The discovery of the first man-made plastic has often been credited to the English chemist and inventor, Alexander Parkes. Parkes discovered
Parkesine, later known as Xylonite, which is actually nitrocellulose (or pyroxylin) treated with vegetable oil and a little camphor, in 1862. However,
the plasticizing effects of certain solvents on nitrocellulose was actually discovered in the 1840s by a French revolutionary poet and painter, Louis
Ménard, who used a combination of ether and alcohol as a solvent, and called his substance ‘collodion’. Ménard quickly lost
interest in the substance, however, when he found that it could not be used as a varnish for paintings, as he could see no other use for the
substance. It was collodion, however, which captured Parkes’ interest as a plausible ‘plastic mass’, a material that could
be molded and cast into an infinite number of identical objects by machine, and could challenge the dominance of the rubber companies and their
vulcanized rubber. However, the solvent originally used to make collodion was too expensive, so Parkes used a cheaper substitute of vegetable oils.
Hence, Parkes’ attempts to market his material failed miserably as he compromised the quality of his goods for lower costs of production.
From the very beginning, the cost of plastic and the quality of the material were significant in the marketing and viability of plastic.
John W. Hyatt and the Camphor Solvent
The commercial success of the first plastic can be attributed to John W. Hyatt. In the mid-1860s, billiard balls were becoming increasingly
expensive due to the increasing demand for billiard balls, and the difficulty of manufacturing billiard balls from ivory. In the process of searching
for a substitute, a bottle of spilled collodion gave Hyatt the inspiration of using collodion as a coating for billiard balls. While the resulting
billiard balls were a dismal failure, it was through his efforts at billiard ball manufacture that Hyatt discovered that camphor is actually a much
more suitable solvent for nitrocellulose than those previously used, and coined the new material ‘celluloid’, which was the first
thermoplastic – a moldable mass formed by heat and pressure into a shape that it retains even after the forces that shaped it have been
removed. With this new thermoplastic which could be easily molded by mechanized methods of mass production, coupled with successful marketing and the
investment of a group of New York investors, led by Gen. Marshall Lefferts, Hyatt achieved considerable success in challenging the rubber monopoly.
However, celluloid still tended to yellow and crack over time, and it had another, more dangerous defect: it burned easily and spectacularly,
unsurprising given that mixtures of nitric acid and cellulose are also used to synthesize smokeless powder. |
