Albany Billiard Ball Company

In the 1860s, John Wesley Hyatt of Albany, New York acquired British chemist Alexander Parkes's 1855 patent for Parkesine, an early polymer, made of nitrocellulose, oil and various solvents.

[1] Parkes's own attempt to build a business around the new material, the first industrial plastic, had failed by 1868.

Using cloth, ivory dust, and shellac, Hyatt devised a method of covering billiard balls with the addition of collodion in 1868.

[2] In 1870, John and his brother Isaiah patented a process of making a "horn-like material" with the inclusion of nitrocellulose and camphor,[4] and founded a second business, Albany Dental Plate Co. (later the Celluloid Manufacturing Co.), to manufacture more than sporting goods.

[2] By the early 1980s, Albany was using the newer, superior phenolic resin, like their Belgium-based competitor Saluc[5] (today the dominant company in the market).