Development

Celluloid might well qualify for the honour of being the first plastic,though its inventor,Alexander Parkes,was certainly not aware of that fact. He made it around 1860 and patented his method for making it in 1865. An American,John Hyatt,found a way of solving the technical problems which plagued Parkes,and he set up business in 1870 to sell the same sort of material. He called it Celluloid to indicate its raw material,cellulose.
In 1920 a German chemist,Hermann Staudinger, put forward a theory about the chemical nature of a whole group of substances,natural and synthetic. He called them macromolecules; today we call them polymers. His theory not only explained the nature of plastics,but also indicated the ways in which they could be made. It provided the foundation for the world of plastics as we know it.