February 18, 2015 • 26 mins
Dr. Leo Baekeland, the inventor of the first synthetic plastic, was a wealthy man at a young age thanks to his innovation in photograph developing. But it was his work with phenol and formaldehyde that would help usher in the age of plastics.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy to Wilson. So, Tracy,
you saw The Graduate. I'm sure you probably remember the
(00:21):
scene that lots of people remember because it's kind of
a famous one liner where a family friend give gives
Dustin Hoffman's character Ben, who is the person who has
just graduated, a one word piece of career advice, and
that word, of course plastics. Plastics. And I love that movie.
And The Graduate came out in n seven, so you
(00:42):
might think based on that that plastics were invented just
a little while before then, if it was considered the
next big industry, But in fact, class plastic came into
being decades earlier. And as I sometimes do when they
are these uh kind of mystery items of public opinion,
I will ask friends and family about when they think
(01:03):
something happened, just to get a rough gauge as I
go into things. And I got answers from it. Wasn't
that a World War two thing? To um? Wasn't that
like thirties or post depression? But they weren't there all
a little later in the game. It was actually way
before that. And that's what we're going to talk about
today is plastics. Kind of the man who's come to
(01:23):
been come to be known as the father of plastics.
Less than a week before President Abraham Lincoln would deliver
the Gettysburg Address, Leo Henrick Bakelod was born in a Gainst, Belgium.
That was on November fourteenth, eighteen sixty three. His parents
weren't wealthy. His father, Charles, repaired shoes and his mother, Rosalie,
was a domestic servant. And Leo was really smart and
(01:46):
curious from a very very young age, but his thirst
for knowledge was almost kind of shut down by his father.
He wanted him to take a practical route in life,
and he wanted to he wanted his son to apprentice
as a tradesman when he entered his teen years, but
mother intervened and she advocated that her son should attend
high school. During his high school years, Leo would attend
(02:10):
regular school during the day and then classes against municipal
technical school at night. His technical school classes included economics, mathematics, physics,
and chemistry. Yeah, so he was like basically doubling down
on his education. He was taking a lot of advanced
extra courses just because he was, as we said, very curious.
And he began attending the university again at the age
(02:32):
of seventeen, which was younger than the average age under
a city scholarship, and just two years later he had
received his Bachelor of Science. So he continued sort of
this accelerated learning, and he continued his studies after his
bachelor his bachelor's degree, and in eighteen eighty four he
graduated with a Doctorate of Science maxima cum laudie at
(02:52):
the age of just twenty one. When he was in school,
Leo fell in love with the daughter of his professor
and mentor theatre sports. Leo married Selene Sworts on August
eighty nine and the marriage was very happy one. For
their honeymoon, the two of them went to the United
States on a travel scholarship that that Leo had been awarded,
and they really enjoyed their time in the States and
(03:14):
they decided to set down permanent roots. They eventually settled
in in New York and Leo took a job as
a chemist with photo equipment manufacturer E. An A. T.
Anthony and Company. The couple had three children, George Nina
and Jenny. Jenny was born in eighteen nineties, so that
was very early in their marriage, but she died of
influenza when she was only five. Yeah, Georgia Nina went
(03:37):
on to adult lives. However. In eighteen ninety three, Bigerland
left his job at the Photo Equipment UH Company and
he founded the Nepra Chemical Company. As part of his
new chemical venture, he worked on advancing the way photographs
were developed. For a long time, indirect sunlight was part
of the process, but that was really limiting, and that
(03:58):
meant that an overcast day could just shut down the
process completely. So this new process that he developed used
artificial light from gas lamps, and this was a pretty
huge step forward. It was also a pretty huge success
for Nepra, and the Velox paper that he invented and
that was used in this method spiked in sales, although
(04:19):
it was not instantaneous. It took some time to catch on.
He once said of his Velox paper and this new
developing technique quote, I had been too optimistic and believing
that the photographers were ready to abandon the old slow
process of making photographic prints. I had to find out
then how difficult it is to teach anything new to
people once they get used to older methods. So yeah,
(04:40):
he didn't have immediate catch on that. He went on
to talk about how really it was sort of the
amateur photographers and the new photographers that were willing to
try it, and they sort of got the ground swell
of support around this Velox paper, and eventually interest in
the paper grew and by it really had the attention
of the Eastman Kodak Company. Is actually an interesting story here,
(05:01):
but we have to preface it with a caveat. This
was relayed by his longtime driver, Dick Richter, and it
was a number of years after the incident reportedly happened. Uh. Yeah,
So in ninety seven Richter, who had been the chauffeur
for the Bakelands for quite some time, relayed this story
of how the inventor UH and the Eastman Kodak Company
(05:24):
came to their eventual agreement. Uh. The Velox paper that
was developed at Nebra Chemical was really putting a dent
in Kodak sales. So the larger company made an offer
to buy the patent, and initially Leo Bakland refused, so
Kodak came back with a much bigger offer, which was
a million dollars. Bakland supposedly gave Kodak the information to
(05:47):
produce the paper, which Codac did, but the development process
did not work. Uh So, we've mentioned on previous episodes
when we talked about inventors that patents often have a
step or a component admitted so that the original inventor
can retain trade secrets and prevent anyone from using the
patent without paying royalties. And it appears, at least again
(06:09):
according to this story told by their their longtime driver,
that Bakerland did precisely that with his Velox paper. When
the paper didn't work in the Eastman Kodak labs, they
went back to Bakerland, who allegedly told him that they
paid for the patent and not the knowledge that was
in his head. After he got an additional payment of
a hundred thousand additional dollars, he explained to them that
(06:31):
a chemical solution was needed to activate to activate the
process and then later removed. So whether or not this
chauffeur's version of the immense is accurate does make a
good story, but we do know that Bakerland sold his
Velox paper rights to Eastman Kodak for one million dollars,
which is a huge sum of money when you consider
(06:51):
this is the beginning of the twentieth century. UH, and
so flush with money from that deal, he and his
bride moved to a much larger home in the area
of Yonkers, New York known as Harmony Park. And their
new estate was called snug Rock and it included a
three story house, a separate cottage, a garage, and a stable.
