Plastic to protect elephants
- Chicago, USA, 1900. According to the census that year, the city had 1,698,575 inhabitants and 830 billiards rooms. Today, they don't reach the dozen... But the blooming of the pool caused elephants to decline.
Billiard fever, in addition to in Chicago, spread all over the West in the 19th century. The game has its origin in the Middle Ages, but in the previous centuries the activity of the elites was predominantly. As the pool rooms were opened there and here, the game spread to all the citizens, causing great harm to the elephants.
For the pool, for the balls to function well, they must be manufactured with materials of determined and uniform density, being the elephant dental pouch suitable for this purpose. Considering that 3 or 4 balls could be extracted from a tooth and that 16 balls are used in the pool, 2 or 3 elephants should be killed to supply a single pool table. The flowering of the pool caused the elephants to decline.
Without ecological awareness, this was an economic disaster for those engaged in the billiards business. But the solution was already invented, although it still didn't have a clear use: plastic. It was a much cheaper and more versatile material, and in the short term, at least more environmentally friendly to elephants.
In 1869 the manufacturer of billiard material Phella & Collender made a call and offered an economic prize in search of a material that substituted ivory. The young inventor John Wesley Hyatt (1837-1920) responded to the call. The English Alexander Parkes (1813-1890) was based on the adaptive nitrocellulose developed years ago to obtain the celluloid base. The ball manufacturer patented the first plastic balls that same year, and the following year, in 1870, the Hyatt itself patented celluloid, the first industrial plastic.
So in the newborn, plastic saved some elephants, although as they grew up, elephants and other living creatures were in danger.
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