• be john wesley hyatt
• a printer from albany, new york, 1863
• a billiard ball company is offering $10,000 to anyone who can replace ivory. elephants are being slaughtered by the thousands to supply america's pool halls
• you soak cotton in nitric acid and add camphor
• it works. you've just made the first synthetic plastic. you call it celluloid
• you test the billiard balls
• they explode. not every time. randomly.
• a colorado saloon owner writes you a letter: every time two balls collide hard enough, every man in the room reaches for his gun. sounds like a gunshot
• your factories keep burning down
• you never collect the $10,000
• but to process the material at all, you had to invent something nobody had ever built: a machine that heats raw material until soft, then forces it into a mold under pressure
• you file the patent in 1872 and think nothing of it
• you move on. you invent a water purification system, a sugarcane mill, a roller bearing
• you hire a 28-year-old draftsman named alfred sloan
• you promote him to president, then sell the whole firm to general motors in 1916
• sloan goes on to run GM, invents the modern corporate org chart, and builds the management template every large company on earth still runs on
• you die in 1920 having never collected your prize and not fully understanding what you built
• the machine you invented to make combs and denture plates is now how the world makes M1 helmet liners, javelin missile housings, UAV fuselages, body armor backing plates, M16 stocks, IV syringes, car dashboards, lego bricks, and iPhone casings
• 8 trillion parts per year. every one of them made by forcing hot material into a mold under pressure
• the entire polymer layer of modern civilization -- consumer, medical, automotive, defense -- runs through one process
• patented by a printer who was trying to win a contest he lost
• absolute, relentless consequence from a single failed billiard ball
back in september, @patrickc posed an interesting question about manufacturing, is it some anachronistic pursuit to make us feel good, or a real existential threat that we should be winning across the board at.
i offered up my experience over an exchange here on X, and he graciously invited me to lunch at stripe hq. we had a fruitful conversation, i hope i tipped the scales more in favor of reindustrialization being a noble and worthy pursuit.
a few weeks after that i received an email from his team, they wanted to send a crew to make a short feature on @atomic_inc, as part of a series called lesser known frontiers - which they show their entire company during stripe's internal annual conference.
it's so cool they do this, so thank you again for everything @stripe, and please enjoy this little feature on Atomic
America may have one chance at catching up to and perhaps surpassing China in manufacturing and it's inside this factory in Detroit. We went to visit @atomic_inc and @aphysicist with the full episode down below on our YouTube channel
please redirect your eyeballs to this video right now. ashlee has been a champion of telling the story of hard tech for so long it's not even funny, and now he's telling the story of american reindustrialization. it's an epic adventure that only he can pull off. enjoy!
2025 Wrapped:
> Series A complete
> Factory 2.0 underway
> SOTA mold design and simulation continue to make extraordinary progress
> Major software achievements in quoting and production planning
> AI designed molds achieving greater performance
> Shift to mass production using Atomic molds underway
> Massive pipeline exceeding capacity
> Ripping on all cylinders
> See you next year!
- Atomic Industries
The Krach Institute is proud to announce the recipients of our 2025 Trusted Tech Leadership Awards: @atomic_inc, @ReElementTech, Strider Technologies and the Government of Sweden 🇸🇪
Read more: https://t.co/wm6TZLN4pB
proud to announce Atomic Industries has raised a $25M Series A led by MaC Venture Capital and DTX Ventures, with participation from the University of Michigan, S&A, Calm Ventures, Blackwing, Narya, and others, to build America's next generation industrial base.