sentences:  They eventually narrowed their search to a mixture of Illinois-sourced silica and the abrasive substance corundum or aloxite (a form of aluminum oxide, Al2O3), founding William A. Spinks & Company with a factory in Chicago after securing a patent on March 9, 1897.Spinks later left the company as an active party, but it retained his name and was subsequently run by Hoskins, and later by Hoskins's cousin Edmund F. , after Hoskins moved on to other projects.While regular calcium carbonate chalk had been packaged and marketed on a local scale by various parties (English player Jack Carr's "twisting powder" of the 1820s being the earliest recorded example, although considered dubious by some billiards researchers), the Spinks Company product (which is still emulated by modern manufacturers with differing, proprietary compounds) effectively revolutionized billiards.