And the stable was like a one and a half
(07:13):
stories and they eventually converted it into a lab so
that Dr Baitland could just do his work right there
at home. And before we get to what he does
with his free time that he has, now that he
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again that is squares based dot com slash history. So
UH Leo Bakeland is in his new lab. He's really
still quite young. He's only thirty five at this point
when he's made this huge deal with Eastman kodak UH
and he's able to do whatever he pleases, which is
kind of a dream for most of us. UH and
his experiments started focusing on combinations of phenol and for
(09:23):
melde him and this was a popular combination for scientists
to be working with at the time because of the
resins it created. UH. There were various different scientists and
inventors working with it, and Bakerland was really frank about
his interest in this area. He was in it because
he thought it was really lucrative. So many experiments by
other chemists had tried unsuccessfully to create an alternative to celluloid,
(09:47):
which had been invented four decades prior by brothers John
Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt. They had come up with
their plastic for a contest to create a substitute for
ivory in billiard balls, which they won. Yeah, at that point,
due to some over hunting, ivory was getting harder and
harder to come by. Uh, So billiard companies wanted to
(10:09):
figure out a new way to manufacture their the balls
used in billiards, and so that they sponsored this contest.
I think the prize was like ten thousand dollars. And
so Bakeland saw colleagues and uh, you know, other chemists
and inventors just constantly meeting with frustration over their attempts
to create something that would compete with celluloid or be
(10:31):
better than it. So he was like, I'm not going
to get in that game. I'm gonna focus on shellac instead.
And natural shellak, which had to be harvested from a
residin that was made by Beatles, was almost always in
short supply compared to demand. At this time. It was
popular for use in electrical cable installation, and as modern
electrical needs were growing very quickly and called for more
(10:52):
and more shellac. There was no way for the gathering
of natural sources to keep up with that, so Bakeland thought,
synthetic She'll black is the way to go. This is
going to be a huge success. Working with his assistant
Nathaniel Thurlow, he developed a shellak, but it didn't turn
out to be the gangbuster hit that they hoped for,
so then they shifted to the idea of creating a
(11:12):
synthetic resin that could be infused into wood and give
it greater strength. And Bakerland noticed during these experiments with
phenol and for melde hyde that again still using those
because they were the popular resin combo, that there was
an interesting effect. So he was treating wood again, trying
to infuse it with some sort of reson and make
(11:34):
it harder, but it wasn't making the wood any harder. However,
the wood was then oozing out a residue that was
very hard. His notebook entry for his final experiment on
June seven reads asbestos plus a in sealed tube. I
found two broken, perhaps in irregular expansion, but the reaction
(11:56):
seems to have been satisfactory because the resulting stick was
very high hard and below where there was some unmixed
liquid A, there was an end question mark of solidified matter,
yellowish and hard and entirely similar to the product obtained
by simply heating a alone and skilled tube. This looks promising,
and it will be worthwhile to determine in how far
(12:18):
this mass, which I will call D, is able to
make molded materials, either alone or in conjunctions with other
solid materials as for instance, asbestos, cassine, zinc, oxid starch,
different in organic powders, and lamp black, and thus make
a substitute for celluloid and for hard rubber. Heah, And
just for clarity, And this is the way I laid
(12:39):
out the outline. That's not his final experiment ever, Just
on that day of June eighteenth that he rates this
out and his entry for the following day follows up
on this work. He really feels like he's kind of
onto something. Uh. And the compound that he had been
calling substance D, which he was able to reproduce, he
then started referring to in his notes as it's spelled
(13:02):
back A lite B A K A l I T
e uh. And while that first mentioned that the name
is spelled with two a's. It shifted to bake light
in subsequent notes, so be A K E L I
T E. And at this point he had created the
first holy synthetic plastic. So a quick note on synthetic plastic.
The Hyatt brothers had created celluloid by modifying natural materials,
(13:25):
so cellulous nitrate and camper. But Baelan wasn't using natural
materials in his resent experiments, so that's not this is different. Yeah,
that's why. Uh, it's referred to as a synthetic plastic.
And according to a pamphlet that was written about the
apparatus that was used in bake light production, and we're
(13:46):
going to talk about that apparatus in just a moment.
