It is generally accepted that the game of snooker was invented by Birmingham-born Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain in Jabalpur, or Jubbulpore, as it was known at the time, in Madhya Pradesh, India in 1875. At that time, despite its obvious limitations – brittleness, porosity and proneness to yellowing, to name but three – elephant tusk ivory was still the material of choice for snooker balls.
The first synthetic plastic, celluloid, was so dubbed by American Isaiah Hyatt in 1872, two years after he and his brother, John Wesley Hyatt, patented a process for making what they described as a ‘horn-like material’ made from camphor and nitrocellulose. Tough, flexible, mouldable, water-resistant and inexpensive to produce in a variety of colours, celluloid was, in many ways, an ideal material for snooker balls. However, celluoid is also highly flammable, such that, occasionally, one snooker ball striking another produced a ‘mild explosion’.
Modern, high-quality snooker are made from synthetic, thermosetting plastic resins, obtained by reacting phenol, a.k.a. phenolic acid, with formaldehyde. The resulting ‘phenolic resin’ becomes irreversibly hardened, or ‘cured’, when exposed to heat and high pressure, such that it can be cast into the desired shape in latex moulds. Phenolic resin can be pre-coloured before casting, rather than painted or varnished afterwards, so the end result is a finish that is resistant to abrasions, chips and scratches, yet can easily be polished to a high shine.
Furthermore, phenolic resin has what is known, technically, as homogenous density distribution, which means that each snooker ball is uniform throughout and has its centre of gravity at its precise geometric centre. Once cast, the balls are lathed to ensure that they are perfectly spherical and free from imperfections, measured and weighed to tight tolerances, according to official specifications and packed into sets of 22 ready for shipping.