Daily Quiz for June 16, 2008

Plastic. English inventor Alexander Parkes is credited with being the first to make plastic in the 1850s. Parkes’ plastic was a cellulosic made by treating a mixture of cotton and nitric acid with camphor. In the United States, John and Isaiah Hyatt developed a similar plastic in 1869 as a substitute for ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls, which they called celluloid. The first completely synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was produced in 1909 by Dr. Leo H. Bakeland.