Atomic Industries

• be john wesley hyatt • a printer from albany, new york, 1863 • a billiard ball company is offering $10,000 to anyone who can replace ivory. elephants are being slaughtered by the thousands to supply america's pool halls • you soak cotton in nitric acid and add camphor • it works. you've just made the first synthetic plastic. you call it celluloid • you test the billiard balls • they explode. not every time. randomly. • a colorado saloon owner writes you a letter: every time two balls collide hard enough, every man in the room reaches for his gun. sounds like a gunshot • your factories keep burning down • you never collect the $10,000 • but to process the material at all, you had to invent something nobody had ever built: a machine that heats raw material until soft, then forces it into a mold under pressure • you file the patent in 1872 and think nothing of it • you move on. you invent a water purification system, a sugarcane mill, a roller bearing • you hire a 28-year-old draftsman named alfred sloan • you promote him to president, then sell the whole firm to general motors in 1916 • sloan goes on to run GM, invents the modern corporate org chart, and builds the management template every large company on earth still runs on • you die in 1920 having never collected your prize and not fully understanding what you built • the machine you invented to make combs and denture plates is now how the world makes M1 helmet liners, javelin missile housings, UAV fuselages, body armor backing plates, M16 stocks, IV syringes, car dashboards, lego bricks, and iPhone casings • 8 trillion parts per year. every one of them made by forcing hot material into a mold under pressure • the entire polymer layer of modern civilization -- consumer, medical, automotive, defense -- runs through one process • patented by a printer who was trying to win a contest he lost • absolute, relentless consequence from a single failed billiard ball