This was also the first instance of an entirely man
made material. And I don't know why, but reading that
while I was putting together notes on this just kind
of blew my mind that the first man made material
was in the early nineteen hundreds. His first patent application
related to bake a light was in nineteen o six,
although it wasn't until nineteen o nine that the invention
(14:08):
was announced. He was a smart man and he wanted
to protect his work throughout his development. He actually had
hundreds of patents that were related to the invention of
bake a light alone. Uh. And it's actually not surprising
that he was so careful with his patent filings, since
his patent Velox is really what set him up in
life and and made him a success. In a speech
(14:30):
that he gave to the American Chemical Society on February
eight of nineteen o nine, he officially launched bake light
into this public sphere using a steam pressure unit called
the bake Aalizer, which I just love that name. Uh.
He started this semi commercial enterprise right there in his
own lab, producing bake light for customers, most of whom
were using it for electrical insulators. A Bacalizer which is
(14:53):
in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, although not
at the moment on display. It's about six ft or
two meters tall and roughly a yard in diameter. It
looks like a giant fat capsule on legs with a
round base, and according to the museum site, it's still
in usable condition. Yeah. It sort of looks like a
(15:13):
wonderful steampunk fans dream because it's got lots of cool
valves coming off of it and uh, you know, a
big cool valve handle. It's really quite lovely. Uh. Bakeland's
orders quickly grew to the point that he could not
keep working just from his lab and his you know,
one little bacalizer, and so in en the General bake
(15:34):
Light Corporation was founded. It eventually changed its name to
the bake Lake Company, and over the years it expanded
until it occupied a one d and twenty acre plants.
So the demands for these plastics was huge. Initially, bake
light was used in automotive and electrical applications because it
was melt resistant and wouldn't conduct electricity. It was just
(15:54):
really perfect for those uses. But soon it's used broadened
into a wide range of items, including pens, jewelry, handles
for catching, catching utensils, and the like. Genuine bake light
jewelry is now really a collector's item. Yeah. If you
do a quick search online, you'll find various sites that
are like, Okay, how do identify whether your jewelry is
(16:15):
genuinely bake light jewelry or not? And there's some wacky
little tests that you can do, and the company's slogan
became quote the material of a thousand uses, and its
logo was the infinity symbol to represent its seemingly endless possibilities.
And before we get on to start of talking a
little bit about Dr Leo Bakeland as a person, we're
(16:37):
gonna have a quick word from a sponsor. Alright, So
back to talking about Dr Bakeland. While he was busily
shifting the world of applied chemistry forward, he was also
working on really fully embracing life in the United States,
and his diaries reflect a belief that America was far better,
in his opinion, than Europe, and he became a US
citizen actually in seven He worked to eliminate his Belgian
(17:01):
accent entirely, so it was really important to him to
just completely blend in and become fully American. And he
even named his son George Washington, after the first US President,
so he was pretty on board with US patriotism from
a verily very early time of his arrival here. We
talked about how his inventions were pretty lucrative, and of
(17:23):
course that helps him work on his own projects, but
his family also used their good fortune to help other people. Yeah,
his wife selene H, who had helped her husband throughout
the years as a bookkeeper. Was an accomplished painter of
her own h She worked mainly in oil. She focused
a lot on landscapes. You can still find some pictures
of her paintings online. Uh and she kind of focusing
(17:46):
on that love of the arts, founded an after school
arts program for children, particularly children whose parents were working,
with the motto of quote bathe them, feed them, and
give them exposure and experience in the art. The Prospect
Settlement House, which served as the base of operations for
this program, was open from nineteen o eight until the
(18:06):
mid nineteen thirties. Here's a fun anecdote in Dr Bakerland's
biography on the Yonkers Historical Society's website, and it has
to do with his clothing. He only had one suit,
but Selene really wanted him to have more than one suit.
But she knew that he would not be willing to
pay how much it costs to buy a nice a
nice suit, even though they could easily afford it. So
(18:30):
she went to a clothing store, picked out a nice
suit for him, paid a hundred dollars of the hundred
and twenty five dollar price, and then asked that it
be put on the window in the window of the
shop with the twenty five dollar price tag and sold
only to her husband. Yes, so she went home and
she told her husband Leo, about this amazing deal on
a great suit. I think it was a blue searge suit,
(18:53):
and he was incredulous, but just the same he went
to the store to investigate his wife's claim and he
did end up purchase sing the suit. So Selene Bakerland's
plan was a success or. It would have been except
for the fact that Dr Bakeland sold the suit on
the way home to an admiring neighbor who was a
lawyer and offered him seventy five dollars for it. So
(19:15):
he was terribly pleased with himself that he made fifty
dollars out of this deal. So this may make it
sound like he was miserly, and that's not really the case.
He just didn't want to spend his money on clothes.
For example, he was a really early adopter of driving
as a regular mode of transportation, and in seven he
drove all over Europe on a tour with his family.
(19:37):
He purchased a yacht called the Ion and eventually got
in the habit of traveling by yacht back and forth
to work, So not so much that he was just
hoarding money, but more that he was kind of particular
about what he wanted to spend it on. Yeah. Uh,
And he's described as a man who was always excited
by science and chemistry, but also as being pretty mercurial.
