Timeline of Poker Chip Materials... a work in progress (2 Viewers)

Taghkanic

Taghkanic

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For a writing project, I went hunting around the interwebs for a simple timeline of what materials were used for poker chips across the roughly two-century history of the game. I was surprised not to find such a timeline (though it is quite possible my google skillz failed me).

Below is my first *totally provisional, off-the-cuff, totally spitballed attempt* at a timeline. I am throwing this out there not as anything even remotely authoritative, but as a conversation starter. I may be completely off on some/all items, and probably I have forgotten some type of chip which should be mentioned. Note that I focused only on checks/tokens/other placeholders for currency used in poker games.

I’m not trying to go back farther in to the history of gambling pre-poker. I am really not sure when some of the early materials (various forms of bone and wood) started to disappear, but I suspect it was by 1930 or so, as modern materials started to take over the markets. I also haven't included various novelty/bespoke materials. (For example, if you go on Etsy or other sites you can find people making chips out of various metals and other impractical materials.)

Anyway, here is the starter chart I made in a spreadsheet program:

1615759020142.png

Here is an updated (v2) based on the comments so far in this thread. Please see the caveats later in the discussion... This is still very provisional and needs editing/suggestions/corrections.

poker-currency-v2.jpg
 
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Note that the lines on either side of each date are 10 years before/after the listed number. So the box which says “1940” begins at 1930 and extends to 1950, for example. But all of my start/stop dates are VERY rough guesses so far. I need to go back into patent and other records I’ve assembled to try to nail things down better, but am also hoping members of this community have some strong opinions.
 
Going through some auction catalogs to pick out dates. These are from the Potter & Potter sales of the Tom Blue (2020) and Eisenstadt (2021) collections:
  • 1870s — Gaming Set with bone counters, made in Paris
  • 1892 — Chicago World’s Fair commemorative poker set includes “clay” poker chips
  • 1899 — Scrimshawed set of chips
  • 1910s — Sims & Co. bone poker chip set
  • 1945 — Vintage game set with Bakelite pieces
Surprisingly for an auction house which regularly features gaming/gambling items, most of their chip listings mention no dates at all. Seems like this is a relatively neglected area of research.
 
I'd add that Celluloid is still used in Plaques and Jetons throughout Europe, so I'd make that separate from Paranoid, Bakelite, and Catalin and have it continue all the way through today. You never mentioned Acrylics, which are used to make cheaper Plaques and Jetons. I don't know when they started being manufactured, but they're still used today. Also, cellulose acetate is used to make higher-end Plaques and Jetons by B&G and Abbiati. Other than those, looks good!

I know the exact year BJ started making the first injection-molded plastic chips, but I'll have to go back and find it. Also, I think there's an exact year Chipco started making the first dye-sub ceramics posted somewhere here, but I forget what it is.

Edit: First injection-molded plastic chips were made in 1965, and the first dye-sub ceramics were made in 1985.
 
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I found a rough timeline in Seymour’s Antique Gambling Chips, which I’ll use to update the chart above soon. He notes that there were also various metallic cheques/tokens in use, going back long before poker existed; to what extent these ever came into play in poker games I can’t really tell from his narrative.
 
A great idea, and a great start!

I question the separation of "compression-molded clay" and "compression-molded clay composites". I believe that early chips along this line were made from materials that were at the time referred to as "clay composition" which itself was a mixture of fine clay minerals and resins, i.e. plastics. At first the resin was shellac, but later the resin was celluloid, and at some point the resin became a more modern plastic such as vinyl.

Bakelite and Catalin, I think, belong on a separate lineage from Paranoid and Celluloid. I think that Paranoid and Celluloid chips are essentially "clay composition" chips, whereas Bakelite and Catalin chips were manufactured using a completely different process. Some Bakelite chips may have been compression molded (although not using the same types of equipment and processes that clay composition chips used, e.g. there were no molds or inlays as we know them today), but Catalin chips were cast as solid rods, then sliced into discs and machined into their final shape.

Paranoid, Celluloid, and clay composition chips are part of the sales, distribution, and marketing lineage that sold to card clubs and then to casinos, whereas Bakelite and Catalin chips remained exclusively in the home market.

I've found a few references which, in aggregate, led me to this particular picture, and I can dig them up and share them later.

