Melmac: The Trademark Is Six Years Older Than the First Plate

By Matthew Partsch - Owl and Twig Vintage - October 1, 2026

A federal trademark names a synthetic resin for textiles and paper in 1940. The molded dinner plate that resin became famous for did not exist for another six years.

What the 1940 trademark actually covers

MELMAC, Registration No. 0732611, was filed by American Cyanamid Company on June 30, 1961 and registered June 12, 1962. The registration's own sworn first-use date reaches back two decades earlier: December 12, 1940, for goods described as "condensation products of aldehydes and amines - namely, synthetic resins with or without a diluent," filed under the chemicals class that covers unprocessed industrial resins and plastics. Nothing in that description is a plate, a cup, or a bowl. The name was born on a drum of raw resin powder, sold to manufacturers who would turn it into something else.

American Cyanamid filed a related patent the same year. U.S. Patent No. 2,385,383, credited to inventor Paul C. Schroy and assigned to American Cyanamid, was filed September 13, 1940 and granted September 25, 1945. It describes a process for making a melamine-formaldehyde resin powder that dissolves in cold water at high concentration, an improvement over resins that would only form dilute solutions. The patent lists several intended markets for the result: finishing textiles, treating paper, bonding plywood, coating surfaces, and molding compounds. Dinnerware is not one of the named uses, and nothing in the patent's claims describes a dish of any kind.

Both documents place American Cyanamid's melamine resin business in 1940, squarely in the category of industrial chemistry rather than consumer goods. The famous plate came later, from a company that was not American Cyanamid, using resin it bought rather than made.

How a Navy-tested plastic became a kitchen staple

George Scribner owned the Boonton Molding Company in Boonton, New Jersey, a firm that had been molding plastic parts since the 1920s. During the Second World War, the U.S. Navy issued melamine resin mess ware because it would not shatter the way ceramic did aboard a moving ship. Scribner watched that performance and judged that an American kitchen, newly flush with postwar money and newly impatient with broken dishes, would want the same thing. In 1946, Boonton Molding Company began producing its own line of melamine plates under the name Boontonware.

Boonton was not alone that year. Ernest E. Hellmich founded what became the Branchell company in St. Louis, Missouri, also in 1946, originally under the name Hellmich Manufacturing Company. Branchell built a competing line of molded melamine dinnerware under the names Color-Flyte, Royale, and later Aztec. By 1958, Branchell's combined sales volume exceeded fourteen million dollars a year, a figure large enough that Lenox, the china maker behind the Spice Village line Owl and Twig has covered separately, bought the company that same year. Branchell kept operating under its own name for a time afterward; a 1961 reference still lists products stamped "Branchell-Aztec" at a St. Louis address.

Watertown Manufacturing Company entered the category the same year as Boonton and Branchell, selling its own melamine line as Lifetime Ware starting in 1946. All three companies were buying finished melamine-formaldehyde molding powder, very likely including American Cyanamid's own Melmac-branded resin, and pressing it into the shapes that would define a decade of American tables.

The designers who made Melmac fashionable

Boonton hired Belle Kogan to design its dinnerware. Kogan, born in Russia in 1902, opened her own industrial design studio in New York in 1932 and was among the first American industrial designers, male or female, to work seriously in plastics; her earlier credits included celluloid toilet sets and Bakelite jewelry. Her pastel Boontonware shapes became the line's signature look. In January 1951, Consumer Reports tested twelve plastic dinnerware brands and judged Boontonware "superior to all others," citing its resistance to chipping and breaking and its durability through repeated washing. Scribner was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1974.

Branchell's dinnerware carried the name of designer Kaye Lamoyne, whose Color-Flyte and Royale lines favored bold, saturated colors over Kogan's pastels.

The line most collectors chase today, Russel Wright's "Residential," came later and from a different manufacturer entirely. Russel Wright and his wife Mary Wright had already built a reputation designing ceramic dinnerware through the 1930s and 1940s when they turned to melamine. "Residential" launched in 1953, manufactured by a Boston-area company that period sources and surviving backstamps render two different ways: design-history accounts call it the Northern Industrial Chemical Company, while an auction house's lot description of a stamped, catalogued set reads simply "Russel Wright Residential by Northern Boston 27." Whichever the full corporate name was, "Residential" won a Museum of Modern Art Good Design Award the year it launched and had grossed more than four million dollars by 1957. Production later continued under Home Decorators, Inc. of Newark, New York. The Henry Ford Museum holds a turquoise "Residential" set from the 1950-1960 period and credits it as the Wrights' first venture into plastic tableware after a career built on ceramics.

By 1956, roughly a quarter of American households owned some piece of melamine dinnerware, according to the Henry Ford Museum's own object record - a fast adoption curve for a material that, a decade and a half earlier, had been a line item in an industrial chemist's patent for water-soluble textile resin.

