Geeks in History: Leo Hendrik Baekeland
If there’s one item that I think we take for granted, it’s plastic. This is, of course, a more modern invention, though it’s been around for just over a hundred years. What would we be using if we didn’t have plastic? Would Barbie be made out of rubber? Well, we can all thank the love of money for this invention by Leo Baekeland.
Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born on November 14, 1863 in Ghent, Belgium, the son of a maid and a cobbler. He attended the University of Ghent via scholarship and graduated summa cum laude when he was twenty-one. He was given a job that moved him and his wife, Céline Swarts, to New York in 1889 due to his invention of a process that developed photographic plates with water instead of chemicals. He worked for the E and HT Anthony Company for two years, and then he made a business for himself as a consulting chemist. During this time, he invented a photographic paper which he called “Velox” and was offered $1,000,00 for the process by George Eastman, the creator of the Eastman Kodak company, and used the money to set up a new home and personal laboratory for himself.
Genius = Profit!
With one financial success under his belt, Baekeland wanted to make more money, so he entered the field of synthetic resins, hoping to find a replacement for the very expensive shellac (made from the excretion of lax beetles). Baekeland started working with phenol and formaldehyde and created “Novolak”, which didn’t fare so well. After that, he worked on a binder for asbestos and found he could make his hard modlable plastic that way. He named it “Bakelite”, though the official name is polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. He announced his invention in 1909 to the American Chemical Society. He beat out Nobel Prize winner Adolf Von Baeyer with the invention of his plastic, and by 1922, his own company merged with a few others to become the Bakelite Corporation.
Baekeland retired in 1939 to sail his yacht, the Ion, work on building a tropical garden for his Florida home, and sold his successful company to the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation which is now a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company. He was rather eccentric, arguing over salaries and starting to eat all of his meals out of cans. He died of cerebral hemorage in a sanitorium, and then was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetary in New York.
There you have it, the man who began the “Age of Plastics”. The next time you sit in a plastic desk or use a plastic chopping board (or, really, anything else involving plastic), remember Leo Baekeland, his desire to put cash in his pocket, and the application of his smarts towards creating the very substance you recycle when you’re done with your soda.
Geeks in History is a biweekly column about notable geeks of the past and how they impacted modern life.
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