Plastic (4 page)

Ironically, the world opened by celluloid film nearly killed the celluloid-comb industry. In 1914, Irene Castle, a ballroom dancer turned movie star, decided to cut her long hair into a short bob, prompting female fans across the country to take scissors to their own hair. Nowhere did those shorn locks fall harder than in Leominster, Massachusetts, which had been the country's comb capital since before the Revolutionary War and which was now the cradle of the celluloid industry, much of it devoted to combs. Nearly overnight, half of the comb companies in town were forced to shut down, throwing thousands of comb makers out of work. Sam Foster, owner of Foster Grant, one of the town's leading celluloid-comb companies, told his workers not to worry. "We'll make something else," he assured them. He hit on the idea of making sunglasses, creating an entirely new mass market.
"Who's that behind those Foster Grants?" the company later teased in ads that featured photographs of celebrities such as Peter Sellers, Mia Farrow, and Raquel Welch hidden behind dark lenses. With a quick trip to the local drugstore, anyone could acquire the same glamorous mystique.

For all its significance, celluloid had a fairly modest place in the material world of the early twentieth century, limited mainly to novelties and small decorative and utilitarian items, like the comb. Making things from celluloid was a labor-intensive process; combs were molded in small batches and still had to be sawed and polished by hand. And because the material was so volatile, the factories were like tinderboxes. Workers often labored under a constant spray of water, but fires were still common. It wasn't until the development of more cooperative polymers that plastics truly began to transform the look, feel, and quality of our lives. By the 1940s, we had both the plastics and the machines to mass-produce plastic products. Injection-molding machines—now standard equipment in plastics manufacturing—turned raw plastic powders or pellets into a molded, finished product in a one-shot process. A single machine equipped with a mold containing multiple cavities could pop out ten fully formed combs in less than a minute.

DuPont, which bought one of the original celluloid companies in Leominster, released photos in the mid-1930s showing the daily output of a father-and-son pair of comb makers. In the photos, the father is standing next to a tidy stack of three hundred and fifty celluloid combs, while ten thousand injection-molded combs surround the son. And although a single celluloid comb cost one dollar in 1930, by the end of the decade one could buy a machine-molded comb of cellulose acetate for anywhere from a dime to fifty cents.
With the rise of mass-production plastics, the fanciful decorative combs and faux ivory dresser sets so popular in the celluloid era gradually disappeared.
Combs were now stripped down to the most essential elements—teeth and handle—in service of their most basic function.

Bakelite, the first truly synthetic plastic, a polymer forged entirely in the lab, paved the way for successes like that of DuPont's injection-mold-comb-making son. As with celluloid, Bakelite was invented to replace a scarce natural substance: shellac, a product of the sticky excretions of the female lac beetle. Demand for shellac began shooting up in the early twentieth century because it was an excellent electrical insulator. Yet it took fifteen thousand beetles six months to make enough of the amber-colored resin needed to produce a pound of shellac. To keep up with the rapid expansion of the electrical industry, something new was needed.

As it turned out, the plastic Leo Baekeland invented by combining formaldehyde with phenol, a waste product of coal, and subjecting the mixture to heat and pressure was infinitely more versatile than shellac. Though it could, with effort, be made to mimic natural materials, it didn't have celluloid's knack for imitation. Instead, it had a powerful identity of its own, which helped encourage the development of a distinctively plastic look.
Bakelite was a dark-colored, rugged material with a sleek, machinelike beauty, "as stripped down as a Hemingway sentence," in writer Stephen Fenichell's words.
Unlike celluloid, Bakelite could be precisely molded and machined into nearly anything, from tubular industrial bushings the size of mustard seeds to full-size coffins. Contemporaries hailed its "protean adaptability" and marveled at how Baekeland had transformed something as foul-smelling and nasty as coal tar—long a discard in the coking process—into this wondrous new substance.