(19:59):
He would get pretty bored if he spent too long
on anyone project. So it kind of makes sense that
he jumped from working on this photography development to working
in residents, to working in plastics, to then being really
into his cars and boats. So despite all of his
many achievements and the significant accumulation of wealth and taking
a yacht back and forth to work, he always remained
(20:21):
a pretty down to earth man. His granddaughter, also named Selene,
said of him, my grandfather in his later years used
to love to take the trolley into downtown Yonkers and
wander talking to street people. He came from a very
poor background and felt a kinship with the poor city folk.
Although he was a scientific genius and made a fortune,
he disdained the material things and remained a man of
(20:43):
simple needs. He was happiest on his boat in old
sneakers and white duck pants and shirt. In fact, he
wore sneakers when he was formally dressed. I sort of
love that. It's sweet. Uh yeah, I think to him
spending money on things like his boat in his cars
that made perfect sense. That was moving us forward and
they could be used as transportation was really logical and
(21:06):
not uh an extravagance. But again not so much the
shoes and clothes. Uh. Dr Bakerland retired finally in nineteen
thirty nine, and the bake Light Company merged with Union
Carbide that year. In late nineteen forty three, Dr Bakerland
was admitted to the Craig House Sanitarium and Beacon, New York,
and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage there several months later,
(21:29):
on February twenty third, nineteen forty four. He was buried
in Sleepy Hollow, New York. And he received many honors
throughout the years, both when he was still alive and posthumously. So.
For example, in nineteen o nine, he was elected president
of the Electrochemical Society. In nineteen twelve he became president
of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. UH. He was
(21:52):
president of another thing, the American Chemical Society in n four.
He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
in nineteen seventy eight, and in nineteen eighty three he
was inducted into the Rail of Fame for United States
Business Leadership. And that's just a small handful. If you
look at a biography of him that like lists out
all of his honors, it goes on for pages, because
(22:15):
he was both as an inventor and a businessman, very
very smart, and pretty ingenious. His wife, Selene, died almost
thirteen years to the day after he did, on February
nineteen fifty seven. She was living in one of the
family's homes in Coconut Grove, Florida at the time, and
her remains were transported to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New
(22:37):
York to be interred near her husband. The family estate
at Snug Rock, unfortunately, was burned to the ground in
a fire in nineteen fifty seven. As for bakelite, it
was eventually surpassed by other materials, and one of the
big reasons was limitations that come along with coloring. This
plastic bi collects natural color is amber, and it can
(22:57):
be pigmented with other tones adding fillers to strengthen the brittle.
The brittle plastic results in kind of muddy opaques though,
and it could never achieve really bright color tones, which
kind of makes me wonder. Um, Like, I for some
reason always picture bake light and kind of a kitchen
nineteen fifties kitchen context, and I wonder if I'm actually
(23:20):
confusing it with some other material. Well, if it's in
sort of the tones like the the avocados and even
some of the kind of um duller shades of pink,
it might still be baker. I'm thinking the avocados that
like the avocado dull yellow kind of colors exactly, those
very well might be. It's the sort of poppy or
(23:41):
like a true red, or you know, like a bright blues.
They couldn't achieve colors like that with it. Uh. And
now I will read a little bit of listener mail.
This is a short one, but I just wanted to
read this one. It's from our listener, Crystal. She says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, thank you so much for the podcast.
It is delightful. I've the listening for years and recently
discovered a new use for it. I am pregnant with
(24:04):
our first child and have been afflicted with morning sickness.
For me, some of it is mental because I have
some intrusive thoughts about current food aversions, which compound the problem.
I have been turning to the podcast more and more
as a distraction, which has helped me tremendously get through
those rougher moments while I'm at my mostly boring job.
Thanks again, I have a great day. Thank you, Crystal,
and congratulations on your upcoming new person. I hope that
(24:26):
all goes smoothly and delightfully. Okay, and now I have
another one which is also crazy charming. And when I
got it, I think I read it allowed to everybody
in the office. Uh says hello, Holly and Tracy. My
name is Waverley, and I'm just writing to tell you
something you might find funny. I love your podcast, but
I think the only person who likes your podcast more
than me is my girlfriend's bird. He's a dove Church
(24:47):
Church gets lonely sometimes and he'll coop if no one's
around to pay attention to him. The only thing that
seems to keep him entertained while we are gone is
your podcast. As soon as the podcast starts, he will
stop cooing and listen quietly. No, their podcast will satisfy Church,
and I've tried several. Moth Podcast and Welcome to night
Vale are a couple of that. He mentions we also
have to be careful and not play an episode more
(25:09):
than once, because then he will not be quiet. I
hope you enjoyed hearing about one of your more unusual fans. Uh.
That is the cutest thing I've ever heard, so high Church,
If you're listening, I just thought that was terribly sweet.
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. It
really did delight me to new end. Uh. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
(25:30):
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(26:12):
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Because it has to have works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy to Wilson. So, Tracy,
you saw The Graduate. I'm sure you probably remember the
(00:21):
scene that lots of people remember because it's kind of
a famous one liner where a family friend give gives
Dustin Hoffman's character Ben, who is the person who has
just graduated, a one word piece of career advice, and
that word, of course plastics. Plastics. And I love that movie.
