Leo Hendrik Baekeland

• Born: November 14, 1863
• Birthplace: Ghent, Belgium
• Died: February 23, 1944
• Place of death: Beacon, New York

Belgian chemist

Baekeland’s invention of Bakelite, the first thermosetting plastic, was critical to the industrial design of the Jazz Age by making it possible to produce large quantities of tough, durable plastic goods.

Primary field: Chemistry

Primary invention: Bakelite plastic

Early Life

Leo Hendrik Baekeland (BAYK-land) was born on November 14, 1863, in Ghent, Belgium. His father, an illiterate cobbler, wanted him to follow him into the shoemaker’s trade and saw no purpose in formal education. By contrast, Leo’s mother believed strongly in the value of education and saw that he received a solid foundation in the basics. When his father forced him to leave school and apprentice in the shoemaking trade, his mother encouraged him to take night courses. In spite of the difficulties of studying after having putting in a full day’s work, he did well enough that he gained a scholarship that enabled him to attend the Ghent University, majoring in chemistry. In 1884, he completed his doctorate and subsequently became a research chemist and teacher.

Although he was a top student throughout his studies, he also had an irrepressible humorous streak that often came out in the form of practical jokes. One joke, in which he painted a classmate’s face with silver nitrate, came to the attention of school authorities when the frightened classmate went to a doctor who applied hydrochloric acid in an effort to remove the marks and instead burned his patient badly. When summoned before the board, Baekeland demonstrated the harmlessness of his prank by marking his own face with silver nitrate and then erasing it with a harmless chemical from a vial he had in his pocket. School officials were sufficiently mollified that Baekeland received only a mild reprimand, but as word got around about his classmate’s injury, the physician’s reputation was permanently damaged.

In 1889, Baekeland and his new wife, Celine, left for the United States, officially on leave from his university position. However, he soon found a position with Richard A. Anthony, Eastman Kodak’s principal rival in the photographic business, and never looked back at academic life or Europe. His first assignment was to find a better way to make photographic paper for the growing amateur photographic market, which had grown explosively since George Eastman’s introduction of the American film, a roll of paper negatives that could be loaded into a point-and-shoot camera. Baekeland was so successful that he was soon given steadily greater responsibility.

He subsequently formed his own company to produce a new kind of film, and he became independently wealthy when it was bought out by Eastman Kodak. He was then able to pursue his own chemical interests without having to worry about their marketability. As he grew bored with the chemistry of photography, he began to search out other aspects of chemistry to explore. Since his own financial situation was secure, he did not have any pressure to focus only on things that could be turned into marketable products quickly, and could risk going into blind alleys.

Life’s Work

Baekeland became interested in the chemistry of phenol (a coal-tar derivative) and formaldehyde (a wood alcohol derivative). Coal tars were originally a noxious waste product of the industrial burning of coal as an energy source, and particularly of the great coking furnaces that turned coal into coke for steelmaking. These tars tended to accumulate in the smokestacks and had to be periodically cleaned out to prevent disastrous fires. In 1856, William Henry Perkin was attempting to create synthetic quinine, an antimalarial drug, out of coal tar and in the process discovered mauvine, the first of the synthetic organic dyes. The brilliant, colorfast purple rivaled the tyrean purple that had been made from the shells of small marine invertebrates in ancient times. However, while tyrean purple had been so rare and expensive as to be reserved for monarchs, mauvine was well within the reach of the burgeoning industrial middle class, whose hunger to ape the wealthy through the use of cheap industrial substitutes for previous luxury goods led to mauvine becoming so popular that the 1890’s was known as the Mauve Decade.

In the half century that had followed, numerous uses had been developed for coal-tar derivatives, including various salves and ointments. However, the promise of phenol in the production of plastic substances had been continually frustrated. Although celluloid showed the value of a substance that could be produced and molded in industrial quantities, its dangerous flammability limited its popularity. Furthermore, the success of the electrical industry in the 1890’s was rapidly making shellac, the only viable electrical insulator at the time, unaffordable.

Baekeland knew that German chemist Adolf von Baeyer had produced an impervious substance as a result of an explosive reaction between phenol and formaldehyde. The resulting substance was an unworkable lump, which led von Baeyer to dismiss it as useless. However, Baekeland wondered if there was some way to control the reaction. If it could be made to progress more slowly and evenly, it might produce something useful. In order to gain that control, he used a pressure vessel, which allowed him to cook the mixture at a far higher temperature and far longer than had been possible at atmospheric pressure.

Throughout the summer of 1907, Baekeland worked to perfect his new substance, certain he was on the brink of a major discovery. It started as a pourable resin but soon hardened into a translucent amber solid impervious to heat and solvents. Baekeland had succeeded in inventing the first thermosetting plastic. Unlike thermoplastics such as celluloid, which can be melted down and reformed, thermosetting plastics form permanent molecular bonds as they cure.

Baekeland presented his new substance to the world under the trade name of Bakelite. Unlike earlier plastics, which often had proved to be commercial disappointments, Bakelite proved to be just the sort of artificial insulator the electrical industry needed so desperately. Furthermore, its hardness and elasticity approached that of ivory, making it the long sought-after ideal artificial billiard ball. Elephants would no longer need to be slaughtered to provide gentlemen with their pastime.

Industry quickly found thousands of uses for Bakelite, creating the first plastic age. The Bell System molded telephone cases from Bakelite, creating the characteristic desk sets of the early twentieth century. The developing radio receiver industry of the Jazz Age also found Bakelite an excellent substance for injection molding to produce inexpensive cases that could even be made to look like the wood used in more expensive models, or could be allowed to revel in their “syntheticness” for a futuristic look. The flexibility of Bakelite, along with the era’s fascination with speed and streamlining, was a major factor in the development of the Art Deco style. By the late 1920’s, forty-three industries had found a use for Baekeland’s wonder substance.

Baekeland himself made the cover of Time magazine on September 22, 1924. In the 1930’s, he became involved in the public debate over what should be the generic name for the family of substances to which Bakelite belonged. He quickly vetoed such outré terms as “synthoid,” which he derided as having no meaning, although his own preferred term “resinoid” fared no better. The court of public opinion would ultimately settle upon “plastic” for the entire family of moldable substances and would identify individual types by their formulations: phenolic plastics, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and so forth.

In 1939, Baekeland sold his company to Union Carbide. By this time, he had been in semiretirement for a number of years and had been spending most of his time in Coconut Grove, Florida, where he owned the former estate of William Jennings Bryan. He shared Bryan’s pacifist leanings, and up to the attack on Pearl Harbor he strove to keep the United States out of World War II. He died on February 23, 1944, disappointed to see the world engulfed yet again in destructive war, but before the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed.

Impact

The inventor of the first thermosetting plastic, Leo Hendrik Baekeland was in a very real sense the “father of the plastic age.” Although Bakelite has since been superseded by other plastics such as PVC, nylon, and polystyrene, its success was an important foundation for the wealth of inexpensive consumer goods that poured into the market during the Jazz Age. For the first time, products could be formed quickly and easily in enormous quantities from materials that had previously been regarded as industrial waste.

Bibliography

Fenichell, Stephen. Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century. New York: HarperBusiness, 1996. A historical overview of the development of plastics, includes a biographical chapter on Baekeland.

Galas, Judith C. Plastics: Molding the Past, Shaping the Future. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 1995. Includes a good chapter on the role of Bakelite in the Jazz Age.

Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Places Baekeland and Bakelite into the context of the role of plastics in shaping America’s culture of abundance.