the world, a historic item. However, I wasn’t sure exactly how historic. And that started me on an interesting exploratory journey.
Our story begins in 1833, when French chemist Henri Braconnot reacted cotton with nitric acid and produced a material that dissolved in vinegar and dried into a malleable film that he named “xyloidine.” His attempts to shape articles out of the material were unsuccessful and although he didn’t realize it, Braconnot had made nitrocellulose, the first plastic material created by a chemist.
Théophile-Jules Pelouze in 1838 dipped paper into nitric acid and found that on drying it became violently flammable. He named the new material, which also was nitrocellulose, “pyroxyline” from the ancient Greek word “pyr” for fire. He made no use of this discovery — but two of his students certainly did.
Ascanio Sobrero discovered that treating glycerin with nitric acid yielded nitroglycerin, and Alfred Nobel changed the world with his invention of dynamite by mixing nitroglycerine with kieselguhr, a type of clay.
Then in 1845 came a momentous event that is recounted by many a chemistry professor, including myself, although it is in all likelihood partially apocryphal. It is just too good a story not to tell. German-Swiss chemist Christian Friedrich Schonbein sometimes carried out experiments in his kitchen. One day in 1845, he spilled a mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids on the floor and quickly reached for the closest fabric with which to wipe it up. That happened to be his wife’s cotton apron hanging on a nearby hook. Mindful that frau Schonbein would not appreciate finding a wet apron, he hung it up in front of the fireplace to dry. The apron burst into flames and vanished — without producing any smoke.
Like Braconnot and Pelouze, Schonbein had also hit upon nitrocellulose, but the difference was that he was able to capitalize on the accidental discovery. Treating cotton with nitric and sulphuric acid produced “guncotton” that eventually replaced the black gunpowder that not only fouled cannons and small arms but obscured the battlefield with smoke. He also discovered, as did Louis-Nicolas Ménard independently, that guncotton dissolves in an ether-alcohol mixture to form a “gluey” solution for which Ménard coined the term “collodion” from the Greek for “glue.” Schonbein excitedly wrote to the leading English chemist Michael Faraday that he was able to shape this material “into all sorts of things and forms.”
In Birmingham, inventor Alexander Parkes read Schonbein’s publication about the gluey substance and found that mixing it with vegetable oil and camphor allowed it to be moulded into a hard material he called “Parkesine,” which he introduced to the world at the 1862 London International Exhibition.
Now we travel across the ocean and come to the crux of the story.
Billiards were a very popular game at the time, but the manufacturers of the balls had a problem: a shortage of the material from which they were made, namely ivory from elephant tusks. The Phelan and Collender Company in 1864 offered a $10,000 reward, roughly $300,000 in today’s dollars, to anyone who could come up with a substitute that matched the properties of ivory but could be produced more cheaply.
This caught the attention of John Wesley Hyatt, a printer working in Albany. Within a year, Hyatt had filed a patent for a material made out of crushed bone or ivory dust pressed together with shellac. Apparently, this met with no success, because in 1869 he followed up with three patents that described making a billiard ball either by pressing such materials as leather chips mixed with shellac into a hard substance and coating it with collodion, or by making the balls out of collodion mixed with bone powder.
As the story goes (and to be taken with a grain of salt), the use of collodion occurred to Hyatt when he accidentally spilled a bottle that was commonly used to coat printers’ fingertips to protect them from cuts when handling lead type. He noted that when the collodion dried, it hardened into a tough material.
Curiously, there was no mention in the patents of the use of camphor, a key ingredient, but there was no doubt that it was in the mix, as noted by its characteristic smell. The collodion-camphor mix was dubbed “celluloid” by Hyatt’s brother Isaiah. The Hyatts’ claim of the discovery of celluloid did not sit well with Daniel Spill, who in England had formulated “xylonite,” also made from collodion and camphor. He claimed in a lawsuit to be the discoverer of celluloid, but the court ruled that the actual discoverer was Parkes and that both Spill’s British Xylonite Company and Hyatt’s Celluloid Manufacturing Company could sell the substance.
The problem with celluloid was its high flammability. Hyatt’s factory experienced numerous fires.
There were also mythical stories about billiard balls bursting into flame when colliding, and a highly dubious story about a letter to Hyatt by a saloon owner in Denver who claimed that on one occasion the balls banging together sounded like a gunshot and caused patrons to draw their pistols. The truth is that Hyatt’s billiard balls were very successful and were mimicked by other manufacturers who came up with names like Bonzoline, Crystalate and Ivorlene that were sold until the mid-1900s.
The Albany Billiard Company, which had been founded by Hyatt, stopped operations in 1986, by which time, like other manufacturers, it had switched to using acrylics or phenol-formaldehyde resins (Bakelite) that were not flammable and could be produced with great uniformity. Exactly when Hyatt’s company stopped making celluloid balls is not clear.
Now back to my balls.
The cracks on the surface suggested that they were not Bakelite. The question was whether they were made totally of bone-reinforced celluloid or had a core of a different material coated with celluloid, as described in Hyatt’s 1869 patents. There was only one way to find out. So, as painful as it was, out came the chisel.
A small piece, about a quarter of a centimetre, came away, revealing a totally different hard material below. The chipped piece immediately caught fire when I ignited it with a barbecue lighter, declaring itself as celluloid. I can’t identify the inner material, but the fact that there is an inner substance surrounded by a shell of celluloid suggests that it is the earliest form of the Hyatt billiard ball before it was replaced by one made totally of reinforced celluloid.
I think I have a set of historic billiard balls, with 15 of them in good shape. One sacrificed its face to the pursuit of the history of plastics.