And The Graduate came out in n seven, so you
(00:42):
might think based on that that plastics were invented just
a little while before then, if it was considered the
next big industry, But in fact, class plastic came into
being decades earlier. And as I sometimes do when they
are these uh kind of mystery items of public opinion,
I will ask friends and family about when they think
(01:03):
something happened, just to get a rough gauge as I
go into things. And I got answers from it. Wasn't
that a World War two thing? To um? Wasn't that
like thirties or post depression? But they weren't there all
a little later in the game. It was actually way
before that. And that's what we're going to talk about
today is plastics. Kind of the man who's come to
(01:23):
been come to be known as the father of plastics.
Less than a week before President Abraham Lincoln would deliver
the Gettysburg Address, Leo Henrick Bakelod was born in a Gainst, Belgium.
That was on November fourteenth, eighteen sixty three. His parents
weren't wealthy. His father, Charles, repaired shoes and his mother, Rosalie,
was a domestic servant. And Leo was really smart and
(01:46):
curious from a very very young age, but his thirst
for knowledge was almost kind of shut down by his father.
He wanted him to take a practical route in life,
and he wanted to he wanted his son to apprentice
as a tradesman when he entered his teen years, but
mother intervened and she advocated that her son should attend
high school. During his high school years, Leo would attend
(02:10):
regular school during the day and then classes against municipal
technical school at night. His technical school classes included economics, mathematics, physics,
and chemistry. Yeah, so he was like basically doubling down
on his education. He was taking a lot of advanced
extra courses just because he was, as we said, very curious.
And he began attending the university again at the age
(02:32):
of seventeen, which was younger than the average age under
a city scholarship, and just two years later he had
received his Bachelor of Science. So he continued sort of
this accelerated learning, and he continued his studies after his
bachelor his bachelor's degree, and in eighteen eighty four he
graduated with a Doctorate of Science maxima cum laudie at
(02:52):
the age of just twenty one. When he was in school,
Leo fell in love with the daughter of his professor
and mentor theatre sports. Leo married Selene Sworts on August
eighty nine and the marriage was very happy one. For
their honeymoon, the two of them went to the United
States on a travel scholarship that that Leo had been awarded,
and they really enjoyed their time in the States and
(03:14):
they decided to set down permanent roots. They eventually settled
in in New York and Leo took a job as
a chemist with photo equipment manufacturer E. An A. T.
Anthony and Company. The couple had three children, George Nina
and Jenny. Jenny was born in eighteen nineties, so that
was very early in their marriage, but she died of
influenza when she was only five. Yeah, Georgia Nina went
(03:37):
on to adult lives. However. In eighteen ninety three, Bigerland
left his job at the Photo Equipment UH Company and
he founded the Nepra Chemical Company. As part of his
new chemical venture, he worked on advancing the way photographs
were developed. For a long time, indirect sunlight was part
of the process, but that was really limiting, and that
(03:58):
meant that an overcast day could just shut down the
process completely. So this new process that he developed used
artificial light from gas lamps, and this was a pretty
huge step forward. It was also a pretty huge success
for Nepra, and the Velox paper that he invented and
that was used in this method spiked in sales, although
(04:19):
it was not instantaneous. It took some time to catch on.
He once said of his Velox paper and this new
developing technique quote, I had been too optimistic and believing
that the photographers were ready to abandon the old slow
process of making photographic prints. I had to find out
then how difficult it is to teach anything new to
people once they get used to older methods. So yeah,
(04:40):
he didn't have immediate catch on that. He went on
to talk about how really it was sort of the
amateur photographers and the new photographers that were willing to
try it, and they sort of got the ground swell
of support around this Velox paper, and eventually interest in
the paper grew and by it really had the attention
of the Eastman Kodak Company. Is actually an interesting story here,
(05:01):
but we have to preface it with a caveat. This
was relayed by his longtime driver, Dick Richter, and it
was a number of years after the incident reportedly happened. Uh. Yeah,
So in ninety seven Richter, who had been the chauffeur
for the Bakelands for quite some time, relayed this story
of how the inventor UH and the Eastman Kodak Company
(05:24):
came to their eventual agreement. Uh. The Velox paper that
was developed at Nebra Chemical was really putting a dent
in Kodak sales. So the larger company made an offer
to buy the patent, and initially Leo Bakland refused, so
Kodak came back with a much bigger offer, which was
a million dollars. Bakland supposedly gave Kodak the information to
(05:47):
produce the paper, which Codac did, but the development process
did not work. Uh So, we've mentioned on previous episodes
when we talked about inventors that patents often have a
step or a component admitted so that the original inventor
can retain trade secrets and prevent anyone from using the
patent without paying royalties. And it appears, at least again
(06:09):
according to this story told by their their longtime driver,
that Bakerland did precisely that with his Velox paper. When
the paper didn't work in the Eastman Kodak labs, they
went back to Bakerland, who allegedly told him that they
paid for the patent and not the knowledge that was
in his head. After he got an additional payment of
a hundred thousand additional dollars, he explained to them that
(06:31):
a chemical solution was needed to activate to activate the
process and then later removed. So whether or not this
chauffeur's version of the immense is accurate does make a
good story, but we do know that Bakerland sold his
Velox paper rights to Eastman Kodak for one million dollars,
which is a huge sum of money when you consider
(06:51):
this is the beginning of the twentieth century. UH, and
so flush with money from that deal, he and his
bride moved to a much larger home in the area
of Yonkers, New York known as Harmony Park. And their
new estate was called snug Rock and it included a
three story house, a separate cottage, a garage, and a stable.
