John Wesley Hyatt
John Wesley Hyatt (born November 28, 1837 in Starkey , New York , USA , † May 10, 1920 in Short Hills , New Jersey , USA) was an American chemist and inventor. He improved the manufacturing process for the first thermoplastic material significantly. The Briton Alexander Parkes had invented celluloid in 1855 and patented it under the brand name Parkesine , but could not guarantee stable quality of use. His developments in rolling bearings led to the establishment of the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company in 1892 , a leading company in the industry, which was acquired by William Durant in 1916 and integrated into General Motors in 1918 . John Wesley Hyatt held hundreds of patents with other inventions.
Life
After training as a printer in Illinois , Hyatt founded a company in Albany to manufacture billiard balls , the Albany Billard Ball Company. He experimented with different materials to find a substitute for the expensive ivory and discovered that adding camphor and alcohol under low heat and pressure dissolves the brittle nitrocellulose and makes the material more pliable. He received his first patent for invented new billiard balls on October 10, 1865. They did not yet completely satisfy the demands of his customers and he continued to experiment.
Nitrocellulose , also known as gun cotton , is made by soaking cotton fibers with nitric acid and sulfuric acid and thus dissolving the natural polymer cellulose from the plant walls. Depending on how much camphor is added to this nitrocellulose, the resulting plastic is hard like horn or soft like raw rubber and can be deformed by heating.
Hyatt had thus invented the first thermoplastic material. At first it slammed because of the close relationship to gun cotton (and their high content) playing pool with cellulose balls yet, and that too so violently at the pool table standing Cowboys grabbed their Colts.
Hyatt patented the manufacturing process in 1870 and founded the Albany Dental Plate Company in 1870 , which made artificial dentures from celluloid . In 1872 he invented the first injection molding machine . In the same year he renamed the company the Celluloid Manufacturing Company and relocated the company headquarters to Newark , New Jersey in 1873 . The company was taken over by the Celanese Corporation in 1927 and thus belonged to the Hoechst -Celanese Corporation.
In 1971 he was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Billiard Congress of America .
swell
- German Plastic Museum: Inventor: John Wesley Hyatt
- Famous americans: John Wesley Hyatt
- Peter JT Morris; Polymer Pioneers: A Popular History of the Science and Technology of Large Molecules; ISBN 978-0-941901-03-1
- General Motors Heritage Center: Hyatt Roller Bearing Company
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ The beginnings of plastic - plastic from the Neandertal In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 11, 2014.
- ↑ Alexander Parkes: The Father of All Plastics from December 29, 2013.
- ↑ Hyatt Roller Bearing Company ( Memento of the original from May 16, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ US patent number 50,359 on "Billiard-Balls" for John W. Hyatt (English), accessed on October 9, 2010
- ↑ Inventor: John Wesley Hyatt. In: German Plastic Museum.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hyatt, John Wesley |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hyatt, John W. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American chemist and inventor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 28, 1837 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Starkey , New York , USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 10, 1920 |
| Place of death | Short Hills , New Jersey , USA |