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November 1888 - In Search of the Perfect Billiard Ball
By 1888 methods of recording images were moving away from glass and toward more flexible surfaces, and a new problem quickly surfaced: the paper-backed film that had replaced glass tore too easily. Eastman and Goodwin were both hard at work developing the perfect material for recording images, but there was also a third player, in Philadelphia, who would initially surpass their achievements by manufacturing the first successful plastic-base sheet films.
John Carbutt was an English-born photographer who had founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works in Philadelphia in 1879 to manufacture gelatin dry plates in Wayne Junction, Pa. The dry plates were an immeasurable improvement on the earlier wet collodion process which required the use of developing tents and inordinately long exposure times but they were still not the ideal solution. Carbutt believed celluloid was the answer.
Celluloid had been around since the mid-1800s, when British chemist Alexander Parkes unveiled the first man-made plastic at the Great International Exhibition in London in 1862. This synthetic plastic known as Parkesine was derived from cellulose and, if moulded when hot, retained its shape upon cooling. The material could be transparent, and Parkes claimed it had the same capabilities as rubber. Unfortunately for Parkes, the high cost of raw materials made the production process expensive, and interest quickly faded. However, the rising popularity of billiards would soon trigger the rebirth of Parkesine in an altered form.
Thousands of elephants were killed for their ivory to meet the demand for billiard balls, but the source material was in danger of drying up, and a substitute material was urgently required. Phelan and Collender, a New York based manufacturer, offered a prize of $10,000 to the inventor of a suitable substitute, and a native New Yorker working in Illinois named John Wesley Hyatt was the first to succeed although he never received the promised reward. Upon accidentally spilling a bottle of collodion in his workshop, Hyatt discovered that it congealed into a tough, flexible film. By mixing it with camphor, he successfully eliminated the brittleness of this substance while managing to maintain its property of being malleable under heat and pressure, and retaining its moulded shape upon cooling.
Hyatt coined the term celluloid for his new invention (although it was marketed as Xylonite in the UK) and patented it in 1870. He then founded the Celluloid Manufacturing Company, and his new material rapidly became used in a wide range of products (shirt collars, knife handles, dental implants, toys, ball point pen bodies, shirt collars and cuffs, etc.)
In 1888, John Carbutt commissioned Hyatts company to produce a thin, transparent celluloid film. Hyatt achieved this by slicing layers one-hundredth of an inch thick from a block and pressing each slice between heated polished plates to eliminate the slicing marks.
Carbutt presented his invention to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia and to the Franklin Institute in November 1888:
The substance I have the honour to bring to your notice tonight is this sheet celluloid, manufactured by the Celluloid Manufacturing Company. It is some three or four years since I first examined into this material, but the manufacturers had not then perfected the finish of it to render it available, and it is only during this year that it has been produced in uniform thickness and finish, and I am now using at my factory large quantities of sheet celluloid 1/100 of an inch in thickness, coated with the same emulsion as used on glass, forming flexible negative films, the most complete and perfect substitute for glass I believe yet discovered . . . I will now show on the screen lantern transparencies from film negatives, both contact and reduced in the camera.
Carbutt offered the photographic quality celluloid film in 20 x 50 sheets under the name of Carbutts Flexible Negative Films. Prices ranged from 65c for 12 quarter plate cut films to $2.50 for a dozen whole plate. [ADD]
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