> 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].
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.
at this point though, we have seen enough of these tradeoffs that as a society we should be able to start seeing the downsides in advance before the new becomes ubiquitous.
then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.
> 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
> 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.)
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.
That's Professor Harold Hill, if you don't mind. I didn't send away 2 bits to the Indiana Online School of Teaching to receive my diploma in two weeks time for nothing.
Why it's the Uneeda Biscuit made the trouble. Uneeda, Uneeda put the crackers in a package, in a package. The Uneeda Biscuit in an air-tight sanitary package made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete
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.
There's also a variant of latex (I realised this researching my reply), gutta-percha (from the tree of the same name, biological name Palaquium gutta), which was also instrumental in long-distance telecommunications as it was used to seal early undersea telegraph cables (themselves a fascinating rabbit-hole of electrical engineering). The use for cables resulted in dramatic overharvesting and a collapse of the gutta-percha supply, yet another caution in the Reliance on Markets for All Things.
Modern-day cables are armoured with polyethylene (which resists seawater rot far better than simple rubber), mylar, steel cables, aluminium, polycarbonate, and petroleum jelly.
> A mixture of pine rosin and beeswax known as "sealing wax" played an important part in 12th through 19th-century information security and 19th-century high-vacuum apparatus.
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.
I don't remember so much of it now, but as a kid I did a History project on this where I went to the local state University and read all the references in the archives related to Celluloid and other names it went by. A really interesting subject, for sure!
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...
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.
When we were teenagers, one of my friends lit a guitar pick on fire. It was a lot more exciting than we expected! We thought it'd just shrivel up and melt, but instead it was like the pick was made of solid rocket fuel.
I've never understood this. Just pack a lighter. I don't know what you need sawdust or cottonballs for. What would you be lighting that can't be broken up into small pieces? Where are you going to be where you can't find a bit of leaves or paper or cloth? The moon?
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?
"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."
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.
It probably would have been invented anyway, by somebody - but when is not known. Billiards gave the first person reason to develop the idea once he saw it could work. There was a year of experimentation needed before it worked in the real world (though as the article notes a trained chemist could probably have figured out the working formula faster).
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.
According to Wikipedia, Alexander Parkes created the first celluloid (later called "Parkesine") on purpose in 1855 (as mentioned in the article, Collodion already existed and, when dried, created a celluloid-like film). John Wesley Hyatt apparently acquired Parkes's patent.
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 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.
> Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?
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.
> 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
You can create a nasty smoke bomb by lighting a table tennis ball wrapped in aluminium foil.
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.
at this point though, we have seen enough of these tradeoffs that as a society we should be able to start seeing the downsides in advance before the new becomes ubiquitous.
then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.
> 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
It doesn’t matter if there are millions downsides, if there are also millions of upsides, then it clearly could still be net positive.
Just saving elephants from extinction alone is probably worth an enormous amount.
> 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.)
That any many other references to Roundwod Pratchett included are listed in the Annotated Pratchett File.
https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/men-at-arms.html
The amount of real stuff in discworld could fill a book.
41 books, in fact ;-)
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
That's Professor Harold Hill, if you don't mind. I didn't send away 2 bits to the Indiana Online School of Teaching to receive my diploma in two weeks time for nothing.
Why it's the Uneeda Biscuit made the trouble. Uneeda, Uneeda put the crackers in a package, in a package. The Uneeda Biscuit in an air-tight sanitary package made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete
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.
There's also a variant of latex (I realised this researching my reply), gutta-percha (from the tree of the same name, biological name Palaquium gutta), which was also instrumental in long-distance telecommunications as it was used to seal early undersea telegraph cables (themselves a fascinating rabbit-hole of electrical engineering). The use for cables resulted in dramatic overharvesting and a collapse of the gutta-percha supply, yet another caution in the Reliance on Markets for All Things.
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.)
Yes, thanks!
> A mixture of pine rosin and beeswax known as "sealing wax" played an important part in 12th through 19th-century information security and 19th-century high-vacuum apparatus.
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.
I don't remember so much of it now, but as a kid I did a History project on this where I went to the local state University and read all the references in the archives related to Celluloid and other names it went by. A really interesting subject, for sure!
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...
So the technology developed for gaming unintentionally built the foundation for an unrelated industry.
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.
When we were teenagers, one of my friends lit a guitar pick on fire. It was a lot more exciting than we expected! We thought it'd just shrivel up and melt, but instead it was like the pick was made of solid rocket fuel.
I've never understood this. Just pack a lighter. I don't know what you need sawdust or cottonballs for. What would you be lighting that can't be broken up into small pieces? Where are you going to be where you can't find a bit of leaves or paper or cloth? The moon?
Great story! I too was going to post the explosive-billiard-ball anecdote but 2 others already have, I see...
> synthetic plastics
Are there any "natural" plastics ?
Excellent discussion of just that, up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45596988
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?
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> "blame ... fault"
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.
It probably would have been invented anyway, by somebody - but when is not known. Billiards gave the first person reason to develop the idea once he saw it could work. There was a year of experimentation needed before it worked in the real world (though as the article notes a trained chemist could probably have figured out the working formula faster).
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.
According to Wikipedia, Alexander Parkes created the first celluloid (later called "Parkesine") on purpose in 1855 (as mentioned in the article, Collodion already existed and, when dried, created a celluloid-like film). John Wesley Hyatt apparently acquired Parkes's patent.
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.
> fault
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.
> Really hard to get past the headline's blame of Americans for this. Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?
are you taking it personally?
> Because it is evidently always the fault of Americans?
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.
[flagged]
Seems like this was intended for adjacent article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591149