getting more popular and the game in the African jungle was getting
scarcer, especially elephants having tusks more than 2-7/16 inches in
diameter. The raising of elephants is not an industry that promises as
quick returns as raising chickens or Belgian hares. To make a ball
having exactly the weight, color and resiliency to which billiard
players have become accustomed seemed an impossibility. Hyatt tried
compressed wood, but while he did not succeed in making billiard balls
he did build up a profitable business in stamped checkers and dominoes.

Setting type in the way they did it in the sixties was hard on the
hands. And if the skin got worn thin or broken the dirty lead type were
liable to infect the fingers. One day in 1863 Hyatt, finding his fingers
were getting raw, went to the cupboard where was kept the "liquid
cuticle" used by the printers. But when he got there he found it was
bare, for the vial had tipped over--you know how easily they tip
over--and the collodion had run out and solidified on the shelf.
Possibly Hyatt was annoyed, but if so he did not waste time raging
around the office to find out who tipped over that bottle. Instead he
pulled off from the wood a bit of the dried film as big as his thumb
nail and examined it with that "'satiable curtiosity," as Kipling calls
it, which is characteristic of the born inventor. He found it tough and
elastic and it occurred to him that it might be worth $10,000. It turned
out to be worth many times that.

Collodion, as I have explained in previous chapters, is a solution in
ether and alcohol of guncotton (otherwise known as pyroxylin or
nitrocellulose), which is made by the action of nitric acid on cotton.
Hyatt tried mixing the collodion with ivory powder, also using it to
cover balls of the necessary weight and solidity, but they did not work
very well and besides were explosive. A Colorado saloon keeper wrote in
to complain that one of the billiard players had touched a ball with a
lighted cigar, which set it off and every man in the room had drawn his
gun.

The trouble with the dissolved guncotton was that it could not be
molded. It did not swell up and set; it merely dried up and shrunk. When
the solvent evaporated it left a wrinkled, shriveled, horny film,
satisfactory to the surgeon but not to the man who wanted to make balls
and hairpins and knife handles out of it. In England Alexander Parkes
began working on the problem in 1855 and stuck to it for t