"You could build a house of milk with this one neat trick..."

December 25, 2015 7:21 AM

Galalith. The world's first plastic. Known as "milk stone" it was created by the interaction of casein and formaline. Produced in the 1900s in great quantities in France and Germany, it was used as an ivory substitute in billiard balls, piano keys and a variety of jewelry. Production declined post-WWII and while vintage galalith is pricey on ebay you can make it yourself at home.
posted by jessamyn (28 comments total)

Casein is sometimes a component of interior house paint, as the Zen family found out the hard way.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:07 AM on December 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

Huh, neat; I'm sure I've encountered the stuff but I'd never heard of it. I like the disconcerting fact of an article in "What-To-Eat" about billiard balls, like a pitch for the world's worst jawbreaker candy.
posted by cortex at 8:30 AM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I thought I had read somewhere that buttons were made from this material, as a substitute for bone or mother-of-pearl.
posted by newdaddy at 9:56 AM on December 25, 2015

it was used as an ivory substitute in billiard balls

Good for elephants and it probably won't explode.
posted by sukeban at 10:19 AM on December 25, 2015

why did loquacious get marked best answer in the cat licking thread? what deep secret am i missing from those observations?

also, is formaldehyde that bad? pretty sure we used to wash feet in formaldehyde when i was a child. maybe that was before cancer.
posted by andrewcooke at 10:22 AM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Interesting. One sees plenty of Bakelite in antique stores still, but I'd never heard of this stuff.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:23 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

"why did loquacious get marked best answer in the cat licking thread?"

Because it's loquacious.

I imagine some 1940 war production board with the daily agenda marked: 'Galalith or Milk: factors in dairy distribution and transportation requirements reviewed, why review when the memo says it all, got milk.'
posted by clavdivs at 10:31 AM on December 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

Interesting stuff, and the article mentions its use for knife handles. It might be interesting to grab a few gallons of skim and give it a try, though I wonder if the vinegar stuff in the "do it at home" is really as good as the formol stuff. Not curious enough to actually try, though I wonder if rennet or other coagulants would work better than vinegar, though admittedly they are more expensive.
posted by Blackanvil at 10:32 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

My 85 yr old polymer technologist father didn't recognise galalith or lactoform. He did remark on formaldehyde being very reactive though. It's the basis of very well known polymers ureumformaldehyde, bakelite and formica.
Following some name mentioned in the German wikipedia article I came upon this 1530 recipe for a casein Kunststoff. It's this casein plastic that the inventors of galalith treated with formaldehyde which resulted in their invention.
posted by jouke at 10:34 AM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

How did people not figure this out thousands of years ago? I mean it's basically dried cheese, right?
posted by cmoj at 11:01 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've seen knitting needles made of milk plastic and I wanna try it myself!

I don't want to try this, though:

Doctor W.H. Dibble, of New Jersey, had patented an exciting material for interior decorators: hemacite, he called it. Hemacite, the magazine explained, was "nothing less than the blood of slaughtered cattle and sawdust, combined with chemical compounds, under hydraulic pressure of forty thousand pounds to the square inch."

posted by moonmilk at 11:02 AM on December 25, 2015 [7 favorites]

Previously: four ways to make plastic from household items such as potatoes or milk with vinegar (currently the 3rd of the five Related Posts, but that could change), but without the history and context of what has been made with this natural plastic.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:03 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

andrewcooke: "why did loquacious get marked best answer in the cat licking thread? "

The lack of favourites means the thread predates the favourite system. Best answers were sometimes used back then (as now) as agreement rather than a most correct answer.
posted by Mitheral at 11:35 AM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

On the one hand, the idea of making durable goods from food just seems wrong. But on the other, having been in the unnatural and dangerous places that make modern plastics from oil, the idea of making durable goods from something relatively simple and natural and not involving all kinds of toxic waste has an element of charm.
posted by Bringer Tom at 11:37 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Milk plastic tends to give off a rotten milk odor in damp environments IIRC.
posted by humanfont at 11:58 AM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I read in a nonline article long ago that the reason people go blind from ingesting methanol is that the alcohol dehydrogenase in your eyes turns the methanol into formaldehyde and it polymerizes your retinas.
posted by jamjam at 12:35 PM on December 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

We made this in science class at high school. It's pretty cool!
posted by lollusc at 1:00 PM on December 25, 2015

Jamjam - so ethanol is first metabolized to acetaldehyde (mildly toxic, carcinogenic) via alcohol dehydrogenase and then to acetic acid (pretty nontoxic) via aldehyde dehydrogenase. Methanol goes to formaldehyde (toxic, definitely carcinogenic) then to formic acid (toxic). That much of the story is true, that's why methanol is so harmful. I don't know about "polymerizes your eyes" though.
posted by atoxyl at 1:10 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I make milk paint the same way. It goes on without runs or ridges, dries really quickly (with zero fumes) and then can be sealed with shellac or linseed oil.

Skim milk is best and I use apple juice instead of vinegar. The video makes a big deal out of stirring it but I find it best to mix it up a little and let it sit so that you get a single solid lump and not a bunch of suspended filaments. Cheese cloth in the strainer will significantly increase your yield. Dark colours from powdered pigments or acrylic paints work best. You'll need to add white or powdered chalk if you want an brighter opaque colour. Add water back to the mixture to get whatever consistence flows best. If you're going to paint something the size of a dresser, you want to start with at least a quart of milk.

