Hyatt's breakthrough came in 1869. After years of trial and error, Hyatt ran an experiment that yielded a whitish material that had "the consistency of shoe leather" but the capacity to do much more than sole a pair of shoes. Where once people had grown and prepared their own food and made their own clothes, increasingly they were eating, drinking, wearing, what is billiards and using things that came from factories. 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. Luckily, there are things you can do to counteract all of the above issues. These methods should be combined with one or more of the main tactics outlined above. A few more require various amounts of cash as an incentive to cough up the details. It wasn't until the development of more cooperative polymers that plastics truly began to transform the look, feel, and quality of our lives. Injection-molding machines-now standard equipment in plastics manufacturing-turned raw plastic powders or pellets into a molded, finished product in a one-shot process.

For most of the game, these actions are considered standard fouls and result in ball-in-hand for the opponent either on the entire table or behind the head string. If you can find a table with leg levelers, great. In most cases, there’s no need to pot the balls in numerical order, except the 8-ball, which can only be safely potted when all your other balls are gone. Today most balls are made of resin. Yet it took fifteen thousand beetles six months to make enough of the amber-colored resin needed to produce a pound of shellac. 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. While celluloid would prove a wonderful substitute for ivory, Hyatt apparently never collected the ten-thousand-dollar prize. 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.

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. The first balls Hyatt made produced a loud crack, like a shotgun blast, when they knocked into each other. Also littles, little ones, little balls. When you consider the question a little more, you realize that being successful at pool requires a very specific pool skill. This is the question. It could be molded into a shape or pressed paper-thin and then cut or sawed into usable forms. 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. As with celluloid, Bakelite was invented to replace a scarce natural substance: shellac, a product of the sticky excretions of the female lac beetle. Bakelite was a dark-colored, rugged material with a sleek, machinelike beauty, "as stripped down as a Hemingway sentence," in writer Stephen Fenichell's words. Ample supplies of celluloid allowed manufacturers to keep up with rapidly rising demand while also keeping costs down.

Combs were now stripped down to the most essential elements-teeth and handle-in service of their most basic function. However, it was an ideal material for combs. Celluloid could be rendered with the rich creamy hues and striations of the finest tusks from Ceylon, a faux material marketed as French Ivory. French billiards, or carom billiards as it might be known in the rec room of your local country club, is a game that’s been around for hundreds of years. The roof of the club conserves traces of the Republican, early 19th century-style house that once was inhabited by some Spaniard or Creole, and which has come back to life thanks to the legendary game of billiards. Like other plastics that would follow, celluloid offered a means for Americans to buy their way into new stations in life. It was created from a natural polymer-the cellulose in the cotton-but had a versatility none of the known natural plastics possessed. By the 1940s, we had both the plastics and the machines to mass-produce plastic products. Instead, it had a powerful identity of its own, which helped encourage the development of a distinctively plastic look. The "experts" say to hold your elbow joint so that your lower arm sits to the ball at a ninety-degree angle to the table, but take a look at how our stop action photography disagrees.