Celluloid

History

Marketed as a material for mass-producing cheap simulacra of scarce natural resources, principally ivory and tortoiseshell, celluloid was patented in 1870 by John Wesley Hyatt, who set up the Celluloid Manufacturing Company in the following year. By 1880, Hyatt's company issued licenses to a variety of firms, producing everything from dental plates and piano keys to jewelry, combs, and novelties, the latter being advertised as a luxury previously only available to the wealthy. In this way, Hyatt capitalized on the development of nitrocellulose by Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1846. Two decades later, Alexander Parkes combined nitrocellulose with a plasticizer-solvent to produce the stable and fully formable forerunner of celluloid, which he named Parkesine. By varying the solvent employed, this new material was found to accurately mimic a wide range of naturally occurring substances.

Despite its extreme flammability, celluloid, the first modern plastic, was crucial in popularizing photography and films. The word film originally referred to the coating of gelatin emulsion produced from connective tissue and other slaughterhouse byproducts.

This history of material mimicry is, however, largely forgotten today, eclipsed by the association of celluloid with the invention of film. By the early 1880s, photographers were already experimenting with transparent sheets of celluloid coated with a gelatin emulsion, seeking to replace the fragile and unwieldy glass plates that were in use at the time. Consistency remained a serious problem, however, and it was only with the introduction of John Carbutt's sheet film in 1888 that celluloid could finally be relied upon to provide a uniform thickness and unblemished surface, thereafter becoming widely available as a base for photographic plates. It was this base stock that Thomas Alva Edison (or rather, [Page 108]his chief engineer W. K. L. Dickson) used in the development of perforated 35mm celluloid film bands—Edison's major contribution to the invention of cinema—for use with his peep-show Kinetoscope. Thin and flexible, and thus allowing for its production in long continuous rolls, celluloid made photography available to amateur hobbyists for the first time. When, also in 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak system—a 100-image celluloid-backed roll film, which was to be returned to the manufacturers for developing—demand immediately outstripped supply.

Celluloid quickly established itself as the only suitable material base for “living pictures,” used not only in the Edison Kinetoscope but also by the Lumiére brothers in their Cinématographe and by many others. Nevertheless, it was unable to shed its explosive origins, the nitrocellulose rendering it highly flammable and thus an unacceptable danger in the minds of many people. This danger was cemented in the popular imagination by a fire during the 1897 ball of the Société Charité Maternelle in which 143 people died (although celluloid was not in fact to blame). This hastened the imposition of safety restrictions upon the practitioners of early cinema, pushing it out of the domestic setting common to the magic lantern shows and into the less reputable theaters and fairgrounds. As a result, motion pictures became increasingly identified with popular public entertainment, as distinct from the domain of scientific research within which it originated.

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