And the stable was like a one and a half
(07:13):
stories and they eventually converted it into a lab so
that Dr Baitland could just do his work right there
at home. And before we get to what he does
with his free time that he has, now that he
is a man of means and leisure, do you want
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again that is squares based dot com slash history. So
UH Leo Bakeland is in his new lab. He's really
still quite young. He's only thirty five at this point
when he's made this huge deal with Eastman kodak UH
and he's able to do whatever he pleases, which is
kind of a dream for most of us. UH and
his experiments started focusing on combinations of phenol and for
(09:23):
melde him and this was a popular combination for scientists
to be working with at the time because of the
resins it created. UH. There were various different scientists and
inventors working with it, and Bakerland was really frank about
his interest in this area. He was in it because
he thought it was really lucrative. So many experiments by
other chemists had tried unsuccessfully to create an alternative to celluloid,
(09:47):
which had been invented four decades prior by brothers John
Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt. They had come up with
their plastic for a contest to create a substitute for
ivory in billiard balls, which they won. Yeah, at that point,
due to some over hunting, ivory was getting harder and
harder to come by. Uh, So billiard companies wanted to
(10:09):
figure out a new way to manufacture their the balls
used in billiards, and so that they sponsored this contest.
I think the prize was like ten thousand dollars. And
so Bakeland saw colleagues and uh, you know, other chemists
and inventors just constantly meeting with frustration over their attempts
to create something that would compete with celluloid or be
(10:31):
better than it. So he was like, I'm not going
to get in that game. I'm gonna focus on shellac instead.
And natural shellak, which had to be harvested from a
residin that was made by Beatles, was almost always in
short supply compared to demand. At this time. It was
popular for use in electrical cable installation, and as modern
electrical needs were growing very quickly and called for more
(10:52):
and more shellac. There was no way for the gathering
of natural sources to keep up with that, so Bakeland thought,
synthetic She'll black is the way to go. This is
going to be a huge success. Working with his assistant
Nathaniel Thurlow, he developed a shellak, but it didn't turn
out to be the gangbuster hit that they hoped for,
so then they shifted to the idea of creating a
(11:12):
synthetic resin that could be infused into wood and give
it greater strength. And Bakerland noticed during these experiments with
phenol and for melde hyde that again still using those
because they were the popular resin combo, that there was
an interesting effect. So he was treating wood again, trying
to infuse it with some sort of reson and make
(11:34):
it harder, but it wasn't making the wood any harder. However,
the wood was then oozing out a residue that was
very hard. His notebook entry for his final experiment on
June seven reads asbestos plus a in sealed tube. I
found two broken, perhaps in irregular expansion, but the reaction
(11:56):
seems to have been satisfactory because the resulting stick was
very high hard and below where there was some unmixed
liquid A, there was an end question mark of solidified matter,
yellowish and hard and entirely similar to the product obtained
by simply heating a alone and skilled tube. This looks promising,
and it will be worthwhile to determine in how far
(12:18):
this mass, which I will call D, is able to
make molded materials, either alone or in conjunctions with other
solid materials as for instance, asbestos, cassine, zinc, oxid starch,
different in organic powders, and lamp black, and thus make
a substitute for celluloid and for hard rubber. Heah, And
just for clarity, And this is the way I laid
(12:39):
out the outline. That's not his final experiment ever, Just
on that day of June eighteenth that he rates this
out and his entry for the following day follows up
on this work. He really feels like he's kind of
onto something. Uh. And the compound that he had been
calling substance D, which he was able to reproduce, he
then started referring to in his notes as it's spelled
(13:02):
back A lite B A K A l I T
e uh. And while that first mentioned that the name
is spelled with two a's. It shifted to bake light
in subsequent notes, so be A K E L I
T E. And at this point he had created the
first holy synthetic plastic. So a quick note on synthetic plastic.
The Hyatt brothers had created celluloid by modifying natural materials,
(13:25):
so cellulous nitrate and camper. But Baelan wasn't using natural
materials in his resent experiments, so that's not this is different. Yeah,
that's why. Uh, it's referred to as a synthetic plastic.
And according to a pamphlet that was written about the
apparatus that was used in bake light production, and we're
(13:46):
going to talk about that apparatus in just a moment.
This was also the first instance of an entirely man
made material. And I don't know why, but reading that
while I was putting together notes on this just kind
of blew my mind that the first man made material
was in the early nineteen hundreds. His first patent application
related to bake a light was in nineteen o six,
although it wasn't until nineteen o nine that the invention
(14:08):
was announced. He was a smart man and he wanted
to protect his work throughout his development. He actually had
hundreds of patents that were related to the invention of
bake a light alone. Uh. And it's actually not surprising
that he was so careful with his patent filings, since
his patent Velox is really what set him up in
life and and made him a success. In a speech
(14:30):
that he gave to the American Chemical Society on February
eight of nineteen o nine, he officially launched bake light
into this public sphere using a steam pressure unit called
the bake Aalizer, which I just love that name. Uh.
