Leo Baekeland and Bakelite: The Basement Lab That Launched Plastics

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Chemist Leo Baekeland sold a new photographic paper to Eastman Kodak in a $750,000 buyout, with about $215,000 as his personal share. He never needed to work again. Instead he went back to the laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York, to attack a supply problem. The booming electrical industry depended on shellac as an insulator, and shellac was scraped from tree branches in Asia, where it was secreted by the lac insect. Baekeland set out to make a synthetic substitute from phenol and formaldehyde. His first result, a coating he called Novolac, was a commercial flop.

This episode follows what he did next. Others, including the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer in 1872, had heated the same two chemicals and gotten useless foam. Baekeland built an egg shaped iron pressure vessel he named the Bakelizer and cooked the mixture at about 150 degrees Celsius under pressure, so the gases could not escape. What came out was the first fully synthetic thermosetting plastic: hard, insoluble, electrically non-conductive, and impossible to melt again.

• Baekeland filed his patent in July 1907 and announced the invention to the American Chemical Society in February 1909. He formed the General Bakelite Company in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1910.
• With advertising director Allan Brown he marketed Bakelite under a B over an infinity symbol and the slogan the material of a thousand uses, from telephone and radio casings to billiard balls that replaced ivory.
• In World War I the material went into the electrical systems of the Liberty airplane engine, propellers, field telephones, and wireless radios.
• Bakelite needed fillers such as wood flour or asbestos, which kept it dark and opaque. After the patents expired in 1927, rivals like Catalin sold filler-free resins in bright colors that Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli took into fashion.
• Baekeland retired in 1939 and Union Carbide acquired his companies. The formula survives in brake pads and welding equipment, and Soviet engineers used Bakelite resin in reentry heat shields.