bile safety glass. And tough, gleaming Tenite now makes thousands of fountain pen barrels, as well as many other semi-transparent things.
It seems a far cry from cow’s milk to buttons, yet chemistry has hurdled the distance. America’s button industryâ€”a large producer concentrating on a small but vital productâ€”relies largely on milk for its basic material. Casein, made from milk, is chemically combined with formaldehyde to form a lustrous plastic that is giving buttons a more prominent place in wearing apparel.
Mineral plastics are composed chiefly of phenol (carbolic acid) combined with formaldehyde. Of these the well-known Bakelite and a few others are molded into desired shapes, are black in color, and therefore are largely restricted for indus-trial use. Others such as Catalin are made from similar basic materials but are cast into sheets, rods and tubes of brilliant colors. This bulk stock can be fabricated by cutting or by turning on an ordinary lathe, resulting in colorful cutlery handles, knobs and novelties.
Among the most useful of the phenol plastics is the laminated type, such as Formica, in which canvas or other fabric is pressed into the material for greater strength and insulation. Modern motor cars can thank laminated phenolic formaldehyde for a large degree of their quietness. Gears of this substance have widely supplanted steel because they wear remarkably and do not clatter. In the new ocean giant, Queen Mary, too, is $100,000 worth of decorative material made from fire-resistant American Formica.
One of the newest compounds to startle the market is the urea plastic, a mixture of nitrogenâ€”snatched from the airâ€”with carbon dioxide and formaldehyde. Unlike the others this is manufactured first as a powder and is then molded. Grocery scales made by the Toledo Scale Company used to be housed in cumbrous metal that made them weigh 160 pounds. The company substituted Plaskon, a urea plastic, for its metal housings; in so doing it reduced the weight of the scales to 55 pounds and trebled its sales!
Industrial war is the inevitable result of a successful new material. When one considers that many industrial units formerly made of several pieces of metal bolted together can now be molded in one piece of plastic, thus saving the cost of assembly and painting, the answer is obvious.
Yet there are many uses which plastics cannot as yet fill, because of mechanical limitations. Will research remedy that by producing still newer materials that will make beautiful and inexpensive furniture, automobile bodiesâ€”even houses? Research is trying, that is certain; and seldom does it fail. Meanwhile, the art of fabricating plastics is advancing steadily. The new automatic injection method of molding, in which a plastic almost ready to harden is forced under pressure into the molds and can be ejected in a few seconds, a finished product, is a case in point. By this method, too, whole sets of buttons, typewriter keys and other similar objects can be molded at once, instead of laboriously one at a time.
There is no telling what may happen next in this lusty infant industry. Molders now produce plastics in sizes ranging from tiny, jewel-like earring adornments to nine-foot, 4,000-gallon water tanks. The Ford Motor Company uses oil pressed from soy beans in the enamel finishes for its cars; and Ford is now experimenting with a plastic made of the soy bean meal, after the oil has been removed, mixed with formaldehyde. It is an exciting technological race; and modern plasticsâ€”those already in use and those still bubbling in test tubesâ€”may well be the source of a new era of prosperity.
Paint, incidentally, gives a startling example of research’s ability to jolt industry into new channels. Twenty years ago automobiles hastened through the assembly line only to languish for five weeks in the finishing shop. Today, because of the high development of nitrocellulose lacquersâ€”made from plant fiberâ€”cars are finished from the bare metal to the final polish in one day! That development was a rude awakening to a sleeping paint