I don't know that it needs to be represented on this particular diagram, but I think it's important to at least bear in mind the distinction between the home market and the club and casino market. When injection molding became a thing, suddenly you had the classic thin light radial chips showing up in every household, where they remained the mainstay of home poker for decades until the 2000s poker boom brought dice chips to the world. Meanwhile, developments were underway in casinos and they had nothing whatsoever to do with radial chips, and only grudgingly embraced injection molding when Bud Jones realized he could take advantage of it and make a new type of chip that his customers would buy.
 
As far as compressed clays go, @CrazyEddie makes a good point.

I do, however, think there is a distinction to be made between the early “composition chips” (Seymour’s term, mainly clay and shellac) starting in the 1880s, fading out by the 1940s, and the major leap forward when chips started to be produced in larger quantities for casinos and clubs in the 1920s-30s, featuring far more customization via molds and inlays, and more secretive formulas for the base material.

The earliest clays were (Seymour and others suggest) made to replace but imitate ivory predecessors, slowly becoming more customizable via engraving, embossing, paste-ins, machining, inlays etc. Seymour points to the Mason Crest & Seal hub and plain inlay chips c. 1900 as a sort of turning point.

So we might need some better terminology to make the distinction. There isn’t much continuity IMHO between the 1880s and 1890s clays and what was commonplace by the 1950s...
 
Good points. I feel like I should drag out and reread my copy of Seymour, closely, before I add much more here. :)

Something to contemplate - the degree of decoration and customization (two separate things!) on chips, and how that evolved over time. Some early chips, like bone chips, were very plain; dyed different colors but mostly without decoration or denominations. Others, like ivories, had elaborate carvings and occasionally had denominations but had nothing to uniquely identify the chips as belonging to a particular person or place (i.e. no customization, even though every chip was a literally handmade bespoke piece of artwork).

At some point stock designs and symbols started showing up; you can see that in the USPCC catalogs. That was perhaps driven by the roulette and faro operators, who needed unique chips per player. USPCC also had letters, so perhaps that started the movement towards customization, as people might get chips with their initial on them?

Some of the stock designs - particularly the engraved ones rather than the inlaid ones - might have been purely for decoration rather than practical purposes. Engraved art pieces resembling or descending from the carved ivories, rather than utilitarian symbols on wheel and faro checks.

Then at some point we get the crest and seal chips, where customers (clubs!) could get their crest or seal lithographically printed on an inlay, as opposed to using a stock die-cut inlay. Customization arrives!

But at the same time USPCC is still selling stock designs and plain chips. So maybe now the market bifurcates, and USPCC is serving both sides? Home games using plain chips and engraved designs, and club games using symbol chips and custom lithos. USPCC and later chip sellers made a big deal about how their customizations would keep ringers from getting introduced to games, so that was surely an upsell aimed at clubs and operators.

Somewhere along the way we get edge molds, and then hotstamps, both of which seem to be a Burt Co thing and not a USPCC thing?

When did Burt Co start doing inlays? Was that before or after they bought the USPCC assets?

So then at some point it's just Burt Co and TRK, and now we have molds and hotstamps and inlays and so it's off to the races making custom, ringer-proof chips for clubs, and then casinos, and then *boom* it's the modern era (albeit pre-Paulson).

So now the home market gets molded monogrammed hotstamps, BUT ALSO plain chips haven't gone anywhere, they're still being sold like crazy. Paper chips, radial chips (the thick compression-molded kind, not the thin injection-molded ones that come later), embossed chips, engraved chips, and plain flat featureless chunks of colored clay and/or bakelite. USPCC made these, but once they folded up shop Burt Co and TRK didn't pick up the slack, they focused entirely on the customs market (mostly clubs and casinos but sometimes monograms for home games). So who took over the mass-market poker chip after USPCC got out?

So here's my point: I think before some watershed moment, poker chips were more-or-less all of a kind: made out of a composite ("composition") of clay and plastic, compression molded, and with varying degrees of decoration available as technology advanced. But then after some watershed moment, chip production diverged very firmly in two directions, one towards the pros and one towards the consumers. And from that point on, developments in one line did not cross over into the other. So casinos got inlays, and consumers got injection molding and acrylic.

Just my speculation; not much more than a just-so story. I wonder how much of that is true and can be supported by historical evidence.
 
One funny thing is that chips being “noiseless” or “silent” (because they were made of rubber or paper) was apparently a big selling point c. 1900-1920.

Seymour thinks this is because people didn't want others to hear that an illegal poker game was going on. I find that a little hard to believe... The noise of players talking, arguing, coming and going would be much bigger tip-offs than the quiet clink of chips. Seems off. But the catalogs Seymour shows do show multiple firms touting this feature.
 
