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The history of plastic is intimately tied to the history of the game of billiards.

In the 1860s, the billiards industry had a problem.

The game was super popular, but it was hard to keep up with the demand for high-end billiard balls because the material used to make the balls was limited.

The material was elephant tusks.

It took about two tusks to make a complete set of balls.

A major billiard ball company offered a

$10,000 reward for anyone who could come up with a sturdy alternative. John Wesley Hyatt was

inspired by this call, and he came up with an alternative to tusks that became the first industrial

plastic. Now, the initial prototypes had the downside that they were highly flammable,

and there were rumors that they would sometimes explode upon impact during a game. Or maybe that's

an upside because it would make the game a lot more exciting. But anyway, today plastics are

ubiquitous. Their inner tires, our clothes, they line our paper

cups, they make disposable medical equipment, which helps protect us from transmissible

diseases. And the microphone and computer that I'm using to record this episode have plastic

in them, too. It's kind of hard to imagine life without plastic. We're probably all aware that plastic has downsides, too.

We're not really good at disposing of it properly, for example,

and there's now garbage patches in the ocean,

which are spots where currents have aggregated the trash we've released into the sea.

And we've probably all seen images of animals like turtles and birds

that have died from

...