Belgian who brought home the Bakelite
How Dr Leo Baekeland, an early and pioneering SCI Member,
tapped into the potential of plastic
We all take plastic for granted, but less than a century
ago it was a radical new material with marvellous potential
for moulding, colouring and mass production. And it was invented
by an early SCI Member, Dr Leo Baekeland.
 Baekeland,
who came from Belgium but settled in the US, was a born entrepruneur.
He made the prodigious fortune of $1m in 1899 when he sold
the rights to a new photographic paper to George Eastman of
Kodak. The new paper, known as Velux, did not rely on sunlight
to develop images, so that photographers could develop by
artificial light instead.
With his windfall, Baekeland bought Snug Rock, a handsome
estate in Yonkers near New York. He also acquired a car, much
to the chagrin of his horse-owning neighbours, who called
him a ‘gasoline devil’. After converting a barn
into a laboratory, he looked around for another venture.
The new electrical industry relied on a natural material,
shellac, for insulators. Shellac was derived from a resin
deposited by beetles in southeast Asia, but supplies were
limited. Baekeland and his assistant spent three years working
on an artificial replacement, and finally in 1907 came up
with a new material, which he called Bakelite.
He got there by heating phenol and formaldehyde in the presence
of an acid or base, to produce a shellac-like liquid that
could be used for coating surfaces. Further heating made the
mixture more solid, and when put in an autoclave he called
a ‘bakelizer,’ it produced a hard, transparent,
mouldable substance we would recognise as plastic.
According to his memorial address, published in Chemistry
& Industry in August 1945: ‘All previous workers
on this reaction had used either a substantial quantity of
an acid accelerator and produced a permanently fusible shellac-like
body … or so much alkali catalyst that the reaction was
uncontrollable and a hard spongy-like mass was produced of
no commercial value.’
His own comment about the previous failures was that ‘they
should have succeeded, but they wouldn’t’.
After patenting the material, known to chemists as polyoxybenzylmethylen-glycolanhydride,
he unveiled it to the American Chemical Society in 1909 in
three versions, Bakelite A, B and C. It was Bakelite C that
was of particular interest as an insulator.
Baekeland played an active role within SCI for many years.
He attended a conference in Manchester in 1906, and was awarded
the William Perkin Medal in 1916 and the Messel Medal in 1938.
After his death the Baekeland lectures were inaugurated (detailed
in the awards book).
His observations on getting products to market would not
be unfamiliar to many today: ‘Many fortunes have been
swallowed up because the research men underestimated the factor
of the time development. In other cases, while expensive research
went on, the trend of the market had changed or entirely new
improvements had been introduced which rendered the initial
problem obsolete.’
Bakelite was not quite the first plastic, as celluloid, which
was ultimately derived from cotton and other vegetable matter,
had been around for some time. But it was the first synthetic
plastic, and the General Bakelite Corporation was set up to
manufacture and license such early 20th century essentials
as pipe stems, billiard balls, knife handles, phonograph records,
knobs and buttons — among many other items.
by Joanna Pegum
Web Editor
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