Plastics

Plastics feel like a twentieth-century story. They began in Victorian Birmingham.

Parkesine

Alexander Parkes, born in Suffolk Street in 1813, trained as a brassfounder and ran Elkington’s casting department before becoming a prolific inventor. His great idea was to take cellulose nitrate — known as the explosive gun-cotton — and soften it with solvents and camphor into a material that could be moulded. He patented it from 1855 and called it Parkesine. At the International Exhibition in London in 1862 he showed objects made of it and won a medal; a second followed at Paris in 1867.

Failure and success

In 1866 the Parkesine Company was set up at Hackney Wick in London to make the material cheaply in bulk. It was wound up in 1868: the material was hard to make consistently, could crack and burned easily. Parkes’s associate Daniel Spill developed it as Xylonite, and in America John Wesley Hyatt developed celluloid, which became a commercial triumph and, above all, the base of cinema film.

Parkes spent his last years arguing for his place in the story. The Science Museum holds the core collection of his Parkesine objects, given by his son in 1937, and a Birmingham Civic Society plaque on Newhall Street marks where he worked.