Due to the shaky economic climate at the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult for an inventor to simply create a product and sell it by themselves. Baekeland was in need of financial backers. In 1891 he went into partnership with Leonard Jacob to form the Nepera Chemical Company based in the Nepera Park area of Yonkers in New York State. They began producing Velox paper by 1893 and made a significant dent in the marketplace, a dent that eventually began to affect Eastman Kodak. George Eastman brokered a deal to purchase the company, and the patent to their Velox product, in 1899. The reports of the sum differ, but it was somewhere between seven hundred and fifty thousand and a million dollars. It is said that Baekeland himself earned two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars from the sale, an amount that would come to nearly six million dollars today. It was the money that he earned from the sale of Velox to Eastman Kodak that Baekeland would use toward creating his most lasting invention: Bakelite.
I was trying to make something really hard, but then I thought I should make something really soft instead, that could be molded into different shapes. That was how I came up with the first plastic. I called it Bakelite.
The road to Bakelite was paved with a few failures. The development of synthetic materials was a new venture for Baekeland, but he was unable to focus on the photography field any longer, due to a twenty-year long non-compete clause that he signed as a part of the deal with Eastman. In 1900, Leo returned to Germany to brush-up on his electrochemistry. Initially, it wasn’t the intent of Baekeland to create a fully synthetic plastic; in fact he was originally looking to find a useful replacement for the commonly used material called shellac. Shellac was a resin produced from the excretion of the lac beetle, used for everything from jewellery and flooring to dentures and other moulded goods. Baekeland was successful in creating a substitute called Novolak. Leo wasn’t pleased with the commercial success of the product at the time, although it is still used today, under the name Novolac, to produce everything from billiard balls to circuit boards. Novolak may not have been a success all on its own, but it would serve as the gateway, and the basis, for Bakelite.
Unsatisfied with his shellac substitute, Baekland kept experimenting with combining phenol with formaldehyde, hoping to develop a hard plastic that was mouldable. He would eventually come upon the correct process for polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, the chemical name of Bakelite. Bakelite was often created by adding a filler, such as wood or asbestos, to the resin. The phenolic resin was such a fantastic development, not only because it was mouldable, but it was also non-flammable, unlike Celluloid. Leo applied for a patent on 13 July 1907 under the title: ‘Method of making insoluble products of phenol and formaldehyde.’ He also applied for patent protection around the world, in countries like Canada, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, and Hungary, to name a few. Leo Baekeland made a formal presentation at the American Chemical Society on 8 February 1909. The patent for Bakelite was finalised and officially issued on 7 December 1909, with Patent 942,699. The age of plastics had begun. In fact, the term ‘plastics’ was actually coined by Baekland.
In 1910, Leo Baekeland was working out of his own laboratory to produce his miracle plastic and selling enough product to justify a serious investment and expansion. He would create the General Bakelite Company, so that he could market and manufacture his product on a larger scale both in America and internationally. The then burgeoning automobile industry was one of the first major players to utilise Bakelite commercially. The resin would be used for items such as electrical and automobile insulators, because it had a fantastic resistance to heat and was itself a great electrical insulator. Bakelite would soon be used to produce everything from telephones to radios. Bakelite, and similar synthetic products, would find a lot more use during the First World War, when there wasn’t time or resources to chase after the typical, naturally occurring resources.
Bakelite was marketed as ‘The Material of a Thousand Uses’. The plastic was first available in clear, black, grey, blue, yellow, green, red and brown. It would be used in products ranging from kitchen utensil handles, pens, billiard balls, tobacco pipe stems, buttons, jewellery, poker chips, lamps, and even one of the original versions of the Viewmaster toy! Bakelite was extremely prevalent all over homes in both America and England. The idea of Bakelite inspired not only products, but art as well. Coco Chanel, who has her own chapter elsewhere in this book, often utilised Bakelite in her very popular jewellery throughout the 1920s. Bakelite would even be featured on the cover of the first issue of Plastics Magazine in October of 1925.
The marketing campaign for Bakelite touted the product as ‘Helping The Family Keep Well’, and pushed the various medical applications for the product. The advert highlighted the fact that Bakelite could be found in everything from hearing aids, oralights and dental restoration. The ads also implored the manufacturing industry to be open to the possibility of Bakelite: ‘All major industries are making profitable use of one or more Bakelite materials, either through using them in the product itself, in production machinery, or in maintenance.’
Baekeland had managed to create a product that revolutionised the marketplace, but his patent would only last for so long – the patent for Bakelite expired in 1927. That left the market open for other companies to swoop in and start developing their own versions of the plastic. The most famous of these was the American Catalin Corporation, which produced Bakelite-style plastic in a wider-range of colours, offering upwards of fifteen brighter colours to the public. This flooded the marketplace with a plethora of products similar to, and often mistaken for, the actual brand name Bakelite. The opening of the market didn’t hurt Baekeland’s business, though. In fact, in 1929, General Bakelite Company got its largest ever order from Siemens telephone for phenolic moulding powder, used for the casing of telephones.
Baekeland sold his company in 1939 and retired to spend his remaining days sailing on his yacht and enjoying the later years of his life. Leo Baekeland would go on to be renowned in his field and made the cover of the prestigious Time Magazine on 20 May 20 1940, wherein he was labelled as the ‘Father of Plastics’. Leo Baekeland passed away on 23 February 1944, at the age of 80. The National Inventors Hall of Fame recognised Baekeland in 1978, and the Rail of Fame for United States Business Leadership would also award him posthumous honours in 1983.