All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

 

QUESTION: Over the years, I’ve noticed dresser sets at flea markets and antique cooperatives. They seem to be made of some sort of plastic and look like they date from the 1940s and 1950s. I’d like to begin collecting these sets. They’re affordable and some are quite beautiful. What can you tell me about them?

ANSWER: Ever since Ancient Egypt, people, especially women, have been obsessed with their looks. As time went on, the utensils for maintaining a person’s looks evolved into a group with common elements—a brush, comb, mirror, hair receiver, powder puff holder, manicure set, and later on a pin box, atomizer, and button hook. And the material needed to make them evolved from that needed to make billiard balls and dentures. 

Dresser sets were the original make-up organizers. Manufactured from Victorian times through the 1950s, these sets changed in form but not in function. Women prominently displayed them on their vanities and men on their chests. 

The dresser sets you’ve been seeing are made of Celluloid. Most people associate Celluloid with motion picture film. But it was one of several plastics developed in the latter 19th and early 20th century.

Celluloid was first manufactured in 1870 and continued until 1947. After the Civil War there was a need for a substance with moldable properties that could replace dwindling supplies of natural materials, such as ivory. During the latter part of the 1860s, brothers John and Isaiah Hyatt worked on developing a thermoplastic material that not only simulated expensive luxury substances but also became widely used hi other applications In fact, Celluloid became so successful it ultimately gave birth to a thriving American industry. That industry lives on in the collecting of a great variety of Celluloid items that 'range from colorful advertising premiums, embossed albums and decorative storage boxes, to figural toys, ornate jewelry and fancy household and personal accessories.

The development of America’s plastics industry began in Albany, New York, around 1863 when a journeyman printer named John Hyatt began experimenting with various composition substances in an attempt to create an ivory for the manufacture of billiard balls. Elephant ivory was becoming scarce and the billiards industry had offered a $10,000 reward for the invention of a suitable re-placement material. In September 1865, Hyatt applied for a patent on his invention of a billiard ball coaled with a combination of shellac mixed with ivory and bone dust. In 1866 Hyatt and Peter Kinnear formed the Hyatt Billiard Ball Company.

It was around this time when Hyatt discovered that collodion, a liquid solution of pyroxylin (cellulose nitrate and alcohol) that printers brushed on their hands to protect them from ink and paper cuts, formed into a hard, but pliable, clear substance when dried, Hyatt patented the use of liquid collodion as a coating for composition core billiard balls.

In his efforts to perfect the billiard ball, Hyatt enlisted the support of his older brother, Isaiah, a newspaper editor from Rockford, Ill. Together the Hyatts discovered that camphor acted as a plasticizer when combined with solid collodion (cellulose nitrate) and under certain conditions yielded a clear, moldable material. John further developed a "stuffing machine" that forced the material into shape using heat and pressure. They named their substance Celluloid, a word that Isaiah came up with by combining the two words cellulose and colloid.

Ultimately the scarcity of high priced rubber and the abundance of inexpensive Celluloid forced dentists into using the new material. Celluloid eventually became the most popular material for dentures until the introduction of cellulose acetate in 1929 in Newark, New Jersey. It was there that the mass production of the nation's first commercially successful plastic began.

The years that followed found John Hyatt diligently at work building molding machinery and finding successful applications for Celluloid. Harness rings, utensil, handles, knobs and dressing combs were among the earliest of molded articles, introduced for the first time to consumers around 1873.

Clear in its original state, celluloid could therefore be dyed in the finest imitation of expensive luxury substances. In 1874, chemists discovered successful formulas for flawless imitations of genuine coral and tortoiseshell, soon followed by convincing simulations of amber, onyx, and grained ivory. Suddenly, the potential for applications of molded Celluloid expanded, shifting from utilitarian and sporting goods, to decorative and ornamental objects. Beautiful accessories like jewelry, eyeglass frames, fans, hair ornaments, parasol handles and a myriad of other fancy items became available, and immensely popular with those who previously couldn’t afford such luxury items. As a result of its convincing appearance for the genuine material it imitated, Celluloid became coveted for its beauty and fine quality.

Four businessmen involved in the manufacture of natural plastic hair ornaments, dressing combs and novelties, formed the Viscoloid Company of Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1900. One of the founders, Bernard Doyle, had been traveling throughout Europe to purchase horn, when he became acquainted with pyroxylin plastic. Upon his return. Doyle began a series of experiments with the material and determined that it had qualities superior to that of natural materials for the molding of hair combs and accessories.

