Celluloid

Celluloid emerged from an unlikely catalyst: the American passion for billiards. By the 1860s, elephant ivory was becoming scarce and expensive, threatening the billiard ball industry. Phelan & Collender, the leading manufacturer, offered a $10,000 prize for any suitable substitute—a bounty that drew inventors into a materials science challenge.

The adjacent possible had been partially unlocked in Birmingham, England. Alexander Parkes had created Parkesine in 1856, dissolving nitrocellulose in various solvents to produce a mouldable material. But Parkesine was brittle, expensive, and unpredictable. It failed commercially. The knowledge existed that nitrocellulose could be transformed, but the right plasticizer remained undiscovered.

John Wesley Hyatt, a printer from Albany, New York, had no formal chemistry training—only the mechanic's intuition for trial and error. In 1868, he discovered that camphor, the aromatic compound extracted from Asian camphor trees, made nitrocellulose pliable and stable. The combination was transformative. Where Parkesine cracked, celluloid flexed. Where Parkesine decomposed, celluloid endured.

The geographic convergence was essential. Albany sat at the nexus of American printing and manufacturing. Asian trade routes delivered camphor from Formosa and Borneo. The Civil War had left surplus nitrocellulose production capacity (gun cotton manufacturing). And American entrepreneurial culture rewarded the kind of empirical tinkering that formal European chemistry sometimes discouraged.

Celluloid never did make satisfactory billiard balls—the material was too flammable and occasionally exploded on hard impacts. But it found its ecological niche elsewhere: combs, buttons, dental plates, piano keys, and most consequentially, photographic film. George Eastman adopted celluloid as the base for his flexible roll film in 1889, which enabled the Kinetoscope and the entire motion picture industry.

The first true synthetic plastic had arrived. Celluloid demonstrated that organic chemistry could create materials nature never imagined—setting the trajectory that would lead to Bakelite, nylon, and the polymer age. The quest for artificial ivory had accidentally unlocked the adjacent possible for artificial everything.