He started this semi commercial enterprise right there in his
own lab, producing bake light for customers, most of whom
were using it for electrical insulators. A Bacalizer which is
(14:53):
in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, although not
at the moment on display. It's about six ft or
two meters tall and roughly a yard in diameter. It
looks like a giant fat capsule on legs with a
round base, and according to the museum site, it's still
in usable condition. Yeah. It sort of looks like a
(15:13):
wonderful steampunk fans dream because it's got lots of cool
valves coming off of it and uh, you know, a
big cool valve handle. It's really quite lovely. Uh. Bakeland's
orders quickly grew to the point that he could not
keep working just from his lab and his you know,
one little bacalizer, and so in en the General bake
(15:34):
Light Corporation was founded. It eventually changed its name to
the bake Lake Company, and over the years it expanded
until it occupied a one d and twenty acre plants.
So the demands for these plastics was huge. Initially, bake
light was used in automotive and electrical applications because it
was melt resistant and wouldn't conduct electricity. It was just
(15:54):
really perfect for those uses. But soon it's used broadened
into a wide range of items, including pens, jewelry, handles
for catching, catching utensils, and the like. Genuine bake light
jewelry is now really a collector's item. Yeah. If you
do a quick search online, you'll find various sites that
are like, Okay, how do identify whether your jewelry is
(16:15):
genuinely bake light jewelry or not? And there's some wacky
little tests that you can do, and the company's slogan
became quote the material of a thousand uses, and its
logo was the infinity symbol to represent its seemingly endless possibilities.
And before we get on to start of talking a
little bit about Dr Leo Bakeland as a person, we're
(16:37):
gonna have a quick word from a sponsor. Alright, So
back to talking about Dr Bakeland. While he was busily
shifting the world of applied chemistry forward, he was also
working on really fully embracing life in the United States,
and his diaries reflect a belief that America was far better,
in his opinion, than Europe, and he became a US
citizen actually in seven He worked to eliminate his Belgian
(17:01):
accent entirely, so it was really important to him to
just completely blend in and become fully American. And he
even named his son George Washington, after the first US President,
so he was pretty on board with US patriotism from
a verily very early time of his arrival here. We
talked about how his inventions were pretty lucrative, and of
(17:23):
course that helps him work on his own projects, but
his family also used their good fortune to help other people. Yeah,
his wife selene H, who had helped her husband throughout
the years as a bookkeeper. Was an accomplished painter of
her own h She worked mainly in oil. She focused
a lot on landscapes. You can still find some pictures
of her paintings online. Uh and she kind of focusing
(17:46):
on that love of the arts, founded an after school
arts program for children, particularly children whose parents were working,
with the motto of quote bathe them, feed them, and
give them exposure and experience in the art. The Prospect
Settlement House, which served as the base of operations for
this program, was open from nineteen o eight until the
(18:06):
mid nineteen thirties. Here's a fun anecdote in Dr Bakerland's
biography on the Yonkers Historical Society's website, and it has
to do with his clothing. He only had one suit,
but Selene really wanted him to have more than one suit.
But she knew that he would not be willing to
pay how much it costs to buy a nice a
nice suit, even though they could easily afford it. So
(18:30):
she went to a clothing store, picked out a nice
suit for him, paid a hundred dollars of the hundred
and twenty five dollar price, and then asked that it
be put on the window in the window of the
shop with the twenty five dollar price tag and sold
only to her husband. Yes, so she went home and
she told her husband Leo, about this amazing deal on
a great suit. I think it was a blue searge suit,
(18:53):
and he was incredulous, but just the same he went
to the store to investigate his wife's claim and he
did end up purchase sing the suit. So Selene Bakerland's
plan was a success or. It would have been except
for the fact that Dr Bakeland sold the suit on
the way home to an admiring neighbor who was a
lawyer and offered him seventy five dollars for it. So
(19:15):
he was terribly pleased with himself that he made fifty
dollars out of this deal. So this may make it
sound like he was miserly, and that's not really the case.
He just didn't want to spend his money on clothes.
For example, he was a really early adopter of driving
as a regular mode of transportation, and in seven he
drove all over Europe on a tour with his family.
(19:37):
He purchased a yacht called the Ion and eventually got
in the habit of traveling by yacht back and forth
to work, So not so much that he was just
hoarding money, but more that he was kind of particular
about what he wanted to spend it on. Yeah. Uh,
And he's described as a man who was always excited
by science and chemistry, but also as being pretty mercurial.
(19:59):
He would get pretty bored if he spent too long
on anyone project. So it kind of makes sense that
he jumped from working on this photography development to working
in residents, to working in plastics, to then being really
into his cars and boats. So despite all of his
many achievements and the significant accumulation of wealth and taking
a yacht back and forth to work, he always remained
(20:21):
a pretty down to earth man. His granddaughter, also named Selene,
said of him, my grandfather in his later years used
to love to take the trolley into downtown Yonkers and
wander talking to street people. He came from a very
poor background and felt a kinship with the poor city folk.
