The Olmecs in Mexico played with balls made of
rubber – a natural polymer. It was not until the 18th century that
the first European, French explorer Charles-Marie de La Condamine, stumbled
upon the rubber tree in the Amazon basin (Knight, 2014) .
Only in the 1840s did the American Charles Goodyear
and the British Thomas Hancock take out patents on either side of the Atlantic
for ‘vulcanized’ rubber (rubber treated with sulphur for more durability). Thanks
to vulcanization, the bicycle tyre was made out of rubber, followed by the
motor car, and the Goodyear tyre company. The history of plastic goes as far
back as when man started using wood. Why? Because half of an average piece of wood
is made of cellulose (a polymer that provides plant cells their tough walls,
and wood, durability and stiffness).
Alexander
Parkes created the first man-made plastic and publicly demonstrated it at the
1862 Great International Exhibition in London (Lytle, 2015) .
Cellulose provided the raw material for this breakthrough. Parkesine was an organic
material derived from cellulose, which once heated, could be molded, still
retaining its shape upon cooling. He named the new material Parkesine after
himself; Parkes.
In 1870
two Americans, the Hyatt brothers added camphor to Parkesine improving its
malleability, and renamed the material, celluloid. The next most important
material in the early history of plastics was formaldehyde. The demand for
white chalkboards in German schools resulted in the discovery of casein
plastics. Casein plastics were produced by reacting casein (milk protein) with
formaldehyde. Casein is still being used by the button industry today. In 1899,
Arthur Smith took out British Patent 16, 275, the first dealing with
phenol-formaldehyde resins for use as an ebonite substitute in electrical
insulation (History of Plastics, 2015) . Phenol-formaldehyde
was studied in the succeeding decade mainly for academic reasons.
The
Resin Identification Code - a system of plastic coding, was developed in 1998
by the U.S.-based Society of the Plastics Industry to ease the recycling of
post-consumer plastics. Nowadays, this code is used on most plastic products,
imprinted on the product, often on the bottom.
References
History of Plastics. (2015). Retrieved May 21,
2015, from SPI - The Plastics Industry Trade Association:
www.plasticsindustry.org
Knight, L. (2014, May 17). A Brief History of plastics,
natural and synthetic. Retrieved May 16, 2015, from British Broadcasting
Corporation - BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27442625
Lytle, C. L.
(2015). When The Mermaids Cry: The Great Plastic Tide. Retriev
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