Families gathered around Bakelite radios (to listen to programs sponsored by the Bakelite Corporation), drove Bakelite-accessorized cars, kept in touch with Bakelite phones, washed clothes in machines with Bakelite blades, pressed out wrinkles with Bakelite-encased irons—and, of course, styled their hair with Bakelite combs. "From the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses will be made of this material of a thousand purposes,"
Time
magazine enthused in 1924 in an issue that sported Baekeland on the cover.

The creation of Bakelite marked a shift in the development of new plastics. From then on, scientists stopped looking for materials that could emulate nature; rather, they sought "to rearrange nature in new and imaginative ways."
The 1920s and '30s saw an outpouring of new materials from labs around the world. One was cellulose acetate, a semisynthetic product (plant cellulose was one of its base ingredients) that had the easy adaptability of celluloid but wasn't flammable. Another was polystyrene, a hard, shiny plastic that could take on bright colors, remain crystalline clear, or be puffed up with air to become the foamy polymer DuPont later trademarked as Styrofoam. DuPont also introduced nylon, its answer to the centuries-long search for an artificial silk. When the first nylon stockings were introduced, after a campaign that promoted the material as being as "lustrous as silk" and as "strong as steel," women went wild. Stores sold out of their stock in hours, and in some cities, the scarce supplies led to nylon riots, full-scale brawls among shoppers.
Across the ocean, British chemists discovered polyethylene, the strong, moisture-proof polymer that would become the sine qua non of packaging. Eventually, we'd get plastics with features nature had never dreamed of: surfaces to which nothing would stick (Teflon), fabrics that could stop a bullet (Kevlar).

Though fully synthetic like Bakelite, many of these new materials differed in one significant way. Bakelite is a thermoset plastic, meaning that its polymer chains are hooked together through the heat and pressure applied when it is molded. The molecules set the way batter sets in a waffle iron. And once those molecules are linked into a daisy chain, they can't be unlinked. You can break a piece of Bakelite, but you can't melt it down to make it into something else. Thermoset plastics are immutable molecules—the Hulks of the polymer world—which is why you'll still find vintage Bakelite phones, pens, bangles, and even combs that look nearly brand-new.

Polymers such as polystyrene and nylon and polyethylene are thermoplastics; their polymer chains are formed in chemical reactions that take place before the plastic ever gets near a mold. The bonds holding these daisy chains together are looser than those in Bakelite, and as a result these plastics readily respond to heat and cold. They melt at high temperatures (how high depends on the plastic), solidify when cooled, and if made cold enough can even freeze. All of which means that, unlike Bakelite, they can be molded and melted and remolded over and over again. Their shape-shifting versatility is one reason thermoplastics quickly eclipsed the thermosets and today constitute about 90 percent of all the plastics produced.

Many of the new thermoplastics at one time or another found their way into combs, which, thanks to injection molding and other new fabrication technologies, could be made faster and in far greater quantities than ever before—thousands of combs in a single day. This was a small feat in and of itself, but multiplied across all the necessities and luxuries that could then be inexpensively mass-produced, it's understandable why many at the time saw plastics as the harbinger of a new era of abundance. Plastics, so cheaply and easily produced, offered salvation from the haphazard and uneven distribution of natural resources that had made some nations wealthy, left others impoverished, and triggered countless devastating wars. Plastics promised a material utopia, available to all.

At least, that was the hopeful vision of a pair of British chemists writing on the eve of World War II. "Let us try to imagine a dweller in the 'Plastic Age,'" Victor Yarsley and Edward Couzens wrote. "This 'Plastic Man' will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces ... a world in which man, like a magician, makes what he wants for almost every need."
They envisioned him growing up and growing old surrounded by unbreakable toys, rounded corners, unscuffable walls, warpless windows, dirt-proof fabrics, and lightweight cars and planes and boats. The indignities of old age would be lessened with plastic glasses and dentures until death carried the plastic man away, at which point he would be buried "hygienically enclosed in a plastic coffin."