CrazyEddie said:
I think before some watershed moment, poker chips were more-or-less all of a kind: made out of a composite ("composition") of clay and plastic, compression molded, and with varying degrees of decoration available as technology advanced. But then after some watershed moment, chip production diverged very firmly in two directions, one towards the pros and one towards the consumers. And from that point on, developments in one line did not cross over into the other. So casinos got inlays, and consumers got injection molding and acrylic.
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Seymour refers to a couple of major situations which caused a panic about people bringing cheques into casinos/cardrooms and putting the house in a huge hole. One was a Depression-era car room in Colorado going broke after a few months, closing, and then discovering that they now had twice as many chips as they had bought to open the room—i.e., that players were sneaking in the same chips that the owner had bought.

Another was a “huge scandal” in Monte Carlo in 1927 involving counterfeit ivory and mother-of-pearl chips, which he says spurred B & G to develop new more secure designs involving “15 layers of plastic with color effects that cannot be duplicated.”

BTW Seymour also says that celluloid chips and Catalin were the same thing. Huh.
 
Another small item picked up from the 1900-1920 catalogs in Antique Gambling Chips: A lot of companies were offering the option of square or rounded edges. A very few offered a compromise half-rounded edge, which I suppose is close to some ceramics nowadays. But interesting that it took some time for clays to settle down to square edges. The suggestion again in his narrative is that early clays were trying to look more like ivory.
 
Cool. :)

Taghkanic said:
BTW Seymour also says that celluloid chips and Catalin were the same thing. Huh.
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It's hard to get everything right about history, and there's some things we may never know for sure. But I'm pretty sure he's wrong about this one.

Celluloid is a plastic made from cellulose, nitric acid, and camphor. Catalin is chemically the same thing as Bakelite, but with a slightly different manufacturing process, and Bakelite is made from phenol and formaldehyde.

I'm pretty sure that some composition chips were made from clay plus celluloid. I know some chips were made from straight-up celluloid aka "French ivory" but I suspect they were very uncommon. Chips made from straight-up Bakelite seem to have been pretty common, and so were chips made from straight-up Catalin. It's pretty easy to tell the difference: Bakelite and Catalin are fireproof, but celluloid will catch on fire and sometimes explode.

FYI, the difference between Bakelite and Catalin is: In Bakelite, the phenolic resin is dried, then powdered, then rapidly molded and cured (sintered, really) to the desired shape under heat and pressure. In Catalin, the phenolic resin is left liquid and poured into a cast, then slowly cooled heated until it cures. The hardened forms (sheets, blocks, and rods) are then cut and machined to the desired form. The practical difference is that Bakelite poker chips are opaque and uniform, while Catalin poker chips are translucent and typically have marble-like swirls from mixing multiple colors while the resin is still liquid.

Complicating matters is that Bakelite and Catalin are brand names and over the years have been used interchangeably to describe either type of product, whether molded and opaque or cast and translucent, including similar products made by companies other than Bakelite and Catalin. Even worse, the Bakelite company produced plastic products made from other types of plastics (i.e. other than phenolic resin) but still called them Bakelite. So there's a fair degree of ambiguity in using the terms. That said it's fair to say that there's one distinct type of poker chip commonly available that was made from translucent cast phenolic resin, usually marbled, and another distinct type commonly available that was made from opaque molded phenolic resin, and that the former could be (and is) usefully called Catalin even if that's not always strictly speaking correct, and that the latter could be (and is) usefully called Bakelite even though that's not always strictly speaking correct.

... and both of them are quite different from celluloid chips.

Edit: Catalin is slowly heated after casting until it cures, not cooled. It's thermosetting, not thermoplastic.
 
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GianThaMan said:
I'd add that Celluloid is still used in Plaques and Jetons throughout Europe, so I'd make that separate from Paranoid, Bakelite, and Catalin and have it continue all the way through today.
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Correction, Celluloid chips are not still made today, I was confusing them with Cellulose Acetate. I have no clue when they started being made (possibly 1920s by B&G after the Monte Carlo scandal?), but please do not do what I said above.
 
CrazyEddie said:
Somewhere along the way we get edge molds, and then hotstamps, both of which seem to be a Burt Co thing and not a USPCC thing?

When did Burt Co start doing inlays? Was that before or after they bought the USPCC assets?
Click to expand...

Nice summary of some chip manufacture history. Just to add information for your two questions above.

