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.
Copenhagen, 18 December 1974 At 12 noon a ferry arrived at the port, from where a group of about 100 Santa Claus landed. They brought a gigantic geese with them. The idea was to make a kind of “Trojan Goose” and, upon reaching the city, to pull the white beard costumes... [+]
Tennessee (United States), 1820. The slave Nathan Green is born, known as Nearest Uncle or Nearest Uncle. We do not know exactly when he was born and, in general, we have very little data about him until 1863, when he achieved emancipation. We know that in the late 1850s Dan... [+]
New York, 1960. At a UN meeting, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister and UN ambassador Jaja Wachucu slept. Nigeria had just achieved independence on 1 October. Therefore, Wachuku became the first UN representative in Nigeria and had just taken office.
In contradiction to the... [+]
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered several cylinders with inscriptions at the present Syrian Reservoir, the Tell Umm-el Marra. Experts believe that the signs written in these pieces of clay can be alphabetical.
In the 15th century a. The cylinders have... [+]
London 1928. At the Victoria and Albert Museum there was a very special painting: in the painting there is a black man, with wig and Levite, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. Thus it was catalogued in the Museum: “Unique satirical portrait representing a failed... [+]
Ethiopia, 24 November 1974. Lucy's skeleton was found in Hadar, one of the oldest traces of human ancestors. The Australian hominid of Australopithecus afarensis is between 3.2 and 3.5 million years old.
So they considered it the ancestor of species, the mother of all of us. In... [+]
A group of archaeologists from the University of Berkeley, California, USA. That is, men didn't launch the lances to hunt mammoths and other great mammals. That was the most widespread hypothesis so far, the technique we've seen in movies, video games ...
But the study, published... [+]
Zamora, late 10th century. On the banks of the Douro River and outside the city walls the church of Santiago de los Caballeros was built. The inside capitals of the church depict varied scenes with sexual content: an orgy, a naked woman holding the penis of a man… in the... [+]
Born 7 November 1924. A group of anarchists broke into Bera this morning to protest against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and to begin the revolution in the Spanish state.
Last October, the composition of the Central Board was announced between the displaced from Spain... [+]
A group of interdisciplinary researchers from the Free University of Berlin and the Zuse Institute have developed a complex mathematical model to better understand how Romanization spread in North Africa.
According to a study published in the journal Plos One, the model has... [+]
Washington (EE.UU. ), 1807. The US Constitution banned transatlantic slave trade. This does not mean that slavery has been abolished, but that the main source of the slaves has been interrupted. Thus, slave women became the only way to “produce” new slaves.
So in 1845, in... [+]
While working at a site in the Roman era of Normandy, several archaeology students have recently made a curious discovery: inside a clay pot they found a small glass jar, of which women used to bring perfume in the 19th century.
And inside the jar was a little papelite with a... [+]
Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States launched an atomic bomb causing tens of thousands of deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; although there are no precise figures, the most cautious estimates indicate that at least 210,000 people died at the end of that year. But in... [+]
Born 2 October 1968. A few months earlier, the student movement started on June 22 organized a rally in the Plaza de las Tres Cultura, in the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco unit of the city. The students gathered by the Mexican army and the paramilitary group Olympia Battalion were... [+]