Ball, John

In the 1870s, ivory was a favorite of the rich and famous, who used it for items of jewelry, piano keys, billiard balls, etc. and there was a desperate need to find new materials for some of these applications. In fact, a substantial prize ( 10,000) was offered for the first person who could find a substitute for ivory billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt (now there s a name that conjures up an image of an aging preacher or country and western singer— well at least to your authors ), a bona fide American entrepreneur, was motivated, but did not win this prize. Nonetheless he is credited with the invention of Celluloid the first true thermoplastic. 

Before the invention of plastic, elephant tusks were the main material used to make billiard balls. John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid, a special kind of plastic, in 1868. Celluloid proved to be the perfect ingredient for creating billiard balls as well as movie film. 

R. D. Anderson and R. T. Puhalla, "Parametric Study of Temperature Insensitivity of Ball Propellants," in Proceedings of the 26th JANNAF Combustion Meeting Vol. 3, CPIA Pubhcation 529, CPIA, Johns Hopkins Urdversity, Laurel, Md., Oct. 1989. 

Figure 2.5 Ball-and-stick and ribbon representations of an a-helix. Reproduced from Sun, P. and Boyington. 1997. Current Protocob in Protein Science by kind permission of the publisher, John Wiley and Sons...

Figure 4.14 The B-form of the DNA double-helix viewed along the helix axis, in a ball-and-stick representation (left) and a space-filling representation (right). (From Voet and Voet, 2004. Reproduced with permission from John Wiley Sons., Inc.)...

JOHN R. BEND1, LOUISE M, BALL, TAHANI H. ELMAMLOUK, MARGARET O. JAMES2, and RICHARD M. PHILPOT ... 

The best billiard balls were made from elephant tusks, which are beautiful and have good bounce. Ivory was also used for combs, buttons, collar stays for shirts, cigarette holders, chess pieces, and many other ornamental articles. Ivory is obtained by hunting and killing elephants to extract their teeth, which is especially valuable from old and mature males. The extinction of elephants was avoided when John Wesley invented celluloid by combining nitrocellulose with camphor. 

The development of plastics accompanied synthetic fibers. The first synthetic plastic with the trade name Celluloid was made in 1870 from a form of nitrocellulose called pyroxylin, the same substance used to produce the first rayon. Celluloid was developed in part to meet the demand for expensive billiard balls, which at the end of the nineteenth century were produced from ivory obtained from elephant tusks. John Wesley Hyatt (1837-1920) combined pyroxylin with ether and alcohol to produce a hard substance called collodion. Hyatt s collodion, like Bernigaut s original rayon, was unstable and potentially explosive. He solved this problem by adding camphor to the collodion to produce a stable hard plastic he called Celluloid. 

Figure 7.20 Comparison of grinding rates for vibratory and ball mills for two ceramics. From J. S. Reed, Principles of Ceramics Processing, 2nd ed. Copyright 1995 by John Wiley Sons, Inc. This material is used by permission of John Wiley Sons, Inc.

P. Eschmann, L. Hasbargen, and W. Weigand, Ball and Roller Bearings, John Wiley Sons, Inc., New York, 1985. 

In 1855, the moldable features of collodion were exploited by the British inventor and chemist Alexander Parkes, who marketed the material as Parkesine. Combs, earrings, buttons, bracelets, billiard balls, and even false teeth were manufactured in his factories. Parkes chose to focus more on quantity than on quality, however. Because he used low-grade cotton and cheap but unsuitable solvents, many of his products lacked durability, which led to commercial failure. In 1870, John Hyatt, a young inventor from Albany, New York, discovered that collodions moldable properties were vastly improved by using camphor as a solvent. Hyatts brother Isaiah named this camphor-based nitrocellulose material celluloid. Because of its greater workability, celluloid became the plastic of choice for the manufacture of many household items. In addition, thin transparent films of celluloid made excellent supports for photosensitive emulsions, a boon to the photography industry and a first step in the development of motion pictures. 

HYATT, JOHN WESLEY (1837-1920). Hyatt is generally credited as being the father of the plastics industry. In 1869. he and his brother patented a mixture of cellulose nitrate and camphor which could be molded and hardened. Its lirsl commercial use was lor billiard balls. The TM Celluloid" was the first ever applied to a synthetic plastic ptoduci, it hammahtlity hazard limits its use. 

John A. Mosbo, Janice T. DeSanto, Paul L. Bock, and Bruce N. Stor-hoff, Department of Chemistry, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306... 

Ajax Powder. A British "permitted perchlorate explosive NG 22.5. GC0.75, TNT + DNT 3.0, W. 10.5, KC104 37.5, Amm oxalate 25.0 and H,0 0.75% power(swing of ball pend) 2.69", maximum chge 12 oz Ref Bamett( 1919), 137 AJZ Propellant is described in confidential "Propellant Manual, SPIA/M2, Johns Hopkins Univ, Silver Sipring, Maryland (1959), Unit No 404... 

John Hyatt was trying to make imitation ivory billiard balls from nitrocellulose and camphor. Instead of ivory , he got a new substance. He called it celluloid . Celluloid has serious disadvantages it is brittle, inflammable and discolours with age. 

Figure 42 was taken from the Air Photo Evidence website (air-photo.com/altered/altered.html) with John C. Ball s kind permission. 

John C. Ball, Ball Resource Services Ltd., Delta, BC, Canada. John C. Ball has not given any details about where exactly he took his samples, nor what kind of material it was. According to his own description, at least the samples from the delousing rooms of BW 5a and BW 5b consist of a mixture of material taken at various places of these rooms, both inside and outside. Hence, the same might be true for his other samples. For this reason, we will only briefly list Ball s analyses results here without going into too many details about how they are to be interpreted. 

John Clive Ball, The Ball Report, Ball Resource Services Ltd., Delta, BC, Canada, 1993. 

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