Edge molds were definitely a USPC Co. thing. The earliest record of an edge mold chip in the USPC records is 1928 for the Hub mold. Then 1929 for the Large Crown mold and Tre-Ball mold. They produced many other edge mold chips (Diamond, H, Cord, Lazy S, and many others) but only some of them are represenetd in their records.

1615869533480.png


By the way, Hunt & Co. were probably the first to produce edge mold chips, and were producing Monarch (raised circle) chips around 1900, and their chain mold chips by 1927 (according to Howard Herz in a 2007 article). http://www.ccgtcc-ccn.com/SampleBoxes.pdf

My impression from a recent 2018 Casinos Collectible News article about the early pre-1947 history of the Burt Co. is that they started with die-cut inlays in the 1930s, and experimented with metal die cut inlays in the 1940s. In the 1930s they made both injection plastic chips, often with serrated edges, (called Plaston) and rounded and square edge composite clay chips (called Smoothies). They did not make edge molded chips until the 1940s. Its possible that they did not produce any clay edge mold chips until they got the UPSC co. equipment around 1947, but I'm not sure.
 
Great stuff... One point of confusion for me: Seymour seems to treat the Mason Crest & Seal chips as a sort of watershed, and places these in the early 1900s. He illustrates these with a Mason catalog page—undated—including the Crest & Seal “Hub” chip, which appears to have both a celluloid inlay and an edge mold.

If this was indeed an early 1900s innovation, then this would appear to be the first “modern” chip in the format we now take for granted, and predating other edge molds by as much as 20 years.

However, since he doesn’t include the catalog page date, it is hard to know the chronology. (Maybe the Hub version came later than the plain one?) Also, was Mason a division of USPC, or did they buy Mason later? Again per Seymour, apparently chip makers pretty shamelessly copied each others' designs in the early days.

2A538E41-8369-4E63-A548-F9A3AC80FC48.jpeg


046E5A53-E213-4185-ADCA-E342625BC42C.jpeg


Update: I just found a thread on Crest & Seals started by @BGinGA some time ago. The same pages from Seymour that I just posted were cited by someone there as well. However, my confusion about the date of the “Hub” mold isn’t cleared up by that discussion. It’s not clear if they were producing these from the get-go as part of the C&S line, or if they came in later. However, I do note that the item number (B-41) in the catalog above is lower for the Hub Inlaid model than for the Plain Inlaid version (B-42), so that possibly suggests the molded Hub version preceded or was contemporaneous with the invention of C&Ses. Unless they revised their item numbers later? I dunno.
 
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Also FWIW, here is the entry for “paranoid” in the Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia of 1910, describing it as “a plastic material which resembles celluloid, used for dominoes, poker chips, etc.”

1615905710086.png
 
Jeff in Iowa said:
Nice summary of some chip manufacture history. Just to add information for your two questions above.
Click to expand...
Thanks for this info! Great stuff.

Jeff in Iowa said:
In the 1930s they made both injection plastic chips, often with serrated edges, (called Plaston) and rounded and square edge composite clay chips (called Smoothies).
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I wonder whether the serrated chips were actually injection-molded. According to Wikipedia:

American inventor John Wesley Hyatt, together with his brother Isaiah, patented the first injection moulding machine in 1872. This machine was relatively simple compared to machines in use today: it worked like a large hypodermic needle, using a plunger to inject plastic through a heated cylinder into a mould. The industry progressed slowly over the years, producing products such as collar stays, buttons, and hair combs.

The German chemists Arthur Eichengrün and Theodore Becker invented the first soluble forms of cellulose acetate in 1903, which was much less flammable than cellulose nitrate. It was eventually made available in a powder form from which it was readily injection moulded. Arthur Eichengrün developed the first injection moulding press in 1919. In 1939, Arthur Eichengrün patented the injection moulding of plasticised cellulose acetate.

The industry expanded rapidly in the 1940s because World War II created a huge demand for inexpensive, mass-produced products.
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So while it's certainly possible that Burt was making poker chips using injection molding, I'd be a little surprised if they were. Injection molding as a practical production method was still somewhat new at the time and didn't become widespread until later. But I'm just guessing, of course. What's your reference for those chips being injection-molded?
 
Taghkanic said:
Also FWIW, here is the entry for “paranoid” in the Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia of 1910, describing it as “a plastic material which resembles celluloid, used for dominoes, poker chips, etc.”

