PLASTICS REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICAN INDUSTRY (Sep, 1936)
PLASTICS REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICAN INDUSTRY
Out of Test Tubes Come Man-Made Products Smashing Traditional Fabrication Methods and Making Cheaply Available Shining Articles of Surpassing Utility.
AS THRILLING as any Polar exploration is the day-by-day chemistry in America’s laboratories. Here intrepid men with test tubes and beakers forge into the vast uncharted lands of science. More money is spent in this ceaseless venture than was ever dreamed of by Byrd or Stefansson. The cost is reckoned in millionsâ€”even, as with radium, in human lifeâ€”but the gains are worth the battle. For out of this pioneering comes new wonders to revolutionize industry and add comfort and enjoyment to living.
The average American gets up in the morning, switches on the light, shaves, has . breakfast, buttons his coat, hops into his car and is off to work. In that short morning hour, usually without realizing it, he has many times made use of a peculiar substance that not so long ago was unknown. That substance is the plastic, a brilliant new child of modern research. The electric light switch is plastic. The razor and its case are probably plasticâ€”as are the handles on the breakfast cutlery, the buttons on the coat, the knobs on the instrument panel of the car. Bright, sturdy and useful articles are all of themâ€”yet they were made from sour milk, from the fuzz of cottonseeds, from carbolic acid or from thin air. All are recent triumphs of the laboratory.
New as they are, plastics have several decades of history behind them. Celluloid, one of the first widely known plastics, is familiar to all; and Bakelite has long been indispensable in telephonic, electric and radio construction. Yet after these had been on the market for years there sprang a new and versatile aggregation of plastics that brought new moldability and workability, new color and more uses. Though of somewhat different formulae, and suited for different uses, all have two things in common. All are plasticâ€”capable of being molded or cast. And all go through the chemical process known as polymerization, in which the molecules of the substance combine by enlargement of molecular structure.
After Dr. Leo Baekeland discovered Bakelite almost by accident in 1909 when he was trying to make a fusible synthetic resin, the creation of new plastics slumped. For years Bakelite and Celluloid were the only important ones used in America, and each had definite limitations. Celluloid, admirable as it was for many uses, was highly inflammable; and Bakelite, despite its utilitarian , excellence, could not then come into popular use because of its cost and blackness.
America needed a popular plasticâ€”a substance cheap, fire-resistant, and capable of taking on beautiful colors so that it could be used in the drawing-room as well as the telephone exchange. Not until the last decade did such a product appear.
Beetle, Catalin, Durez, Plaskon, Tenite, Resinox, Unyte, and many othersâ€”all are new names, all trade names of brilliant plastics made for thousands of uses. Outwardly similar, they are chemically different. Lustrous, vari-colored Catalin, for instance, cannot take the place of Bakelite in telephone and radio; nor can black Bakelite replace Catalin in the construction of toilet articles and chessmen, where beauty is needed and dialectricity is not. Roughly, plastic can be divided into three groups: Those made from vegetables, from animal, and from mineral matter.
Celluloseâ€”the fiber forming the cell wall of all plants, but found in its purest form in cottonâ€”is the old and the new titan in plastics. From this cheap and plentiful vegetable base came the earlier Celluloid; and it now makes Pyralin, Tenite and cellulose acetate. Though it will burn slowly, cellulose acetate is not highly inflammable as was the older Celluloid. Buyers of Cord, Auburn and Hudson cars this year have steering wheels made of this newest plastic. Sheets of Pyralin one-fiftieth of an inch thick are sandwiched between two thin panes of glass to make modern automo