The word plastic traditionally refers to the pliability and shapeability of a material.

So clay is typically a very plastic substance, as you can easily shape and reshape it,

stretch it out and bunch it back up.

Its plasticity is a key component of why it's so useful to us.

The term plastic became commonly colloquially applied

to a category of materials called polymers

in the mid to late 20th century,

after World War II, primarily with a negative implication.

Polymers are abundant in nature,

and substances like cellulose, which is the material that

makes up the cellular walls of plants, are polymers.

Cellulose is made up of long chains of molecules, hence the name, which means many parts.

We've been using natural polymers like rubber and cotton and starch pretty much since we

discovered them and their useful plasticity. But the first synthetic, human-made polymer was invented

by a man named John Wesley Hyatt in 1869, in the pursuit of a $10,000 reward for anyone who could come up with a suitable

synthetic replacement for ivory, a natural substance that was very limited and thus

increasingly expensive to source, but also increasingly necessary, due particularly to the

popularization of billiards, which at the time necessitated the use

of ivory balls. Hyatt treated cellulose that he refined from cotton with a substance called

camphor, another natural substance that is derived from a few different types of tree,

which allowed him to create an ivory-like material that could

be produced in essentially any shape he wanted, and in far more abundant quantities than ivory,

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