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 Short
Stories
of Science and Invention A Collection of Radio Talks by Charles F. Kettering |
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One day, while setting type he cut his finger and went to get some
collodion or liquid court plaster from the bottle usually kept on a
nearby shelf - but he found someone had overturned the bottle and the
contents had spilled over the shelf, forming a hard, tough sheet. And
then Hyatt's outstanding quality came into play, his faculty of
intelligent observation. He didn't see the spilled collodion as an
irritating accident. He saw it as a new material to be used as a binder
for his new billiard balls and maybe - the ten thousand dollars.As the result of a careful investigation, he traced back the materials that made up the collodion and found among them nitrocellulose - or guncotton. 
After still more experimentation, he found a way, under heat and
pressure, to mold guncotton together with alcohol and camphor -
something no educated chemist would have done at that time. But Hyatt
tried this experiment, and out of the mold came a hard, clear substance
which he called" Celluloid" - the first of the great family of plastics
which, with the exception of vulcanized rubber, marked the beginning of
the great new plastic industry.This new material was not good enough for a billiard ball so he sold his patents and another man started the new industry. But the most important thing that came out of Hyatt's celluloid was the chain of experiments it started, and the new uses that were found for this material.   |
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