Dentures, celluloid

While Celluloid was developed originally for use in place of ivory for making billiard balls and used later for dentures and shirt fronts, the annual volume never exceeded 500 tons during the nineteenth century. Much of this volume was used for photographic film, hairpins and combs. 

The commercial history of synthetic resins and plastics can be traced to about 1869, when John Wesley Hyatt and his brother Isaiah, who were seeking a substitute for ivory, developed a practical process for converting cellulose nitrate into useful products." It was mixed with camphor and molded into dentures, billiard balls, toothbrushes, combs, dolls, and collars. This material, which was called celluloid, was one of the developments that made the early motion picture industry possible, as it also could be cast into transparent films of good optical quality. Because of its flammability and poor dur-... 

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