Audiences from Seattle to New York roared at the antics of Buster Keaton and thrilled to hear Al Jolson speak the first words in a talkie: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The mass culture of film reeled across class, ethnic, racial, and regional lines, drawing one and all into shared stories and imbuing us with the sense that reality itself is as changeable and ephemeral as the names on the movie marquee. 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. Celluloid appeared at a time when the country was changing from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. We were fast on our way to becoming a country of consumers. 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. 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. 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.

A single machine equipped with a mold containing multiple cavities could pop out ten fully formed combs in less than a minute. 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. 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. To keep up with the rapid expansion of the electrical industry, something new was needed. Ample supplies of celluloid allowed manufacturers to keep up with rapidly rising demand while also keeping costs down. Celluloid was the first of the new materials that would level the playing field for consumption, as historian Jeffrey Meikle pointed out in his insightful cultural history American Plastic. The first balls Hyatt made produced a loud crack, like a shotgun blast, when they knocked into each other.

As Hyatt noted in one of his early patents, celluloid transcended the deficiencies that plagued many traditional comb materials. Celluloid made it possible to produce counterfeits so exact that they deceived "even the eye of the expert," as Hyatt's company boasted in one pamphlet. With film, an old elite was dethroned; the glamour once associated with class and social standing was now possible for anyone with good cheekbones, some talent, and a bit of luck. Perhaps that's because celluloid didn't make very good billiard balls-at least not at first. When selecting a pool table, it’s a good idea to look into the materials it is made from to gauge its true value. It’s a cue sport where the player strikes the billiard balls, moving them around the table. Continue moving the kids back until all but one player is eliminated. 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.

Like other plastics that would follow, celluloid offered a means for Americans to buy their way into new stations in life. By the 1940s, we had both the plastics and the machines to mass-produce plastic products. 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. 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. Companies that struggled to make an online presence during the pandemic are still behind the eight ball. Because if you don’t, it’s useless to make plans. It’s not a gymnastic. In other words, it’s full of holes, pores, through which you breathe. It’s also the only game where one player can do almost all the work, potting the first eight balls, only for their opponent to pot the 9-ball and win! The balls you’re assigned depend on what ball is potted first. Most of the time, you will use 16 balls (including the white ball).

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