The more items included in a dresser set, the more rare and valuable it s to collectors. Most often, however, the sets will have a brush, a comb, and a hand mirror. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about world's fairs in the Fall 2020 Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

How About a Game of Bones?

QUESTION: While traveling on a recent trip to Cuba I noticed men playing dominoes on a table in a park. There were several games going. This took me back to my childhood when my grandfather taught me how to play dominoes. We used an ordinary black wooden set that had the image of a dragon pressed into the back. I'm certain the dominoes came from the five and dime store. I also remember drawing face-down dominoes from the so-called bone yard when none of the remaining ones in my hand could be matched with those on the table. The first player to rid himself of all his dominoes by matching them to others on the table was the winner. This, I learned later, was the draw game.  I haven’t played the game in a long time, but I’d like to know a little more about it. How and when did it originate? Are there different forms?

ANSWER: The game of dominoes, or bones, as some like to call it, has been around since the 12th century. Legend says that a Chinese statesman invented the game of dominoes which he presented to the Emperor Hui Tsung in 1120 C.E. and which were circulated abroad by imperial order during the reign of Hui's son, Kao-Tsung seven years later.



During the 18th century, the game reached Venice and Naples. No one knows if a set had been brought back from China or whether an Italian created his own game. The game changed in the translation from Chinese to the European culture. European sets contained seven additional dominoes, with six of these representing the values that resulted from throwing a single die with the other half of the tile left blank, and the seventh domino representing the blank-blank (0–0) combination. By the late 18th century, the game of dominoes had arrived in Britain from France where it became popular in inns and taverns.

The word "domino" probably came from the Latin word dominus, meaning “the master of the house.” This evolved through French, then English to domino. The word “domino” first referred to a type of monk’s hood, then to a black hooded masquerade costume with a white mask worn during the Venetian Carnival, then to the mask itself, and finally to one of the pieces in the domino set, namely the one-on-one tile.

The game moved from Italy to France in the early 18th Century and became a fad. By the late 18th century, France began producing two types of domino puzzles. In the first, a person placed tiles on a given pattern in such a way that the ends matched. In the second type, a person places tiles on a given pattern based on arithmetic sums of the pips, usually totals of lines of tiles and tile halves.

European-style dominoes are rectangular tiles of wood or ivory—thus the nickname bones—that are twice as long as they are wide. Each has a line dividing its face with two square ends. Each end has a number of spots called pips that range from one to six. There’s a single tile for each combination of the faces of a pair of dice. The backs of the dominoes in a set are either blank or had a common design. The domino gaming pieces make up a domino set, sometimes called a deck or pack. The traditional domino set consists of 28 dominoes, featuring all combinations of spot counts between zero and six. A domino set is a generic gaming device, similar to playing cards or dice, in that a variety of games can be played with a set.

Dominoes have traditionally been made of bone or ivory, or a dark hardwood such as ebony, with contrasting black or white pips, either inlaid or painted. Alternatively, domino sets have been made from many different natural materials, including various types of stone, woods; metals, ceramics, or glass .

Tiles are generally named after their two values. Deuce-five or five-deuce are alternative ways of describing the tile with the values two and five. Tiles that have the same value on both ends are called doubles. Players refer to them as double-zero, double-one, etc. Tiles with two different values are called singles.

The most common domino sets commercially available are double six, with 28 tiles, and double nine, with 55 tiles.

It’s amazing how many forms of the game can be played with just 28 dominoes. In addition to the basics like the draw game and the block game, there are games with unusual names like Sebastopol, Bergin, Rounce, Sniff, All Fives, Fives & Threes, and Flower and Scorpion.

While wooden dominoes are the most commonly found, the best ones are made of oblong pieces of ivory, with ebony backs. One hundred years ago, a set of polished bone dominoes in a mahogany box would have cost as much as $4, while ordinary bone dominoes sold for as little as 50 cents.

Dominoes are an affordable collectible. Only the best ebony and bone sets sell for  $100 or so today. Celluloid sets from the 1930s, made by the Elkloid Company of Providence, Rhode Island, sell for around half that. Other sets, tied to special events like world’s fairs, can go for much more. And the more common sets like the one used above sell for very little.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Winter Edition, "The Old West," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.