John Wesley Hyatt forms the Albany Dental…

John Wesley Hyatt forms the Albany Dental Plate Company (later renamed the Celluloid Manufacturing Company) to produce, among other things, billiard balls, false teeth, and piano keys, first in Albany in 1870, and later in Newark, New Jersey.

Hyatt's other patented inventions include roller bearings and a multiple-stitch sewing machine.

Hyatt was born in Starkey, New York, and had begun working as a printer when he was sixteen.

He later became an inventor, receiving several hundred patents.

Aided by his brother Isaac, he has experimented with Parkesine, a hardened form of nitrocellulose, while researching a substitute for ivory to produce billiard balls.

Parkesine had been invented by the English Alexander Parkes in 1862, and is considered the first true plastic, although it is not a success as a commercial or industrial product.

Liquid nitrocellulose, or collodion, had been used as early as 1851 by another English inventor, Frederick Scott Archer, in photographic applications; it had also been used extensively as a quick-drying film to protect the fingertips of printers.

Hyatt's eventual result is a commercially viable way of producing solid, stable nitrocellulose, which he had patented in the United States in 1869 as "Celluloid" (US patent 50359; now a genericized trademark).