Leo Baekeland
Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, and made a fortune from photographic paper first. Born in Ghent in 1863, the son of an illiterate cobbler and a housemaid, he was pushed towards a trade by his father and supported by his mother; he attended night school, won a scholarship, and took a doctorate in chemistry at twenty-one with highest honours. He emigrated to the United States in 1889 after a travelling fellowship, and worked for a photographic firm. His first success was Velox, a photographic printing paper that could be developed under artificial light rather than sunlight, which he sold to George Eastman in 1899 for around three quarters of a million dollars — enough to fund a private laboratory at his house in Yonkers for the rest of his life. He then went after shellac. It was secreted by lac beetles, imported from Asia, expensive, and in enormous demand for insulating the wiring of the new electrical industry. Working on the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde, which other chemists had abandoned because it produced an intractable mess, he built a pressure vessel he called the Bakelizer to control heat and pressure, and in 1907 produced a hard, infusible resin. Bakelite was the first plastic that did not soften on reheating. It insulated electricity, resisted heat, solvents and acids, and could be moulded cheaply into any shape — telephones, radio cabinets, distributor caps, billiard balls, jewellery. He sold the company to Union Carbide in 1939, became reclusive and eccentric in old age, and died in 1944.
- Lived: 1863 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: Belgian
- Roles: chemist, inventor, industrialist
