CORBIS In 1907, Baekeland developed the first all-artificial plastic, which he called Bakelite

Monday, March 29, 1999
In the opening scene of The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock (played by a young Dustin Hoffman) is awkwardly working an affluent Southern California crowd at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents when a family friend offers one of the century's most famous pieces of cinematic advice: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."

	Leo Baekeland Tim Berners-Lee Rachel Carson Francis Crick & James Watson Albert Einstein Philo Farnsworth Enrico Fermi Alexander Fleming Sigmund Freud Robert Goddard Kurt Gödel Edwin Hubble John Maynard Keynes Louis, Mary & Richard Leakey Jean Piaget Jonas Salk William Shockley Alan Turing Ludwig Wittgenstein Wilbur & Orville Wright Categories Leaders/Revol. Builders/Titans Scientiests/Thinkers Heroes/Icons

Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled. The scene neatly captured their own late-'60s ambivalence toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times. They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops, but envied — and longed for — the authentic touch and timelessness of marble and wood. The chord struck by that line in The Graduate underscored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Hendrik Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough that would change the stuff our world is made of.

A Belgian-born chemist-entrepreneur, Baekeland had a knack for spotting profitable opportunities. He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox, an improved photographic paper that freed photographers from having to use sunlight for developing images. With Velox, they could rely on artificial light, which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric. It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work. In 1899 George Eastman, whose cameras and developing services would make photography a household activity, bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $1 million.

With that windfall, Baekeland, his wife Celine (known as "Bonbon") and two children moved to Snug Rock, a palatial estate north of Yonkers, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson River. There, in a barn he converted into a lab, he began foraging for his next big hit. It wasn't long before the burgeoning electrical industry seemed to say just one word to him: insulators.

The initial tease for Baekeland — "Doc Baekeland" to many — was the rising cost of shellac. For centuries, the resinous secretions that Laccifer lacca beetles deposited on trees had provided a cottage industry in southern Asia, where peasants heated and filtered it to produce a varnish for coating and preserving wood products. Shellac also happened to be an effective electrical insulator. Early electrical workers used it as a coating to insulate coils, and molded it into stand-alone insulators by pressing together layers of shellac-impregnated paper.

When electrification began in earnest in the first years of the century, demand for shellac soon outstripped supply. Baekeland recognized a killer ap when he saw one. If only he could come up with a synthetic substitute for shellac.

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Sept. 22, 1924

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