99% Invisible - 164- The Post-Billiards Age

Episode Date: May 13, 2015

We live in a post-billiards age. There was an age of billiards, and it has been over for so long, most of us have no idea how huge billiards once was. For many decades, starting in the mid-19th Century, billiards … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We live in a post-billionaire's world. There was an age of billions and it has been over for so long. Most of us have no idea how huge billions once was. 100 years ago, there were 830 pool halls in my city of Chicago. Now if you add up all the gas stations, all the McDonald's and all the Starbucks in Chicago right now, you'd be nowhere close to that number. You'd be a little under 600 if you want to be exact. And I know you do, you beautiful nerds. Today, Chicago has fewer than 10 pool halls.

That is Dan Weissman, reporter, Chicagoan, Dan originally reported the story for Marketplace. So billiards. Not what it used to be. But this is a post-billards world in a much more profound sense, because the growth of billiards led to the development of a material that, for better or worse, came to define the modern world. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

You listening? Plastics. This story starts with a guy named Michael Phalen, who's regarded by everybody as the really the father of American Billiards. That's Michael Shamus. He's the author of the illustrated encyclopedia of Billiards. Phalen was a brilliant player, but he also raised awareness of the sport, promoted it, arranging the biggest big money matches. Phalan was totally remarkable, because he was everything. He was an all around everything guy. He started a huge billiards hall in San Francisco.

He patented a new kind of billiard cushion, and then he took the money he had won, playing billiards and writing books on billiards, and used it to become the first big manufacturer of billiard tables and equipment. Phalan created the age of billiards in the US, and he felt that to further popularize the game of billiards. And some more tickets to matches, and some more books, and some more equipment, he would need to standardize the gear. Because if tables and balls weren't the same from one location to another, well, you were basically playing a different game every time you went somewhere new.

But standardizing the billier ball was no easy task. It's a very, very high standard to meet. The billier ball has to have certain physical properties. It has to rebound properly. It has to be a uniform density. And at the time, there was really only one material that would do, ivory, which was not cheap. Going to Africa, shooting elephants,

that is dangerous and expensive. Not to mention horrible. And people for decades had been trying to find substitutes for ivory. And they tried a variety of materials, including even metal balls, iron balls, which really don't perform well. Iron billiard balls just weren't the same.

Ivory balls had just the right weight, the most even roll, the best rebound of the custick, of each other, of the side of the table. Nothing was as good. And not only that, only the best grade ivory would do. In fact, when you look at records from the ivory trade, the top grade of ivory is actually called billiard ball ivory.

And billiard balls required a lot of billiard ball grade ivory. Unlike the ivory on piano keys, which were just a veneer over wood, billiard balls had to be made of 100% solid ivory. And therefore, the average number of billiard balls that could be obtained from a single tusk was three. If you are the best luckiest billiard ball trainer,

maybe you could get five balls from one tusk, but even so, that means one set of billiard balls is gonna require killing at least two elephants. So billiard balls were very expensive. And when you're trying to build an industry, that's a problem. For Phalan's company, it was the problem. The entire trade depended on the shortage of its one exotic material. That's Robert Fredell, a professor at the University of Maryland. He

studies the history of technology and he wrote the book on what happens next. Phalan and his colleagues were acutely aware that their dependency on ivory was not ideal. They're really desperate, I don't think it's too strong a word, to find some kind of substitute material. But if there simply wasn't anything. Failing takes out an ad in the paper, and here's a dramatization of what happened when a guy named John Wesley Hyatt found that ad.

Say John, look at this, read it yourself. A prize of $10,000 for the discovery of a satisfactory substitute for ivory and making billiard balls. That's from a 1937 episode of a radio show called Cavalcade of America. Say, that's a lot of money. So it is. In terms of wages people earned at the time, it was like $3 million.

Hi, it wasn't a chemist, but he was a tinkerer and he worked for years to win failing's prize. By trade, Hi, it was a printer. And printers use nitrated cellulose to protect their hands. It's still sold as liquid bandages. And that material turned out to have very interesting properties, and in particular it dissolved, and it creates a very sure-up reliquate. In the radio dramatization, Hayek gets his key inspiration when a bottle of

the stuff overturns, and he watches it dry into a film that he finds interesting. Why this bit of film has given me an idea, and the idea it might be worth $10,000. Hi I need to say you're going to heat that light-created cotton and compress it. That's right. I'm going to hear it. As far away as I can before I start using that press. But John Hyatt and his lab assistant Jim kept going. They'd heat up the nitrated cotton, put it in the press, and... Ready to open the press, John? Yeah. Throw the lever. John, what is it?

