Plastic Arts

Bakelite, marketed as the “The Material of a Thousand Uses,” was used in many household items in the 1920s and 1930s.

View larger

The 20th century was labeled the Auto Age, Electric Age, Atomic Age, and Computer Age, for each new technology that dramatically changed the way we live. It was also the Synthetic Plastics Age, for the materials that form countless durable or disposable products. The U.S. alone produces over 100 billion pounds of plastics annually.

Plastics were an accident. In 1907, in his private chemistry lab near New York City, Leo Hendrik Baekeland sought an alternative to shellac as insulation for the expanding electric industry. Each year, the U.S. imported 50 million pounds of shellac, processed from extractions of parasitic Southeast Asian beetles.

In a pressure vessel, Baekeland heated a phenol (C₆H₅OH) and formaldehyde (CH₂O) mixture. The unexpected result, a resin, could be molded into any shape, then permanently hardened under high temperature and pressure, without distortion. This compound became "polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride."

Patenting his discovery, Baekeland formed the General Bakelite Co. to market the revolutionary new material, produced commercially in a pressure vessel, the “Bakelizer.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has two of the vessels, including the original, used in Baekeland’s private lab.

Baekeland intended to use Bakelite for phonograph records, but, spotting broader potential, began marketing it as "The Material of a Thousand Uses." Was the ambitious company logo—the letter “B” over an infinity sign—an overstatement? No one suspects we’ve yet discovered all uses of plastics.

Initially, Bakelite was in telephones, toasters, ashtrays, clocks, electrical fittings, toys, umbrella handles, guitars, and musical instrument mouthpieces. George Eastman put it into Kodak cameras. Highly moldable Bakelite was a preferred Art Deco medium in the 1920s and 1930s, when radios were a home furnishing. Fine woods were in lavish radios; more affordable models were mounted in Bakelite, in richly varied contours and colors. (During World War II, Russia chose hard, durable Bakelite for rifle magazines and as a structural material in combat airplanes.)

Although he discovered the formula by accident, Leo Baekeland knew he was onto something with Bakelite. The material was manufactured in an autoclave called the Bakelizer.

Molded into many shapes for jewelry and trinkets, Bakelite sold for pennies in the 1930s. The artist Andy Warhol became a prolific collector of Bakelite artifacts. After his death in 1987, Sotheby’s auctioned his collection, expecting the two lots of Art Deco costume jewelry to sell for $300 to $400. One brought $1,650, the other $5,500. Vintage Bakelite items trade steadily on E-bay.

The Franklin Factor

Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Ghent, Belgium, in 1863, to uneducated parents. When he read Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Franklin’s success as businessman, scientist, and statesman gave the boy a role model, and an admiration for America.

His mother encouraged her bright, diligent son to follow his dreams. At the University of Ghent, he developed a passion for chemistry and photography–and was awarded a doctorate on his 21st birthday. Recognized as a rising academic star at the University of Bruges, Baekeland married Celine Swarts, daughter of his mentor, a senior chemistry professor. In his sideline photography business, Baekeland invented easier-to-use photographic printing supplies.

At 26, Baekeland received a traveling scholarship, headed for the U.S. with his wife, and worked in photographic chemistry. George Eastman was then building Eastman Kodak into a global business. A self-taught chemist, Eastman developed a dry emulsion to replace wet emulsions applied to plates at the time of picture taking. Dry emulsions allowed film to be rolled into a camera. Having simplified picture-taking, Eastman’s remaining challenge was creating a more sensitive photographic paper. Only the sun provided a sufficiently intense light source.

In response, Baekeland developed a highly sensitive paper that could make prints from the light of a kerosene lamp or electric light bulb. He called it Velox. In 1899, George Eastman paid Baekeland $750,000 for exclusive Velox rights.

Independently wealthy at 36, Baekeland moved his family to a large Yonkers estate, and converted the carriage house into his chemistry laboratory, Bakelite’s birthplace. An active, lifelong experimenter, Baekeland served as the American Chemical Society president, as well as on government committees with Thomas Edison.

Bakelite’s increasing use in consumer products made its inventor a celebrity. Featured on a 1924 Time magazine cover, he was cited by Time in 1999 as one of the 20th century’s outstanding scientists. Baekeland and Charles Goodyear were the first chemists inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, OH.

In 1939, Union Carbide purchased General Bakelite Corp. for $16 million. Retiring to Florida, Leo Baekeland raised lions, and large tropical gardens, until his death in 1944. Baekeland is buried near Yonkers in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, immortalized by Washington Irving. In 1993, the first object designated for the American Chemical Society’s historic landmark program was the Bakelizer.

Frank Wicks is a mechanical engineering professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

[Adapted from “Plastic Arts,” by Frank Wicks, ASME Fellow, for Mechanical Engineering, June 2007.]

Every year, the U.S. produces over 100 billion pounds of plastics. Yet the material that forms countless objects in our everyday lives was discovered by accident, a century ago.

Tweet

Share

 Email

 Print