How to tell a real one

• Read the backstamp first. A genuine piece is usually molded with the maker's name directly into the underside: "Boontonware," "Branchell," "Branchell-Aztec," "Watertown Lifetime Ware," or "Russel Wright Residential" followed by the manufacturer's city. A piece with no mark at all is harder to attribute to a specific maker and should be priced and described that way, not guessed into a famous name.
• Weigh it in your hand. Genuine melamine resin is noticeably heavier and thicker than the thin injection-molded plastic used for cheap modern picnicware, a difference collectors can usually feel without a scale.
• Check for stiffness rather than flex. A genuine melamine piece resists bending and will not spring back the way a flexible modern plastic plate does; pressed hard enough to deform, ordinary plastic bends where melamine stays rigid.
• Expect color fade, not color loss. Original melamine pigments are prone to ultraviolet fading, especially in reds and oranges, after decades in a sunny kitchen. A faded piece is consistent with age; a piece that looks freshly saturated in a pattern known for fading is worth a second look.
• Treat a hot-water or open-flame test as something you read about, not something you do to someone else's inventory. Collector guides describe melamine as charring rather than melting under flame, and holding its shape in boiling water where thinner plastic warps. Both tests damage the piece being tested and are not something to try at a flea market table; they explain what a seller or appraiser might already know about a piece's history, not a test for a buyer to perform on the spot.

The look-alikes: modern melamine and other plastics

Melamine dinnerware never stopped being made. Current restaurant-supply and camping-gear melamine, including lines sold by IKEA and similar retailers, uses the same resin family as a 1950s Boontonware plate. The giveaway is usually the label rather than the material: modern pieces are routinely printed or stamped with phrases like "melamine," "BPA-free," and "dishwasher safe," language built around safety and marketing conventions that did not exist when Boonton, Branchell, and Watertown were selling their lines. A piece carrying that kind of modern safety language is not vintage, whatever its color or shape suggests.

A second, older confusion is with Bakelite and its sibling resin Catalin, both phenolic plastics rather than the amino resin melamine is built from. Owl and Twig's guide to Bakelite covers identifying that material in detail; the short version is that Bakelite and Catalin are denser, typically darker or marbled in color, and were used for radios, jewelry, and handles rather than dinner plates. A Melmac dish and a Bakelite radio knob share a decade and a resin-chemistry family tree, not much else.

Why a vintage piece should stay out of the microwave

Where the records disagree

Two gaps in the record are worth naming rather than smoothing over. First, the trademark itself: the surviving MELMAC registration was not filed until 1961, twenty-one years after its claimed first use, which is an ordinary consequence of marks lapsing and being refiled per class over the decades, the same pattern this series has already documented for Crayola's trademark history. The 1940 first-use date is the company's own sworn claim, not an independently dated specimen this guide could inspect, though it lines up with American Cyanamid's own 1940-filed melamine resin patent closely enough to support it.

Second, the adoption numbers do not quite agree, because they are not measuring the same thing. The Henry Ford Museum states that about a quarter of American households owned melamine dinnerware by 1956. A separate design-history account of the British and American melamine boom puts melamine dinnerware at roughly half of all dishes sold in America by the late 1950s. A household-ownership figure and a share-of-sales figure in a different, later year can both be true at once, but repeating either one as "the" adoption statistic for Melmac overstates how precisely any single source actually measured the boom.

Third, Russel Wright's "Residential" manufacturer has no single confirmed corporate name across the sources checked for this guide: some call it the Northern Industrial Chemical Company, others the Northern Plastic Company, and the clearest primary evidence, a catalogued auction lot's own backstamp transcription, reads only "Northern Boston 27." This guide names all three rather than picking one to sound more authoritative than the evidence supports.

Chasing a Boontonware set, a piece of Russel Wright Residential, or other mid-century plastic dinnerware for the shop or your own collection?

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What it sells for now

Most Melmac trades as everyday kitchenware, priced accordingly. A set of three pink Boontonware cups was recently listed on eBay at seventeen dollars and fifty-nine cents (an asking price, not a confirmed sale) with no chips noted. A thirteen-piece lot of Branchell Color-Flyte, mixed plates, saucers, and bowls in coral tones, was listed on Etsy at eighty-eight dollars and ninety-five cents, also an asking price.

Designer attribution changes the range. A complete, catalogued seventy-seven-piece Russel Wright "Residential" service, stamped "Russel Wright Residential by Northern Boston 27," carried a two-thousand-to-three-thousand-dollar estimate at Wright20, a design-specialty auction house; the realized price was not available in the record checked for this guide, so the estimate is reported as an estimate, not a confirmed sale.

For a real, current example at the attractive middle of the market: Owl and Twig has an active listing for a set of six 1970s melamine Oblique bowls, stackable and made in the USA, at sixty-five dollars - an asking price on a current listing, offered here as a genuine data point rather than a sold record. Owl and Twig also carries a Dansk melamine serving tray credited to designer Gunnar Cyren, a reminder that the Dansk brand covered in Owl and Twig's guide to Dansk teak put its name on plastic as well as wood.

Looking for vintage plastics, mid-century tableware, or other Design and Materials pieces for the shop or your own collection?

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For another guide where a trademark's own paper trail does not match the popular origin date, see Bakelite: the trademark filed before the patent. For another mid-century plastic collecting guide, see Owl and Twig's guide to vintage Lucite. See more Field Guides