For a young Dustin Hoffman in the classic 1967 movie The Graduate there was just one word: plastics. But for the journeyman printer who developed the first commercially viable artificial plastic nearly 100 years earlier, there were two: billiard balls. For, many historians argue, the inspiration for John Wesley Hyatt's 1870 invention of celluloid was a New York manufacturer's offer of $10, 000 to anyone who came up with a suitable substitute for the ivory that was then used to make the spheres. Following the lead of European chemists, Hyatt began experimenting with nitrocellulose, a group of flammable or explosive substances formed by treating paper or cotton with acids. Hyatt's innovation was to mix nitrocellulose pulp with pulverized camphor gum and heat the mixture under heavy pressure in a mold; as the product cooled it became "as hard as horn or bone," according to Hyatt's patent on the process.

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