When Plastic Saved the Elephants: Pool Balls and the Bakelite Revolution
Imagine losing your life so that the people in far-away lands could amuse themselves with your body parts. That was the fate of vast numbers of elephants for centuries who were killed to keep European nobility playing pool.
Billiards goes back to the 15th century, when wooden balls were used by the elites enjoying this new game. As European colonization expanded, new materials like ivory became more available, ushering a shift from wooden pool balls to the functionally superior ones made from the tusks of unfortunate Asian elephants.
Amazingly, one tusk of an Asian elephant could only make 4–5 billiard balls, meaning that by the 19th century, the trade required almost industrial scale slaughter. One company alone, Burroughes and Watts (which still sells pool tables and accessories today, though of course not ivory) boasted in the 19th century that it sold 1,140 elephants’ worth of billiard balls each year.
As the game’s popularity increased, the number of Asian elephants decreased, leading to a crisis for the billiards industry. (While pool balls were a driving force in the ivory trade, other culprits included ivory combs and piano keys — though the latter were typically made from African elephants, not Asian.)
Necessity Was the Mother of Invention
It was technological innovation, not humane sentiment nor conservation concerns, that saved the elephants.
Dwindling elephantine numbers caused the price of pool balls to skyrocket, with one set of ivory billiard balls in the mid 1800s (just three balls total at that time) costing about $60, or $1,400 in 2023 dollars.
Things got so dire that in 1863, pool table manufacturer Phelan and Collender announced a $10,000 prize to any innovator who could invent a pool ball not made of ivory (nor wood).
One of America’s most prolific inventors, John Wesley Hyatt was inspired by the contest and discovered an ivory substitute: nitrocellulose. Sadly, he didn’t win the money, as the nitrocellulose balls stemming from his invention, while superior in many ways to ivory, had one fatal flaw: they sometimes exploded — including midgame!
It wasn’t until the first decade of the 20th century that elephants would finally get their permanent reprieve from billiards enthusiasts. Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland had no interest in elephant conservation, but his 1907 invention of Bakelite (just for fun: Polyoxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride) did more to save the gentle giants than just about any environmental campaign would have. The so-called “Father of the Plastics Industry” made a material that was so durable, inexpensive, and functional — and it had the advantage of not exploding like celluloid balls — that the ivory ball was relegated to the history books.
According to one historian:
“It was not too long before the majority of pool balls being manufactured were made using Bakelite. By the 1920s, Bakelite billiard balls had become the preferred standard. Even the wealthy had to switch to Bakelite balls when they needed to replace their ivory pool balls.”
Today, we play pool with balls made from phenolic resin, polyester resin, and epoxy resin. Unlike the ivory balls, these balls can last for 40 years, or up to 400,000 impacts.
In other words, it was an inventor’s imagination, not an activist’s persuasive arguments, that spared tens of thousands of elephants from becoming pool balls.
Lessons Learned
It’s seductive to think that humans, when we learn about an abusive industry we may support, will recoil from our ways and change our behavior. Sadly, our species rarely works that way.
As Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Even if they cared about elephants, few people in the 19th century would have stopped playing pool to save them from slaughter, just as few people today — even those who love animals — will do things like stop eating chickens and pigs to save them from factory farms.
Rather, what seems far more likely to end the factory farming of animals for meat, eggs, and milk, is new technology.
In fact, nearly every category of animal exploitation that’s ever been essentially ended has seen its demise not because people made altruistic sacrifices for the purpose of ending cruelty. Consider, for example:
- Geese are no longer live-plucked for their quills not because anyone crusaded for the birds, but because metal fountain pens were invented.
- Cheese no longer contains calf intestines, not because there was an uproar about killing baby animals, but because synthetic biologists created a human-made chymosin.
- We no longer use carrier pigeons not because we cared about the pigeons, but because the telegraph was invented.
- Fireflies are no longer “harvested” by the millions for the biotech industry not because it was unsustainable, but because scientists synthesized luciferase.
- Humanity (largely) stopped exploiting horses for labor not because of animal advocates’ campaigns to garner horses better working conditions, but because of the invention of the internal combustion engine.
- Our homes are no longer lit by whale oil not because 19th century social reformers gave whales a voice, but because kerosene liberated whales from harpoons.
The point isn’t to suggest that animal advocates shouldn’t make ethical arguments and expose how poorly farmed animals are often treated. Rather, the point is that moral awareness is virtually never sufficient to end an abusive industry. Humans need clearly superior alternatives to warrant switching away from animal use.
Today, almost no one would consider killing an elephant to play pool, or harpooning a whale to light their room, mostly because we don’t need to. With new inventions, this can be true in the future about tormenting billions of animals to produce our food. At that point, people may be as grateful that they no longer need to produce food via animal exploitation as we are grateful today that we don’t need to kill elephants to play pool.
Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a five-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast. In 2023, he was named a Most Admired CEO by the Sacramento Business Journal.
