No one envisioned such sweeping effects when the first simple applications of plastics appeared during the nineteenth century. Before 1869, when John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid, manufacturers had used such natural resinous materials as shellac, gutta percha, and hard rubber to mold buttons, buckles, daguerreotype cases, and other everyday articles. Answering a challenge from a manufacturer of billiard balls, Hyatt sought an artificial substitute that would improve on ivory's uncertain supply and natural irregularities. The result was celluloid, a combination of nitrated cellulose and camphor obtained under pressure. Although Hyatt established several companies to manufacture harness fittings, denture plates, and knife handles, as well as billiard balls, successful competitors soon rendered celluloid a generic term. Manufactured in blocks and sliced into sheets of varying thickness, celluloid was then worked like tortoiseshell, horn, or ivory to produce combs and accessories. Clever techniques for simulating the visual grain, patterning, and color of natural materials not only democratized former luxury goods but also earned celluloid a reputation for cheapness. Conflicting reputations for technological ingenuity and second-rate imitation persisted in the twentieth century.
The next major development came in 1907, when Leo Baekeland, an immigrant Belgian chemist, made the first chemically synthetic plastic by subjecting phenol and formaldehyde to extreme heat and pressure. Although he too sought a material substitute (in this case for shellac as an electrical insulator), he realized that Bakelite, which was durable, nonflammable, chemically inert, and electrically resistant, could be molded into a host of products from pipestems to distributor caps. As "the material of a thousand uses" became a household word during the 1920s and 1930s, owing to the expanding radio industry, other companies developed a range of chemically distinct plastics, including cast phenolic resins for colorful costume jewelry; urea formaldehyde for pastel-colored moldings that could not be achieved with Bakelite; cellulose acetate as a substitute for flammable celluloid; early forms of vinyl for extruded sheeting and soft moldings; and transparent acrylic, promoted as an unbreakable substitute for glass. Plastic's utopian aura as a laboratory miracle conjured out of coal, air, and water was reinforced by industrial designers who specified glossy streamlined moldings for consumer products. By 1939 the industry supported a journal, Modern Plastics, and a trade association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, and the word plastics had gained popular currency.
Major chemical and petroleum companies transformed the industry during the 1940s and 1950s. E. I. duPont de Nemours's commercialization of nylon as a synthetic fiber for women's stockings in 1938 initiated this shift. Wallace Carothers, an organic chemist brought in from Harvard, had set out to design a polymer with specific traits defined in advance. No longer was developing a new synthetic a hit-or-miss proposition. However, as the industry achieved ever more precise control over its artificial products, it lost control of the cultural meaning of plastics. This divergence became apparent during World War II, when the industry came to maturity as a supplier of acrylic cockpit covers, polyethylene radar casings, phenolic mortar fuses, and Teflon coatings essential to the Manhattan Project. Aware in general of how plastics contributed to the war effort, Americans also learned, through morale-building advertising, about a projected postwar " miracle world" of bubble-domed automobiles, molded or extruded houses, and new products. But the home-front reality encompassed cheap, shoddy substitutes that continued to appear even after the war�sticky vinyl shower curtains, polystyrene toys that were easily broken, and buttons that dissolved when dry-cleaned. Even as the major chemical companies worked to advance standards of quality control among the welter of small companies that were injection-molding such new thermoplastic polymers as polyethylene and polypropylene, the taint of the imitative substitute was associated with plastic in popular consciousness. All the same, postwar Americans experienced a wide range of successful new products�Tupperware, hula hoops, fiberglass chairs, Formica laminate, bubble packaging, dry-cleaning bags, Teflon-coated skillets�whose proliferation mirrored an expanding economy and provoked concerns about an excessively materialistic culture.
That a material in itself could embody cultural ambivalences was demonstrated in 1968 when a generation of young, middle-class Americans and their parents laughed nervously during the film The Graduate when a middle-aged duffer offered the following advice to the new graduate, Benjamin (played by actor Dustin Hoffman): "Just one word � plastics � there's a great future in plastics." Although some members of the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s embraced vinyl go-go boots or inflatable plastic domes, doubts about plastics developed into hostility. Almost simultaneously came reports of vinyl workers afflicted with liver cancer, survivors of airplane crashes asphyxiated by burning polyurethane upholstery, ocean fish killed by microscopic particles of styrofoam, landfills overflowing with plastic packaging, and decreasing reserves of petroleum. Although plastic was already used as an adjective meaning phony, the very existence of plastics came to embody a larger fear that humanity had lost control of its future in seeking to transcend natural limits through technology. Some industry leaders feared that plastics might be legislated out of existence. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, as people grew up who had never known a world without plastics, and whose automobiles, sporting goods, audio equipment, and other consumer goods had been revolutionized by durable composites and versatile engineering resins, plastics regained their good name. As attention shifted progressively from relatively inert traditional materials to more malleable synthetic materials to the eternally morphing electron flows of virtual reality, the concept of plasticity continued to express American faith in an ability to remold the world.
Technology in American Business
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Plastics" (by Jeffrey L. Meikle), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=169 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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