[00:02.71]Chemist Leo Baekeland
[00:05.67]In the opening scene of The Graduate,
[00:08.95]Benjamin (played by a young Dustin Hoffman)
[00:12.23]is awkwardly working an affluent Southern California crowd
[00:15.73]at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents
[00:19.23]when a family friend offers
[00:20.87] one of the century's most famous pieces of cinematic advice:
[00:24.48] "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."
[00:29.95]Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled.
[00:33.56] The scene neatly captured their own late 60's ambivalence
[00:37.60]toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times.
[00:41.00]They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops,
[00:45.04] but envied—and longed for—the authentic touch
[00:48.32]and time-lessness of marble and wood.
[00:50.83]The chord struck by that line in The Graduate under-scored
[00:54.33]how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907,
[00:58.60] when Leo Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough
[01:01.44] that would change the stuff our world is made of.
[01:04.62]A Belgian-born chemist-entrepreneur,
[01:08.33]Baekeland had a knack for spotting profitable opportunities.
[01:11.73]He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox,
[01:17.41]an improved photographic paper
[01:19.32]that freed photographers from having to use sunlight
[01:22.16]for developing images. With Velox, they could rely on artificial light,
[01:26.53] which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric.
[01:31.68]It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work.
[01:34.95] In 1899 George Eastman,
[01:38.13]whose cameras and developing services would make photography a household activity,
[01:42.83] bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $1 million.
[01:49.17]Starting around 1904, Baekeland and an assistant began their search.
[01:54.53]Three years later,
[01:55.95]after filling laboratory books with page after page of failed experiments,
[02:00.88] Baekeland finally developed a material that he dubbed in his notebooks "Bakelite".
[02:06.67] The key turned out to be his "bakelizer",
[02:09.51] a heavy iron vessel that was part pressure cooker and part basement boiler.
[02:14.55]With it, he was able to control the formaldehyde phenol reaction
[02:19.02]with more finesse than had anyone before him.
[02:21.75]Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde
[02:24.93](in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going)
[02:28.31]produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish.
[02:33.23] Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier good.
[02:37.17]And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer,
[02:39.90]he was rewarded with a hard, translucent,
[02:43.19]infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic. |