Why don't you speak? What's the matter? Look, Jim. And then the press. Look at it. Jim, it's what we've been trying to find all this time. And the material that would take the place of ivory was plastic. Hi it called his new material, Celluloid, but Celluloid did not win, fail in his $10,000 prize. Celluloid is a wonderful material.

It's a beautiful plastic. It can be colored in all sorts of ways. It can be shaped beautifully. It has a wonderful range of uses. But, billiard ball, if it's not one of them. Balls made a celluloid just didn't bounce right, but Hayet tried to make a go of it anyway. He does set up a billiard ball company,

but his ball of or not made him sayolite. They have a thin veneer of sayolite on the outside, but they're mainly plaster on the inside and they're very inferior by your ball. Hyatt didn't give up on sayolite. He went into business with his brother, Isaiah. The Hyatt's set up a whole series of companies to try to exploit what they are convinced is a very nifty material, but they can't figure out what on earth the market's going to be. They tried dental plates. You can color so you Lloyd to look just like real gums,

but there's a problem. Turns out that shall you like get soft if you drink any hot tea. Eventually they find the best use for celluloid is imitation ivory. I'll be it, not for billiard balls, but for versions of popular ivory luxury goods. Nice handles, combs, hand mirrors, even toys and boxes, a gigantic range of things,

many of which would never actually have been made at Ivory. Also, piano keys. A Sears catalog from the 1890s offers pianos with a choice of key coverings. Ivory or Celluloid. And of course, the most famous use of Celluloid would eventually be to make film stock for movies. Meanwhile, billiard balls kept getting made out of Ivory.

Ivory that came mostly from Africa, which of course the Europeans had been busy colonizing and exploiting, and the ivory trade was pretty awful for the people of Africa. Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness based largely on his own experience in the Belgian Congo, where ivory was the big product. Conrad called the whole enterprise, quote, the vileist scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience. And Conrad didn't necessarily care about this part, but obviously the ivory trade was also terrible for elephants. So what Wajim thought a pretty common animal in Central Africa

in the middle of the 19th century is becoming increasingly scarce by the 20th. By the time of World War I, the ivory supply crunch, the one that Michael Falon had started worrying about 50 years before had arrived. And around this time, the real significance of Hyatt's celluloid had begun to show itself. It hadn't worked for billiard balls. However, it began to inspire people to think about what artificial material might be available, what people could make, what people could invent. In 1907, a chemist named Leo Beklund comes up with a new kind of plastic made from petroleum. He names it Beklund.

After himself. And one cool thing about bake light, you can melt it, mix in fillers. And it turns out that with that capability, you can vary the density, you can vary the elasticity, and you can make a perfect bay of ball. And so they finally replaced ivory balls with this new plastic bake Bakelite. By the 1940s, even top pool tournaments were being played with plastic balls, but by then, pool had passed its peak. It crashed as the depression began, and never regained its former prominence. The age of billiards was over.

And this post-billionards age, the age of plastics, had really gotten into gear. For example, the handle of your toothbrush is probably plastic. So undoubtedly, or the barrel of your fountain pen, the instrument panel in your car, and yet these are just a few of more than 25,000 modern uses for plastics. That's a plastics plural. By that time, you got a bunch on the market. PVC, vinyl, polyethylene, plexiglass, nylon, and in labs. They're discovering the stuff that would end up becoming teflon and saran wrap. In good old celluloid, the plastic that started it all had been retired, even from the movies.

It was indispensable to the beginning of motion pictures, but it was highly dangerous and framable. Celluloid film caused several disastrous and fatal fires in movie theaters. By 1934, a new form, Cellulo's acetate, had taken the place of highest cellulo's nitrate for film. Celluloid, born out of billions, was the first plastic. It ushered in a new age of modern products, but it never succeeded in revolutionizing the game of billions.

It did, however, revolutionize another table's board. Ping Pong. Before Celluloid was invented, Ping Pong was played with something more closely resembling a golf ball, which, as you can imagine, just didn't have that perfect bounce. Celluloid Ping Pong balls were used for years,

but finally got bumped from tournament play in 2013. The reason? They were a little too bouncy. Poor E-Loid, it just can't win. Someday we'll find the perfect home for you, my bouncy friend. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Dan Weissman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffleman, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Dave Bond, who runs the Chicago Billiard Museum, an online museum which has an amazing collection of billiards related documents, data, and images. We'll have a link on our website.

We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSund. An architecture and interior firm. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Spotify. And you can see that Johnny Apple seed of Billiards Michael Phalan's extremely unsettling neckbeard at 99BI.org. I just want to say one more deal. Just one more. Yes, sir. I ain't listening. Yes, sir, you.

Plastics. Exactly. How do you mean? It's a great future in plastics. Think about it. What do you think about it? Yes, I will. I've said, that's a deal. Radio til P.R.X.

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