chemist is an economical soul. He is never content until he has
converted every kind of waste product into some kind of profitable
by-product. He now has his glittering eye fixed upon the mountains of
sawdust that pile up about the lumber mills. He also has a notion that
he can beat lumber for some purposes.

VII

SYNTHETIC PLASTICS

In the last chapter I told how Alfred Nobel cut his finger and, daubing
it over with collodion, was led to the discovery of high explosive,
dynamite. I remarked that the first part of this process--the hurting
and the healing of the finger--might happen to anybody but not everybody
would be led to discovery thereby. That is true enough, but we must not
think that the Swedish chemist was the only observant man in the world.
About this same time a young man in Albany, named John Wesley Hyatt, got
a sore finger and resorted to the same remedy and was led to as great a
discovery. His father was a blacksmith and his education was confined to
what he could get at the seminary of Eddytown, New York, before he was
sixteen. At that age he set out for the West to make his fortune. He
made it, but after a long, hard struggle. His trade of typesetter gave
him a living in Illinois, New York or wherever he wanted to go, but he
was not content with his wages or his hours. However, he did not strike
to reduce his hours or increase his wages. On the contrary, he increased
his working time and used it to increase his income. He spent his nights
and Sundays in making billiard balls, not at all the sort of thing you
would expect of a young man of his Christian name. But working with
billiard balls is more profitable than playing with them--though that
is not the sort of thing you would expect a man of my surname to say.
Hyatt had seen in the papers an offer of a prize of $10,000 for the
discovery of a satisfactory substitute for ivory in the making of
billiard balls and he set out to get that prize. I don't know whether he
ever got it or not, but I have in my hand a newly published circular
announcing that Mr. Hyatt has now perfected a process for making
billiard balls "better than ivory." Meantime he has turned out several
hundred other inventions, many of them much more useful and profitable,
but I imagine that he takes less satisfaction in any of them than he
does in having solved the problem that he undertook fifty years ago.

The reason for the prize was that the game on the billiard table was