Plastic (3 page)

Plant cellulose was the raw material for the earliest plastics, and with peak oil looming, it is being looked at again as a base for a new generation of "green" plastics. But most of today's plastics are made of hydrocarbon molecules—packets of carbon and hydrogen—derived from the refining of oil and natural gas. Consider ethylene, a gas released in the processing of both substances. It's a sociable molecule consisting of four hydrogen atoms and two carbon atoms linked in the chemical equivalent of a double handshake. With a little chemical nudging those carbon atoms release one bond, allowing each to reach out and grab the carbon in another ethylene molecule. Repeat the process thousands of times and
voila!
, you've got a new giant molecule, polyethylene, one of the most common and versatile plastics. Depending on how it's processed, the plastic can be used to wrap a sandwich or tether an astronaut during a walk in deep space.

This
New York Times
dispatch is more than a hundred and fifty years old, and yet it sounds surprisingly modern: elephants, the paper warned in 1867, were in grave danger of being "numbered with extinct species" because of humans' insatiable demand for the ivory in their tusks. Ivory, at the time, was used for all manner of things, from buttonhooks to boxes, piano keys to combs. But one of the biggest uses was for billiard balls. Billiards had come to captivate upper-crust society in the United States as well as in Europe. Every estate, every mansion had a billiards table, and by the mid-1800s, there was growing concern that there would soon be no more elephants left to keep the game tables stocked with balls. The situation was most dire in Ceylon, source of the ivory that made the best billiard balls. There, in the northern part of the island, the
Times
reported, "upon the reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities, 3,500 pachyderms were dispatched in less than three years by the natives." All told, at least one million pounds of ivory were consumed each year, sparking fears of an ivory shortage. "Long before the elephants are no more and the mammoths used up," the
Times
hoped, "an adequate substitute may [be] found."

Ivory wasn't the only item in nature's vast larder that was starting to run low. The hawksbill turtle, that unhappy supplier of the shell used to fashion combs, was becoming scarcer. Even cattle horn, another natural plastic that had been used by American comb makers since before the Revolutionary War, was becoming less available as ranchers stopped dehorning their cattle.

In 1863, so the story goes, a New York billiards supplier ran a newspaper ad offering "a handsome fortune,"
ten thousand dollars in gold, to anyone who could come up with a suitable alternative for ivory. John Wesley Hyatt, a young journeyman printer in Upstate New York, read the ad and decided he could do it. Hyatt had no formal training in chemistry, but he did have a knack for invention—at the age of twenty-three, he'd patented a knife sharpener. Setting up in a shack behind his home, he began experimenting with various combinations of solvents and a doughy mixture made of nitric acid and cotton. (That nitric acid-cotton combination, called guncotton, was daunting to work with because it was highly flammable, even explosive. For a while it was used as a substitute for gunpowder until producers of it got tired of having their factories blow up.)

As he worked in his homemade lab, Hyatt was building on decades of invention and innovation that had been spurred not only by the limited quantities of natural materials but also by their physical limitations. The Victorian era was fascinated with natural plastics such as rubber and shellac. As historian Robert Friedel pointed out, they saw in these substances the first hints of ways to transcend the vexing limits of wood and iron and glass.
Here were materials that were malleable but also amenable to being hardened into a final manufactured form. In an era already being rapidly transformed by industrialization, that was an alluring combination of qualities—one hearkening to both the solid past and the tantalizingly fluid future. Nineteenth-century patent books are filled with inventions involving combinations of cork, sawdust, rubbers, and gums, even blood and milk protein, all designed to yield materials that had some of the qualities we now ascribe to plastic. These plastic prototypes found their way into a few decorative items, such as daguerreotype cases, but they were really only intimations of things to come. The noun
plastic
had not yet been coined—and wouldn't be until the early twentieth century—but we were already dreaming in plastic.

Hyatt's breakthrough came in 1869. After years of trial and error, Hyatt ran an experiment that yielded a whitish material that had "the consistency of shoe leather" but the capacity to do much more than sole a pair of shoes. This was a malleable substance that could be made as hard as horn. It shrugged off water and oils. It could be molded into a shape or pressed paper-thin and then cut or sawed into usable forms. It was created from a natural polymer—the cellulose in the cotton—but had a versatility none of the known natural plastics possessed.
Hyatt's brother Isaiah, a born marketer, dubbed the new material
celluloid,
meaning "like cellulose."

While celluloid would prove a wonderful substitute for ivory, Hyatt apparently never collected the ten-thousand-dollar prize. Perhaps that's because celluloid didn't make very good billiard balls—at least not at first. It lacked the bounce and resilience of ivory, and it was highly volatile. The first balls Hyatt made produced a loud crack, like a shotgun blast, when they knocked into each other. One Colorado saloonkeeper wrote Hyatt that "he didn't mind, but every time the balls collided, every man in the room pulled a gun."

However, it was an ideal material for combs. As Hyatt noted in one of his early patents, celluloid transcended the deficiencies that plagued many traditional comb materials. When it got wet, it didn't get slimy, like wood, or corrode, like metal. It didn't turn brittle, like rubber, or become cracked and discolored, like natural ivory.
"Obviously none of the other materials ... would produce a comb possessing the many excellent qualities and inherent superiorities of a comb made of celluloid," Hyatt wrote in one of his patent applications.
And while it was sturdier and steadier than most natural materials, it could, with effort, be made to look like many of them.

Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory.
It could be mottled in browns and ambers to emulate tortoiseshell; traced with veining to look like marble; infused with the bright colors of coral, lapis lazuli, or carnelian to resemble those and other semiprecious stones; or blackened to look like ebony or jet. Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet.
"As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the pamphlet stated, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no long­er be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer."

