I'm also not clear that this somehow "paved the way" for synthetic plastics. Was an early mover precisely because it was a luxury activity. But I don't think anyone thinks they would have not been invented had it not been for the sport?
It is when we willingly took hegemony of the world economy for the last 80 years, and we at least pretend like this is representative of the interests of americans.
The fact that we clearly haven't been able to implement at least common-sense regulation of use of plastics in consumer industries is a pretty clear indication we are to blame, IMO. We haven't even been able to make it less shitty of a consumer experience, let alone pretend to care about health.
Everything we know could have been invented by someone else earlier if they had tried (many things depend on earlier inventions and so earlier is often only a few years). Most of them would be invented by someone else a few years latter as well. However we remember the person who invented it (and often the person who made it successful) and not the others who didn't.
Daniel Spill, who worked with Parkes directly in England, founded several companies with Parkes selling Celluloid in England.
Spill and Hyatt spent the better part of a decade in court against each other over who invented it first and who has the right to the patents. The judge ultimately ruled that both of them can continue their businesses, and that Parkes invented it first.
I think you're imposing these value judgments yourself. The article isn't framing the innovation of synthetic plastic balls as a bad thing. If anything it's celebrating America's contribution to material science, which isn't unexpected from the Smithsonian.
are you taking it personally?
I mean, I'm not sure that it's _complaining_, as such. All in all, it's probably preferable that billiard balls are made of plastic and not ivory, even if they were initially mildly explosive.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Huh. There's a mention in a Discworld book of an exploding billiard ball, and until just now I hadn't realised that it was a _real thing_.
(Seems to by no relation to the Hyatt who invented the annoying hotel chain, incidentally.)
-- Harold Hill
I like the promotional quote at the end. It ties in petroleum too. Again, our dependence on petroleum is coming back to haunt us, but at the time, it averted extinction for whales. Mass adoption of technologies always comes with tradeoffs.
then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.
I usually phrase similar in context of energy usage and how any improvement we can make in our personal lives (renewables, EV>ICE, efficient appliances, etc) is basically dwarfed by crypto and now AI. Seems we will continue inventing & promoting rather unnecessary technology that do exactly the opposite of what We, as a species, need to do from an energy use perspective
Just saving elephants from extinction alone is probably worth an enormous amount.
Cellophane/rayon/viscose is kind of a borderline case. The content of the finished polymer article is 100% natural cellulose, without even so much as a nitrate or acetate group affixed. But the process of dissolving that cellulose from plant matter so that you can form it into sheets or spin it into microfibers involves chemicals that are so nasty that nowadays they are used almost only for this purpose.
In my childhood (the 01990s, not the 01890s) ping-pong balls were still made of explosive celluloid. My father, who attended a mining college, demonstrated by dropping one onto an electric stove burner, not hot enough to glow visibly. It disappeared in a puff of flame. I was disappointed to discover recently that this is no longer the case for the ping-pong balls I found.
I suspect you are referring to a different use of rosin and beeswax, but the mixture was used for centuries for sealing - which is for information security. It was mixed with either arsenic-based or copper-based minerals to both color it, and protect it from slow fungal attack, so seals (after about a century of colorful failures) were always red or green.
A slightly different proportion was used as "code" (no relation to cyphers), a shoemaker's waterproofing glue for seams. AFAIK no coloring was added.
Modern-day cables are armoured with polyethylene (which resists seawater rot far better than simple rubber), mylar, steel cables, aluminium, polycarbonate, and petroleum jelly.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha>
(James Burke's Connections, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, also describes this use and significance of gutta-percha.)
Are there any "natural" plastics ?
JKCalhoun•3mo ago
Depicted in the brilliant "Connections" series by James Burke [1].
Scrub to 29:12 [1] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09
dwd•3mo ago