Bakelite (1907) was the first fully synthetic plastic

Bakelite, invented by Belgian-born chemist Leo Baekeland in 1907 in his laboratory in Yonkers, New York, was the world’s first fully synthetic plastic: a hard resin made from phenol and formaldehyde, with no natural substance in the recipe. He filed his process patent in July 1907, announced the discovery to the New York section of the American Chemical Society in February 1909, and was granted the U.S. patent on 7 December 1909.

Wasn’t Parkesine first?

Not as a fully synthetic plastic. Some sources, including a Science Museum Group collection biography, give the title to Alexander Parkes, whose Parkesine was shown at London’s 1862 International Exhibition. The difference is the raw material. Parkesine, later sold as xylonite and celluloid, was cellulose nitrate: plant cellulose modified with chemicals, which the Museum of Design in Plastics classes as semi-synthetic. Bakelite was assembled from small laboratory molecules, which is why it counts as the first fully synthetic plastic.

Why did Baekeland invent Bakelite?

To make money. Baekeland was not chasing a revolution. Having sold his Velox photographic paper to Eastman Kodak in 1899 for a reputed $750,000, he chose synthetic resins deliberately as a commercial bet, and his first target was a substitute for shellac, then made from lac beetles. By tightly controlling heat and pressure in a vessel nicknamed the “Bakelizer”, he produced a resin that, pressed with fillers such as wood or asbestos, set permanently hard.

Advertised as “the material of 1,000 uses”, it went into radios, telephones and car parts. By his death in 1944, world production of Bakelite had reached an estimated 175,000 tons, used in more than 15,000 products.

A footnote for collectors: many of the brightly coloured, translucent radios and bangles now sold as vintage “Bakelite” are really Catalin, a filler-free cast version of the same phenol-formaldehyde resin first produced by the American Catalin Corporation in 1927.