View attachment 657207
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The early plastics were known by a lot of different trade names despite being essentially the same few chemicals. For example, lots of different companies made phenol-formaldehyde resins (Bakelite) and they each had their own name for them. The end materials would be slightly different from each other depending on the amount and type of binders mixed in with the resins, the specific ratios of precursors used in producing the resins, the amount of heat, pressure, and time used when curing the resins and binders, etc. But one brand name might be used to cover all of the various different formulas used by a single company (the Bakelite company called all of its products "Bakelite") and all the brand names referred to more-or-less the same sort of material.

I think Paranoid must be this sort of material. When the dictionary says it resembles celluloid, it probably means that it was celluloid, or rather, was one particular composite of celluloid plus binders using one particular formula.

I also think it must have been a brand name that was particular to the USPCC ! I bet they formulated their own material and either produced it themselves or obtained it from a supplier who produced it to their specifications. Probably the former; we know, for example, that TR King mixed up their own material using the base ingredients (vinyl, clay, cotton, pigments, etc). So I'm betting that "Paranoid" specifically refers to, and only to, the plastic composite that USPCC manufactured and used in some of their chips, and I guess in dominoes too.
 
CrazyEddie said:
So while it's certainly possible that Burt was making poker chips using injection molding, I'd be a little surprised if they were. Injection molding as a practical production method was still somewhat new at the time and didn't become widespread until later. But I'm just guessing, of course. What's your reference for those chips being injection-molded?
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That 2018 article actually does not use the term injection-molded. I just assumed that they were because the chips pictured looked very similar to the very inexpensive interlocking plastic chips that were common when I was a kid. Below is a picture from that 2018 article of some of the plastic chips they made in the 1930s.

1615914714573.png


You have probably already seen this if you have the 2nd Edition of Seymour's book, but he dates the inlaid square edge clay chips as showing up in catalogs beginning in the 1890s. They were paranoids made by the USPC Co.
1615914934851.png


According to Richard Hanover's excellent timeline, unique crest and seal designs began soon after around 1900. http://www.oldpokerchips.com/CSdates.htm
 
Jeff in Iowa said:
That 2018 article actually does not use the term injection-molded. I just assumed that they were because the chips pictured looked very similar to the very inexpensive interlocking plastic chips that were common when I was a kid. Below is a picture from that 2018 article of some of the plastic chips they made in the 1930s.

1615914714573.png
Click to expand...
It’s possible they were compression-molded plastic. That can be cheaper than injection-molding, and they already had the setup for it.
 
A patent was filed in 1947 and approved in 1948 for what appears to be a plastic interlocking gaming token. The patent does not indicate the material used, however, but rather is for the form of the chip.

1615927101355.png
 
There’s also an earlier 1938 patent which looks like it might be for another type of interlocking chip, though again the description does not specify the material, and since only the frontal view is given, it’s hard to say exactly how these worked.

1615927305286.png
 
Backing up a bit in the discussion... One of my fundamental questions is: Why did the rampant innovation/experimentation in poker chip design and manufacture come to a near-standstill once companies like Paulson and ASM arrived at the mold/spots/inlay formats so familiar to us now?

I’m not saying that no other invention occurred in the past 70 or so years... Obviously, we now have dice chips, and various faux clays, and ceramics, and the occasional flight of fancy like those webbed Paulson chips. And tech advances in security chips, etc.

But compared to the period from roughly 1880-1950, when companies were experimenting with all kinds of ways of making chips, things have calmed down a lot. Is it because a couple companies cornered the market? Or because through trial and error, the industry settled on the 3-4 types of chips which 98.5% of humanity finds useful, so there is little room left to innovate in the field?
 
Taghkanic said:
Is it because a couple companies cornered the market? Or because through trial and error, the industry settled on the 3-4 types of chips which 98.5% of humanity finds useful, so there is little room left to innovate in the field?
Click to expand...
I'd argue it's both. GPI, Abbiati, and Matsui all pretty much cornered the market for casinos, and they're constantly adding new security features (GPI has even added some new types of chips recently, see "Intricate edge insert" chips and premium decor chips) which is enough to keep all the casinos happy, and cheap plastic Chinese chips keep all of the home market happy. Hell, even the picky PCF home market seems pretty happy with the constant flow of expired casino chips, old leaded chips that are exchanged in the classifieds, and the occasional NAGB. There just isn't any reason or significant demand to make more types of chips. And there aren't too many more types of chips that can be made, anyway. The 19th and early 20th centuries experimented with all the weird materials (wood, ivory, paper, etc.), and we've settled on some materials that make sense (plastics and clay composites), which means there isn't much else to do except experiment with combinations and different formulations of those sensible materials.
 

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