Happy Birthday, Celluloid!

JA from MNPP here, with your cinematic history lesson of the day. On this day one-hundred and forty-two years ago, the inventor John Wesley Hyatt patented a process of mixing together cellulose nitrote and camphor, which he'd meant as a means of producing cheap billiard balls (which had up til then been made strictly of ivory). They'd actually purchased the patent from a British inventor, Alexander Parkes, who'd gone bankrupt twice over trying to figure out a good use for his substance (including creating a line of waterproofed clothing) - lawsuits inevitably followed between them once the plastic began to take off, but it was Hyatt who's credited with calling it celluloid and figuring out its final composition.

Although the process began ten years later, it wasn't until another ten years after that, around 1888, that celluloid began being sliced down into sheets for photography (check out Hannibal Goodwin and his five million dollar winning lawsuit against Eastman Kodak over that), which by 1889 made their way into Thomas Edison's grubby hands and the rest is cinematic history.

Unfortunately celluloid had some disadvantages. It doesn't age well, and a lot of early films were ruined because of it. And it turned out to be highly flammable - the supposedly regal movie-house in my tiny upstate NY hometown actually burned to the ground back in the 1940s because of it - and it'd started being replaced by acetate and polyester by the 1950s (and now of course everything's digital). Still, even if the substance itself hasn't lasted, the word itself still carries weight.

This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."
-- Alfred Hitchcock in his AFI Lifetime Acheivement Award speech, March 1979 

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