The Cellulosics

The cellulosics occupy a fascinating middle ground in the history of materials: they are neither fully natural nor fully synthetic, but semi-synthetic, natural cellulose that humans chemically talked into becoming something new. Cellulose itself is magnificent but stubborn; it won’t melt and it won’t dissolve in anything friendly, so for most of history you could use it only in the shape nature grew it, as wood, or as cotton fibers. The cellulosics are the clever chemical workarounds that finally set that abundant polymer free.

The tricks are ingenious. Treat cellulose with nitric acid and you get nitrocellulose: flash paper, early film stock, and the first true plastic, celluloid, which gave us billiard balls, movie reels, and eventually a lot of terrifying fires. Dissolve cellulose through the xanthate route and you can regenerate it as viscose rayon (a silk substitute spun from wood) or as cellophane (the first transparent wrapping film). Each of these took the same underlying molecule and, without changing its glucose backbone, gave it a manufacturable second life. This branch is really a sub-dynasty of the great polysaccharide family, distinguished by the fact that a chemist got involved.

The cellulosics were the bridge from the age of natural materials to the age of plastics; they were the first proof that if you couldn’t yet build a new polymer from scratch, you could at least renovate one that nature had already built.