Artificial Billiard Balls
- PDF / 39,105 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 160 Views
HISTORICAL NOTE
Artificial Billiard Balls In his 1859 book The Game of Billiards, Michael Phelan, co-owner of the Phelan & Collender Company, the largest manufacturer of billiard balls in the United States, lamented the state of his raw material supply. The ivory obtained from the tusks of the elephants of Ceylon, he said, was superior to that of the African elephant for his purposes, being more solid and less friable. However, the cost of this ivory was “dreadfully dear.” Adding to the problem was the fact that only 1 in 50 tusks was of sufficient quality to make a billiard ball, due to the defects—pores and cracks—inherent in natural materials. Phelan speculated that “if any inventive genius would discover a substitute for ivory, possessing those qualities which make it valuable to the billiard player, he would make a handsome fortune for himself, and earn our sincerest gratitude.” Several years later, the decimation of elephant herds had created such a shortage of ivory that Phelan decided to supply the small fortune himself. In advertisements placed in newspapers across the United States, he offered a prize of $10,000 to anyone who could make artificial billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt, a young printer in Albany, N.Y., began experimenting with the material he was most familiar with— the natural polymer cellulose, a carbohydrate obtained from the cell walls of plants and a common ingredient in paper and textiles. He was soon fashioning composite balls made of wood pulp, cloth, and paper bound together by adhesives such as shellac and various resins, compressed into a sphere under high temperature and pressure. He patented such a ball in 1865, but it did not have the same hardness and “feel” as the ivory balls that billiards players were accustomed to, so it was unsuccessful. Fortunately, the occurrence of one of those serendipitous spills that happen frequently in the history of science led to a breakthrough for Hyatt. As a printer, he naturally had a supply of collodion, which printers used to coat their fingertips to prevent burns from hot lead type. Collodion was a compound of ether, alcohol, and cellulose nitrate, invented by Louis Menard of the Collège de France in 1846, which produced a clear liquid that hardened into a tough transparent film. Menard had been trying—unsuccessfully—to synthesize the explosive cellulose trinitrate, or “guncotton.” The side product, collodion, proved to be useful to doctors as a compound to close minor cuts
614
and to printers like Hyatt for burn prevention; it also served as a coating for photographic plates. One day in 1868, Hyatt found that a bottle of collodion in his cabinet had spilled, and that a hard, thick, transparent material had formed. He thought collodion might make an excellent coating for his billiard balls. In his excitement, he convinced his brother Isaiah Smith Hyatt, until then a newspaper editor, to join him in his experimentation.
“[Phelan] offered a prize of $10,000 to anyone who could make artificial billiard balls.” After months of coating numero
Data Loading...