Of course, scarcity has long been key to the collection of qualities that make an object luxurious and valuable. There are few things we long for more insistently than those that are just beyond our reach. The writer O. Henry captured the sting—and ultimate emptiness—of that longing in his 1906 story "The Gift of the Magi." Della, the young wife, falls in love with a set of combs she spies in a store on Broadway: "Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims ... They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession." There is no way Della can afford such combs, not on her husband's twenty-dollar-a-week salary. Nor, it seems, does Della come from a family that might bequeath such exquisite heirlooms. Living in an eight-dollar-a-month flat that looks out on an airshaft, saving pennies "one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher," Della at the start of the story defines her world by what she lacks rather than what she has.
Yet in the end that nagging sense of lack—the driver of modern consumption—is not what motivates Della. On Christmas Eve, she cuts and sells her hair—her proudest possession—to buy a watch fob for her husband's treasured gold watch. Meanwhile, he sells the watch to purchase Della her tortoiseshell heart's desire. In that pair of selfless acts, both define themselves by what they give up—what they don't have—rather than by what they hope to consume.

Had those combs been made of celluloid, O. Henry would have had no story to tell.

Even on husband Jim's modest salary, celluloid combs would have been within reach. Indeed, the irony of O. Henry's tale turns on a notion of generosity that only makes sense in a world of scarce resources and rare commodities. In Plasticville, it's not entirely clear what gifts the Magi might offer. But obviously the possible virtues of scarcity were not on Hyatt's mind when his company enthused that a "few dollars invested in Celluloid" equaled "hundreds expended in the purchase of genuine products of nature."

That fantastic talent for forgery became a hallmark of the celluloid industry. It would have been easier—and less expensive—to omit the painstaking layering and dyeing required to make a comb that appeared to be ivory or tortoiseshell. But custom demanded the appearance of natural materials. People took pleasure in this game of artifice—evidence, in a sense, of humanity's growing mastery over nature. Art critic John Ruskin described the thrill of the trompe l'oeil: "Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as
nearly
to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind."

Perhaps most agreeable of all was the prospect that one's inexpensive possessions might be regarded as rare by others. Hyatt's company offered an extensive line of toiletry sets promoted with wonderfully ambiguous names such as Ivaleur, Amberleur, Shelleur, and Ebonleur. The company urged its salesmen to emphasize the artistic appeal of these products in hopes of persuading women "who have not already done so as a matter of good taste [to] turn from the ostentatious silver toilet ware to that which is less expensive though really more beautiful."

Thanks to celluloid, anyone—even O. Henry's Della—could now afford to possess a comb, brush, and mirror set that looked as if it might have belonged to a Rockefeller, "with graining so delicate and true," one company boasted, "that you would think it could only come from the gleaming tusks of some fine old elephant."
Any shop girl could pin up her hair with gorgeously filigreed forgeries of the carved tortoiseshell combs she could never have afforded. (Good thing too, since, according to one turn-of-the-century observer, contemporary hairstyles often demanded "a couple of pounds of Celluloid" combs.
) Material scarcity had stoked the longing of a Della, but celluloid managed to take the pain out of consumer desire—turning the wistful and class-conscious window-gazer into the satisfied shopper. Celluloid helped spread a taste for luxury—or at least the look of luxury—to those who'd never been able to entertain fantasies of the finer life. But even more important, it helped fuel a growing demand for things, period.

Celluloid appeared at a time when the country was changing from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. Where once people had grown and prepared their own food and made their own clothes, increasingly they were eating, drinking, wearing, and using things that came from factories.
We were fast on our way to becoming a country of consumers. Celluloid was the first of the new materials that would level the playing field for consumption, as historian Jeffrey Meikle pointed out in his insightful cultural history
American Plastic
. "By replacing materials that were hard to find or expensive to process, celluloid democratized a host of goods for an expanding consumption-oriented middle class."
Ample supplies of celluloid allowed manufacturers to keep up with rapidly rising demand while also keeping costs down. Like other plastics that would follow, celluloid offered a means for Americans to buy their way into new stations in life.

Combs obviously weren't the only example of celluloid's democratizing effect. Celluloid collars stamped with the weave of linen allowed any man to look the part of a dandy. Celluloid toothbrushes replaced ones with bone handles, making dental hygiene available for mere pennies.
Once Hyatt perfected a way to make celluloid billiard balls, billiards stepped down from the plush cognac-and-cigars milieu and into community halls. No longer just a rich man's pleasure, billiards became an everyman's game, especially when the tables gained pockets and the sport evolved into pool.
As
The Music Man
's Professor Harold Hill sang, "Pockets that mark the diff'rence/between a gentleman and a bum."

Perhaps celluloid's greatest impact was serving as the base for photographic film. The history of film, which is one of plastic's most profound cultural legacies, is a book in itself. Here celluloid's gift for facsimile achieved its ultimate expression, the complete transmutation of reality into illusion, as three-dimensional flesh-and-blood beings were transformed into two-dimensional ghosts shimmering on a screen. Here, too, celluloid had a powerful leveling effect in several ways. Film offered a new kind of entertainment, available to and shared by the masses. A dime bought anyone an afternoon of drama, romance, action, escape. Audiences from Seattle to New York roared at the antics of Buster Keaton and thrilled to hear Al Jolson speak the first words in a talkie: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The mass culture of film reeled across class, ethnic, racial, and regional lines, drawing one and all into shared stories and imbuing us with the sense that reality itself is as changeable and ephemeral as the names on the movie marquee. With film, an old elite was dethroned; the glamour once associated with class and social standing was now possible for anyone with good cheekbones, some talent, and a bit of luck. A Della could become a socialite onscreen and a movie star in real life.