Whale baleen: the plastic of the nineteenth century, from 500 to 3,000 pounds a tonne

In French an umbrella has “baleines”, whales. A corset had “baleines” too, and in English it had whalebone. The word stayed in the language long after the thing itself had gone, and it says exactly what it names: for a century, the supple, resilient material that industry could not manufacture was fetched from the mouth of an animal.

What a baleen plate is

Baleen is neither teeth nor bone. Baleen plates are blades of keratin, the same protein as our nails and our hair, set into the upper jaw and fringed along their inner edge. The animal takes in a mouthful of water, pushes it out through this comb and retains the plankton.

A right whale carries several hundred on each side, the longest of them over two metres. Our page on baleen in mysticetes sets out this anatomy, and the one on anatomical counts gives the numbers species by species.

Its industrial property comes down to three words: light, flexible, springy. Heated, keratin takes a shape and keeps that shape as it cools, while retaining its ability to spring back. No material available before plastics combined these qualities: wood breaks, metal does not spring back, bone does not bend.

Everything that had to bend without breaking

The list of uses is that of a plastic before its time. Corsets and crinolines first of all, which absorbed most of the production. Umbrella and parasol frames, the source of the French word. Coachmen’s whips, fishing rods, springs for horse-drawn carriages.

But also brushes and brooms, made by cutting up the fringes; stiffened shirt collars and shirt fronts; hat stiffeners; tool handles; springs for seats and for various mechanisms.

From 500 to 3,000 pounds a tonne in thirty years

The path of the price tells the whole story, and it is a story of depletion.

A tonne of baleen was worth about 500 pounds sterling in 1870. It reached 3,000 pounds in 1902, six times as much in a single generation. This surge does not reflect a new fashion but growing scarcity: right whales and bowhead whales, the only species carrying baleen long enough and supple enough for these uses, had been hunted to collapse.

The mechanism is a perverse one. The scarcer the animal becomes, the more its material is worth, and the more profitable it becomes to go after the last of them. It is the opposite of the self-regulation sometimes attributed to markets, and it is one of the reasons the North Atlantic right whale has never recovered its numbers.

What saved the last of them

It was not a law, it was a steel spring.

In the late nineteenth century the steel industry developed flat coiled steels fine enough and springy enough to stiffen a corset, at a price nowhere near that of baleen. By the turn of the century the substitution was complete. Corset production reached its peak in 1905, but by then it was already largely steel.

Two developments finished off the market. Fashion first: the corset gave way to the girdle in the 1920s, then to synthetic elastic fabrics. Chemistry next: celluloid, Bakelite, then modern plastics offered the same flexibility for next to nothing.

This should be said plainly, because it qualifies the usual account: it was industrial substitutes, and not a change of heart, that took baleen off the market. The right whale was saved by a hair’s breadth by the coil spring and by plastic.

Today

International trade in baleen is prohibited under CITES. It is still met with in museum collections, in antique objects and on the antiques market, where identifying it is sometimes a problem: many pieces sold as “whalebone” are horn, bone or celluloid.

Baleen does, on the other hand, remain an active subject of research. Like a tree ring, it records the isotopic composition of what the animal ate month after month, which makes it possible to reconstruct diets and migrations over several years. Recent work has also shown that krill clogs the baleen and imposes an unexpected hydraulic constraint on the feeding of rorquals.

This page is part of our feature on whale products, which sets out the six main uses that drove commercial whaling.