Conversation:

When plastic was first invented, it was a bit of a scientific curiosity.

It took one particular application of the material to bring it to the world's attention. What, exactly?


Feel free to post your suggestions and wacky ideas. I'll only award klaxons to anyone who gets too chemical .

(In fact I have three "getting too chemical" klaxons identified)


Icy

Was it film, as in movies?

Bakelite telephones & snooker balls?

Granny's rain hoods?

I think I know the answer to this but I'm dmned if I can dredge it up from the recesses of my pathetic mind...

Some kind of insulator?

I would go either with celluloid, as pedro said, or rayon, which was knocking around at the turn of the last century.

B

What *is* a plastic anyway? Is there some particular definition you're using, Icy?

> Some kind of insulator? < (Mala)

Covering for electric wiring - replacing that perishing rubber stuff?

You lot are too clever by half.

Whisky got it - billiard balls was the answer I was looking for. Up to the invention of celluloid, these required you to find a dead elephant, so in the 1860s a $10,000 prize was offered for an alternative. It was the American John Wesley Hyatt who won it - adapting a material which the English chemist Alexander Parkes had found stuck at the bottom of his test tube while he was playing around with dissolving pyroxylin - some explosives ingredient (but I'm no expert in these matters).

Feel free to add anything else interesting on this subject, and I'll score it another day.

Icy

Elvis Costello's song No Action is quite possibly the only pop song ever to include the word bakelite.

exploding billiard balls were one of the subjects in james burkes "the day the universe changed"

Also in one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I forget which.

Men At Arms.

B

QI - Plastic

Scores:

+1 Pedro (post 2) celluloid film - followed very soon after
+3 Whisky (post 3) correct - billiard balls
+1 Oops (post 10) Would have been a QI, but it's not the only one - google it.
+6 Taff (post 11) James Burke's exploding balls
+1 Mala (Post 12) Pratchett
+1 Mu Beta (post 13) More Pratchett

Thanks for playing!

Icy

Icy, that's why I said quite possibly, because I didn't want to cheat by looking it up. Was it at least the first?

I can't remember! It was certainly the best-known artist.