I've gotten a nice crackle finish by painting a coloured linseed oil onto bare wood, letting it dry for a couple weeks, priming with de-waxed shellac, then milk paint, then clear linseed oil.
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:15 PM on December 25, 2015 [27 favorites]

Jamjam - so ethanol is first metabolized to acetaldehyde (mildly toxic, carcinogenic) via alcohol dehydrogenase and then to acetic acid (pretty nontoxic) via aldehyde dehydrogenase. Methanol goes to formaldehyde (toxic, definitely carcinogenic) then to formic acid (toxic). That much of the story is true, that's why methanol is so harmful. I don't know about "polymerizes your eyes" though.

Formaldehyde at Low Concentration Induces Protein Tau into Globular Amyloid-Like Aggregates In Vitro and In Vivo

Recent studies have shown that neurodegeneration is closely related to misfolding and aggregation of neuronal tau. Our previous results show that neuronal tau aggregates in formaldehyde solution and that aggregated tau induces apoptosis of SH-SY5Y and hippocampal cells. In the present study, based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) observation, we have found that formaldehyde at low concentrations induces tau polymerization whilst acetaldehyde does not. Neuronal tau misfolds and aggregates into globular-like polymers in 0.01–0.1% formaldehyde solutions.
...
Immunocytochemistry and thioflavin S staining of both endogenous and exogenous tau in the presence of formaldehyde at low concentrations in the cell culture have shown that formaldehyde can induce tau into amyloid-like aggregates in vivo during apoptosis. The significant protein tau aggregation induced by formaldehyde and the severe toxicity of the aggregated tau to neural cells may suggest that toxicity of methanol and formaldehyde ingestion is related to tau misfolding and aggregation.

posted by jamjam at 1:55 PM on December 25, 2015 [3 favorites]

Gurney has been popularizing the use of casein paint as one might gouache or acrylic in painting. It apparently dries a bit faster than gouache and goes shiny if you buff it.
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:15 PM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder if making it yourself gets notably different results from high-temp pasteurized milk versus the more pedestrian stuff; when I was fiddling with making my own ricotta - also via warm milk and vinegar - the writeups mentioned you wouldn't get good results from ultra pasteurized.
posted by phearlez at 6:58 PM on December 25, 2015

I won 25¢ from Jessamyn cause I told her about billiard balls made out of cottage cheese and some chemical I couldn't remember, and she said NOWAI. I'd recently read about in a Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not compendium, and though I don't trust about half of what I read in it, I was willing to put a quarter on the table that this was true. So while I slept late on Christmas morning, she looked it up, confirmed it, and wrote this post.

So for xmas, she got 50+ favorites, and I got a shiny new quarter. BELIEVE IT... OR NOT!!
posted by not_on_display at 9:11 PM on December 25, 2015 [10 favorites]

also, is formaldehyde that bad? pretty sure we used to wash feet in formaldehyde when i was a child. maybe that was before cancer.

Yeah, it's bad, and I'm also allergic to formaldehyde resin. I made casein plastic for a science-fair project once, but using the vinegar method. I wouldn't really recommend it for things you'd actually like to keep for posterity.
posted by limeonaire at 6:34 AM on December 26, 2015

moonmilk: "I don't want to try this, though:

Doctor W.H. Dibble, of New Jersey, had patented an exciting material for interior decorators: hemacite, he called it. Hemacite, the magazine explained, was "nothing less than the blood of slaughtered cattle and sawdust, combined with chemical compounds, under hydraulic pressure of forty thousand pounds to the square inch.""

Around the turn of the last century people experimented taking all sorts of weird shit - mostly the huge piles of waste from other industries - and, with a zeal not all too different to the alchemists a few centuries earlier, trying to turn them into something useful by heating & squeezing them.

Hemacite was one which ended up being pretty successful; the same idea later gave us Bakelite, Catalin, & other thermoset plastics. These days you're most likely to come across it as old door furniture like knobs, fingerplates, escutcheons, etc. If you ever find something like that that looks like Bakelite but other dating suggests its WWI or earlier, there's a reasonable chance it's hemacite.

Today, blood + sawdust + chemicals = gourmet sausage…
posted by Pinback at 9:39 PM on December 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

A similar recipe.
posted by the_blizz at 1:13 PM on December 28, 2015

Here's is a great article (PDF) which covers the history and process in some depth. My grandfather worked in Lightpill Mill which was the center of production in the UK (though after it was converted to the production of other plastics) and i discovered the historical connection after I started wearing an earplug made of a casein plastic. It can be quite beautiful, there's a distinctive marbling effect that occurs when you start the manufacturing process with different coloured "nibs" that become fused together. It also has the interesting property that it absorbs moisture and heat in response to the environment and contact with the body so lending it a distinct "feel". It was used a lot for pens in Europe at one time, and supposedly this was a desirable material as these qualities means it tend tends to match the relative humidity and temperature when in contact the body for extended periods.
posted by tallus at 4:48 PM on December 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here's is a great article

"In the United States the first successful casein plastics material was produced about 1919 under the name Aladdinite."

So great! Thank you.
posted by jessamyn at 6:14 PM on December 28, 2015