Credit: Shutterstock photoLeo Baekeland is the most important inventor you never heard of.
That will change if cultural influencers can convey their enthusiasm for a new documentary, " All Things Bakelite: The Age of Plastic ," which is earning applause and awards at film festivals and science conferences across the globe. Director John Maher and his team bring alive the story of the man who invented the first synthetic material, with musical numbers, humor, interviews with excited chemists and product designers, and archival footage.
"My great-grandfather had the courage to take risks and not give up in the face of repeated failure," Hugh Karraker, the executive producer, told IBD. "The world changed one summer night in 1907 in his lab in Yonkers, when the first plastic settled to the bottom of a test tube. It has had a huge impact on our lives."
That form of synthetic plastic - known as Bakelite - was turned into 15,000 products that helped create the modern world, including electrical wire insulation, light bulb sockets, automobile parts, appliances, telephones, televisions and military gear. It is still used widely in everything from electronics to aerospace and led to the invention of other plastics.
Baekeland (1863-1944) grew up in Ghent, Belgium. His father, a shoemaker, and his mother, a maid, were poor and illiterate, but recognized Leo's potential. At 8, he read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and wanted to emulate his dedication to self-improvement, curiosity about the natural world, and invention. He was drawn to photographic chemistry and at 17, won a scholarship to the University of Ghent, graduating maxima cum laude with a Ph.D. four years later.
At 24, while trying to develop a better photographic plate, Baekeland was offered an associate professorship of chemistry and physics at his alma mater under his former chemistry professor, Theodore Swarts. He also fell in love and eventually married Swarts' daughter, Celine. Feeling pressure from his father-in-law, who thought Baekeland's startup was a distraction from academic pursuits, he and his bride sailed for America.
Landing in New York City, Baekeland received a job offer from the firm that would become the photo giant Agfa Gevaert, which he accepted.
"America was a mobile, open society where people who could prove they had the moxie to accomplish something would win out," Jeffrey Meikle, author of " American Plastic: A Cultural History ," said in the film.
Two years later, the restless entrepreneur left the company to become an independent chemical consultant.
By 1893, however, an economic depression had caused him to go broke and soon after he came down with appendicitis. While lying in bed near death, he rethought his plans and decided to concentrate on the one project most likely to bring him the best commercial results, an improved photographic paper for the small cameras being made by Eastman Kodak ( KODK ). Baekeland's Nepera Chemical Co. developed Velox, which was sold to Eastman Kodak in 1899 for $750,000, of which Baekeland netted $215,000 (equal to $6.4 million today).
Inventing The Fourth Kingdom
The money allowed Baekeland to outfit a barn on the grounds of his Yonkers mansion as a research laboratory, where he began experimenting in 1902 to try to create a commercial plastic. Electrical wires had been painted with a natural shellac excreted by a beetle, but that could melt at high temperatures. Many scientists had tried to create an artificial version by combining phenol with formaldehyde, but were unable to control the reaction that would result in a gunk that could not be molded.
"He kept meticulous notes on each experiment and would try things again and again, even though everyone said what he was trying to do was impossible," Burkhard Wagner, a research chemist retired from Union Carbide, said in the film. "He was extremely stubborn and where others saw a wall, he leaned against it and discovered a door. His genius was to realize that he could interrupt the chain reaction."
The result was neither animal, vegetable nor mineral: a man-made fourth kingdom, said Karraker. Baekeland decided to have it mimic his name, calling it Bakelite (pronounced "bake-uh-lite") and received a patent in 1909, which he announced at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. (His discovery occurred when he was 43; since 1945, the ACS has biennially bestowed the Baekeland Medal to promising chemists under 40).
"Bakelite could be molded into anything, from automobile distributor caps and office equipment to toasters, cameras, tableware, and billiard balls, launching the era of industrial design and mass consumption from the 1920s to '50s," said Karraker. "It was valued because it resisted scratches and solvents and was used where it was needed to withstand extreme heat, such as heat shields on spacecraft."
Of course, competitors leapt into the arena, but found themselves up against the extraordinarily thorough 55 patent applications that Baekeland was awarded in the U.S., as well as those in other countries, which anticipated the range of uses for his inventions or anything like them, said Wagner. He won all of his lawsuits, but in one case, he invited rivals Condensite and Redmanol to join him to form the Bakelite Corp. in 1923. The following year he was on the cover of Time and in 1925 was on the cover of the first issue of Plastics.
"He was a good businessman, but had mixed feelings about being CEO because it was such a grind. Yet he preferred to manage his own affairs," said Karraker. "The workload increased when his patents expired in 1927, resulting in a return to competing products. Bakelite was a game-changer and equally important were the manufacturing processes he developed. His work helped lead chemists to other plastics, like polyesters, polyurethanes and polyamides."
After Bakelite
Baekeland's son, George, however, had no interest in taking over the business, so it was sold to Union Carbide in 1939. (Baekeland's part of the sale earned him $23 million, equal to $397 million today.)
In 1984, Union Carbide was acquired by Dow Chemical and on Sept. 1, 2017, it merged with DuPont to become DowDuPont ( DWDP ), the world's largest chemical company in terms of sales.
Leo Baekeland spent his remaining five years exploring botany to research the possibilities for new products, but he died at age 80 before he could achieve anything notable in that field.
The global plastics industry remains enormous and growing, with total shipments in 2015 valued at $418 billion, according to Louis Pilato, a researcher and consultant with expertise in phenolic resin technologies and bio-based materials, who appears in the film. "The cost of oil for plastic manufacturing, especially in the U.S., is low because of the use of fracking to fully extract it," he said.
Yet Bakelite and its children have been a double-edged sword, the film admits, as plastic has become all-pervasive - though researchers have been developing forms with less negative impact on the environment.
The 56-minute version of "All Things Bakelite" won the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival's Platinum Remi Award for documentary (named after Frederick Remington, whose art captured the spirit of the West). It has been screened at industry conferences from New Zealand to Norway, at the 200th anniversary of the founding of University of Ghent and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and will be featured at the Sixth Biannual Baekeland Thermoset Symposium in Shanghai in April 2018. The producers have also been showing a 21-minute version, designed especially for middle- and high-school classrooms, and hope to distribute it to universities and public libraries worldwide.
If they are successful, Leo Baekeland will take his rightful place alongside America's other great inventors, such as Thomas Edison , Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell .
Baekeland's Keys
Inventor of Bakelite, the first plastic, which revolutionized consumer and industrial product design.
Overcame: Poverty and lack of business opportunity before he moved to America.
Lesson: Creative persistence in the face of repeated failures can achieve great results.
"The religion of science is the worship of truth and the worship of truth is the worship of God."
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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
