The Goodyear tire company, which still exists today, is named after Charles Goodyear. .
In the late 1860's John Hyatt developed a material to make billiard balls, in place of ivory, which was becoming scarce. This material was called celluloid and patented in 1869. Celluloid was made by treating cellulose (a substance found in cotton) with nitric acid. The resulting substance was called pyroxylin and this was combined with a solvent called, camphor to produce celluloid. Celluloid is a hard, stiff, thermoplastic polymer that could be shaped under pressure to form useful items. Celluloid was initially used to make items like combs, photographic films, knife handles and toy dolls, but when it was discovered that celluloid was highly flammable, the use of celluloid to produce these items was stopped. Today celluloid is used in the production of ping-pong balls and another less flammable thermoplastic polymer, cellulose acetate, is used in place of celluloid.
In 1888, John Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre in the USA. The Dunlop tyre company is named after John Dunlop. The pneumatic tyre was a tyre made out of rubber. It was more durable than the tyres that were available at the time, which made it more suitable for the road conditions. Also, it was more energy-efficient as it emitted less noise than other tyres. This meant that it wasted less energy as noise energy and it used the energy to propel the vehicle forward. The pneumatic tyre was actually first invented by Robert William Thomson, a Scottish engineer, in the 1840's. However, the pneumatic tyre wasnt useful at that time so it did not really become popular.
In 1907, Leo Baekeland, a Belgian scientist, created the first wholly synthetic plastic, Bakelite. He did this by producing resin, which is a very large polymeric molecule with many charged sites along the polymer. He mixed the resin with suitable fillers and then applied heat and pressure to it.