Although he was a scientific genius and made a fortune,
he disdained the material things and remained a man of
(20:43):
simple needs. He was happiest on his boat in old
sneakers and white duck pants and shirt. In fact, he
wore sneakers when he was formally dressed. I sort of
love that. It's sweet. Uh yeah, I think to him
spending money on things like his boat in his cars
that made perfect sense. That was moving us forward and
they could be used as transportation was really logical and
(21:06):
not uh an extravagance. But again not so much the
shoes and clothes. Uh. Dr Bakerland retired finally in nineteen
thirty nine, and the bake Light Company merged with Union
Carbide that year. In late nineteen forty three, Dr Bakerland
was admitted to the Craig House Sanitarium and Beacon, New York,
and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage there several months later,
(21:29):
on February twenty third, nineteen forty four. He was buried
in Sleepy Hollow, New York. And he received many honors
throughout the years, both when he was still alive and posthumously. So.
For example, in nineteen o nine, he was elected president
of the Electrochemical Society. In nineteen twelve he became president
of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. UH. He was
(21:52):
president of another thing, the American Chemical Society in n four.
He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
in nineteen seventy eight, and in nineteen eighty three he
was inducted into the Rail of Fame for United States
Business Leadership. And that's just a small handful. If you
look at a biography of him that like lists out
all of his honors, it goes on for pages, because
(22:15):
he was both as an inventor and a businessman, very
very smart, and pretty ingenious. His wife, Selene, died almost
thirteen years to the day after he did, on February
nineteen fifty seven. She was living in one of the
family's homes in Coconut Grove, Florida at the time, and
her remains were transported to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New
(22:37):
York to be interred near her husband. The family estate
at Snug Rock, unfortunately, was burned to the ground in
a fire in nineteen fifty seven. As for bakelite, it
was eventually surpassed by other materials, and one of the
big reasons was limitations that come along with coloring. This
plastic bi collects natural color is amber, and it can
(22:57):
be pigmented with other tones adding fillers to strengthen the brittle.
The brittle plastic results in kind of muddy opaques though,
and it could never achieve really bright color tones, which
kind of makes me wonder. Um, Like, I for some
reason always picture bake light and kind of a kitchen
nineteen fifties kitchen context, and I wonder if I'm actually
(23:20):
confusing it with some other material. Well, if it's in
sort of the tones like the the avocados and even
some of the kind of um duller shades of pink,
it might still be baker. I'm thinking the avocados that
like the avocado dull yellow kind of colors exactly, those
very well might be. It's the sort of poppy or
(23:41):
like a true red, or you know, like a bright blues.
They couldn't achieve colors like that with it. Uh. And
now I will read a little bit of listener mail.
This is a short one, but I just wanted to
read this one. It's from our listener, Crystal. She says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, thank you so much for the podcast.
It is delightful. I've the listening for years and recently
discovered a new use for it. I am pregnant with
(24:04):
our first child and have been afflicted with morning sickness.
For me, some of it is mental because I have
some intrusive thoughts about current food aversions, which compound the problem.
I have been turning to the podcast more and more
as a distraction, which has helped me tremendously get through
those rougher moments while I'm at my mostly boring job.
Thanks again, I have a great day. Thank you, Crystal,
and congratulations on your upcoming new person. I hope that
(24:26):
all goes smoothly and delightfully. Okay, and now I have
another one which is also crazy charming. And when I
got it, I think I read it allowed to everybody
in the office. Uh says hello, Holly and Tracy. My
name is Waverley, and I'm just writing to tell you
something you might find funny. I love your podcast, but
I think the only person who likes your podcast more
than me is my girlfriend's bird. He's a dove Church
(24:47):
Church gets lonely sometimes and he'll coop if no one's
around to pay attention to him. The only thing that
seems to keep him entertained while we are gone is
your podcast. As soon as the podcast starts, he will
stop cooing and listen quietly. No, their podcast will satisfy Church,
and I've tried several. Moth Podcast and Welcome to night
Vale are a couple of that. He mentions we also
have to be careful and not play an episode more
(25:09):
than once, because then he will not be quiet. I
hope you enjoyed hearing about one of your more unusual fans. Uh.
That is the cutest thing I've ever heard, so high Church,
If you're listening, I just thought that was terribly sweet.
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. It
really did delight me to new end. Uh. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
(25:30):
at History Podcast at house to works dot com. You
can also connect with us on Twitter at misst in history,
at Facebook dot com, slash missed in history, used in
history dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest dot com
slash miss in history. We also have a spreadshirt store
at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com, so you
can get t shirts and bags and phone covers and
(25:51):
all manner of other goodies. If you had like a
research a little bit more about what we talked about today,
you can go to our parents site, how Stuff Works
do a search for sticks and you'll get an article
called how plastics Work. You can also research almost anything
your mind can conjure there. If you would like to
visit us in our home base on the web that
is missed in history dot com, or we have all
(26:12):
of our episodes with a full archive. We have show
notes for any of the episodes since Tracy and I
have been working on the show, as well as the
occasional blog post, So we hope you visit us at
mist in history dot com and how stone works dot
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