John Wesley Hyatt
John Wesley Hyatt ( born November 28, 1837 in Starkey, New York, USA, † May 10, 1920 in Short Hills, New Jersey, USA ) improved the manufacturing process for the first thermoplastic material. The Briton Alexander Parkes in 1855 had invented the celluloid and patented under the brand name Parkesine, but could not ensure stable quality of use. With further inventions John Wesley Hyatt held hundreds of patents.
Life
After training as a printer in Illinois Hyatt founded in Albany a company for the manufacture of billiard balls billiard ball Albany Company. He experimented with different materials to find a substitute for the expensive ivory and discovered that the addition of camphor and alcohol under low heat and pressure dissolves the brittle nitrocellulose and makes the material more pliable. His first patent for invented new billiard balls he received on 10 October 1865. You up to his claims not yet complete and he experimented on.
Nitrocellulose, also called gun cotton is prepared by impregnating cotton fibers with nitric acid and sulfuric acid, and then the natural cellulose polymer dissolves from the plant walls. Depending on how much camphor that nitrocellulose is added, the resulting plastic is hard as horn or soft as raw rubber and can be deformed by heating.
Hyatt had thus invented the first thermoplastic. At first it popped because of the close relationship to the gun-cotton (and their high proportion ) playing pool with cellulose balls now and then so violent that standing by the pool table Cowboys grabbed their Colts.
1870 by Hyatt patented the manufacturing process and founded in 1870, the Albany Dental Plate Company, which manufactured dentures made of celluloid. In 1872, he renamed the company in Celluloid Manufacturing Company and moved its headquarters in 1873 to Newark, New Jersey. The company was taken over in 1927 by the Celanese Corporation and now part of the Hoechst Celanese Corporation.
In 1971 he was admitted posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Billiard Congress of America.
Swell
- German plastics Museum: Inventor: John Wesley Hyatt
- Famous americans: John Wesley Hyatt