> Hyatt later reflected on some of the (celluloid, i.e. nitro-cellulose or gun-cotton) balls’ flaws, recalling, “A lighted cigar applied would at once result in a serious flame and occasionally the violent contact of the balls would produce a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.” He received “a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it but that instantly every man in the room pulled a gun.”

Depicted in the brilliant "Connections" series by James Burke [1].

Scrub to 29:12 [1] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09

Really hard to get past the headline's blame of Americans for this. Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?

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?

> Hyatt later reflected on some of the balls’ flaws, recalling, “A lighted cigar applied would at once result in a serious flame and occasionally the violent contact of the balls would produce a mild explosion like a percussion guncap.” He received “a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado, mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it but that instantly every man in the room pulled a gun.”

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.)

Great story! I too was going to post the explosive-billiard-ball anecdote but 2 others already have, I see...

Well, either you're closing your eyes To a situation you do now wish to acknowledge Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated By the presence of a pool table in your community. Ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City.

-- Harold Hill

Another place where you will frequently find celluloid is guitar picks. Can just slowly amass a collection for free. Especially if they're thin, flexy, especially if they've got wavy or trippy designs in the plastic, it's probably celluloid. This can be handy for survivalism -- you buy your first ferro-rod fire starter, if you're having trouble getting wood shavings to ignite, try mixing them with shavings of guitar pick and see if the explosive reaction helps. Other folks keep a jar of cotton balls coated in petroleum jelly for a similar quick-start, or egg cartons filled with sawdust and parrafin (although that's less for getting the spark to take and more for getting a log to start burning in a stove)... and of course if you don't want to just slowly accumulate unwanted guitar picks you can buy big sheets of celluloid for like 5-10 bucks.

I was talking to my partner last night about animation cels. She said they were a fire hazard. It turns out cels are painted on celluloid, whose popularity we owe to the search for a synthetic billiards ball...

I was reflecting on this a week ago when discussing how ubiquitous plastic is now. There are rightfully many health and environmental concerns about plastic, but it's nice to remember many of the positive impacts it has had. If celluloid had not been invented when it was, humans would have absolutely hunted elephants to extinction for something as trivial as pool balls.

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.

It's unusual that they specified "synthetic plastics". Natural plastics, in the sense of thermoplastic or thermosetting organic polymers, include birch tar, pine rosin, natural latex rubber (sometimes vulcanized with morning-glory juice), beeswax, and the shellac mentioned in the article. A mixture of pine rosin and beeswax known as "sealing wax" played an important part in 19th-century information security and high-vacuum apparatus. And of course pine rosin played such a crucial role in naval power during the 18th and 19th centuries that the first federal product-purity law in the US was enacted to prevent fake rosin and turpentine from being sold; the current version of the law is https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su....

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.