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Gaaark [soylentnews.org] writes:

From the don't-mention-the-elephant-in-the-billiards-room dept.

In the Victorian era, billiard balls were made of ivory, from elephant tusks. But the fear was that with the rising popularity of billiards would come a real shortage of ivory.

Phelan and Collender, a major billiard table manufacturer, offered a $10,000 reward to any person who could make a non-ivory billiard ball. In 1869, an inventor named John Wesley Hyatt came up with a solution. He mixed nitrocellulose with alcohol and a waxy resin called camphor, and molded it into a ball that looked and felt a lot like ivory.

Unfortunately, nitrocellulose is also called guncotton, and it’s combustible.

I first learned about this from the BBC show 'Connections': it is here also: http://mentalfloss.com/article/64247/first-plastic-billiard-balls-routinely-exploded [mentalfloss.com]

Original Submission