That world was delayed in coming. Most of the new plastics discovered in the 1930s were monopolized by the military over the course of World War II. Eager to conserve precious rubber, for instance, in 1941 the U.S. Army put out an order that all combs issued to servicemen be made of plastic instead of hard rubber. So every member of the armed forces, from private to general, in white units and black, got a five-inch black plastic pocket comb in his "hygiene kit."
Of course, plastics were also pressed into far more significant service, used for mortar fuses, parachutes, aircraft components, antenna housing, bazooka barrels, enclosures for gun turrets, helmet liners, and countless other applications. Plastics were even essential to the building of the atomic bomb: Manhattan Project scientists relied on Teflon's supreme resistance to corrosion to make containers for the volatile gases they used. Production of plastics leaped during the war, nearly quadrupling from 213 million pounds in 1939 to 818 million pounds in 1945.

Come V-J Day, however, all that production potential had to go somewhere, and plastics exploded into consumer markets. (Indeed, as early as 1943, DuPont had a whole division at work preparing prototypes of housewares that could be made of the plastics then commandeered for the war.)
Just months after the war's end, thousands of people lined up to get into the first National Plastics Exposition in New York, a showcase of the new products made possible by the plastics that had proven themselves in the war. For a public weary of two decades of scarcity, the show offered an exciting and glittering preview of the promise of polymers. There were window screens in every color of the rainbow that would never need to be painted. Suitcases light enough to lift with a finger, but strong enough to carry a load of bricks. Clothing that could be wiped clean with a damp cloth. Fishing line as strong as steel. Clear packaging materials that would allow a shopper to see if the food inside was fresh. Flowers that looked like they'd been carved from glass. An artificial hand that looked and moved like the real thing.
Here was the era of plenty that the hopeful British chemists had envisioned. "Nothing can stop plastics," the chairman of the exposition crowed.

All those ex-GIs with their standard-issue combs were coming home to a world of not only material abundance but also rich opportunities created by the GI Bill, housing subsidies, favorable demographics, and an economic boom that left Americans with an unprecedented level of disposable income. Plastics production expanded explosively after the war, with a growth curve that was steeper than even the fast-rising GNP's.
Thanks to plastics, newly flush Americans had a never-ending smorgasbord of affordable goods to choose from. The flow of new products and applications was so constant it was soon the norm. Tupperware had surely always existed, alongside Formica counters, Naugahyde chairs, red acrylic taillights, Saran wrap, vinyl siding, squeeze bottles, push buttons, Barbie dolls, Lycra bras, Wiffle balls, sneakers, sippy cups, and countless more things. The nascent industry partnered with the press, especially women's magazines, to sell consumers on the virtue of plastics. "Plastics are here to free you from drudgery,"
House Beautiful
promised housewives in a special fifty-page issue in October of 1947 titled "Plastics ... A Way to a Better, More Carefree Life."
Even combs were brought into the service of consumption, taking on a new function as mini-billboards for various companies. Hotels, airlines, railroads, and other industries in the late 1950s began handing out complimentary combs stamped with the companies' names.

That proliferation of goods helped engender the rapid social mobility that took place after the war. We were a nation of consumers now, a society increasingly democratized by our shared ability to enjoy the conveniences and comforts of modern life. Not just a chicken in every pot, but a TV and stereo in every living room, a car in eve­ry driveway. Through the plastics industry, we had an ever-growing ability to synthesize what we wanted or needed, which made reality itself seem infinitely more open to possibility, profoundly more malleable, as historian Meikle observed.
Now full-fledged residents of Plasticville, we began to believe that we too were plastic. As
House Beautiful
assured readers in 1953: "You will have a greater chance to be yourself than any people in the history of civilization."

2. A Throne for the Common Man

I
N
1968,
NEW YORK'S
Museum of Contemporary Crafts put on a landmark exhibit showcasing art, furniture, housewares, jewelry, and sundry other items made of plastic. The show, "Plastic as Plastic," was meant as a tribute to the new kinds of artistic freedom made possible by polymers.
As the
New York Times
art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in his review of the show, here "was the answer to an artist's dream"—an "entire family of materials that can be made to assume virtually any size, shape, form, or color the mind of man may conceive." Was it any wonder that artists and designers had fallen deeply in love with these new materials?