It was 20th century alchemy. From something as vile as coal tar came a remarkably versatile substance. It wasn't the first plastic, however. Celluloid had been commercially available for decades as a substitute for tortoise-shell, horn, bone and other materials. But celluloid, which had developed a reputation as a cheap mimic of better traditional materials, was derived from chemically treated cotton and other cellulose-containing vegetable matter. Bakelite was lab-made through and through. It was 100% synthetic.

Baekeland founded the General Bakelite Corp. to both make and license the manufacture of Bakelite. Competitors soon marketed knockoffs--most notably Redmanol and Condensite, which Thomas Edison used in a failed attempt to dominate the nascent recording industry with "unbreakable" phonograph disks. The presence of inauthentic Bakelite out there led to an early 20th century version of the "Intel Inside" logo. Items made with the real thing carried a "tag of genuineness" bearing the Bakelite name. Following drawn-out patent wars, Baekeland negotiated a merger with his rivals that put him at the helm of a veritable Bakelite empire.

Bakelite became so visible in so many places that the company advertised it as "the material of a thousand uses." It became the stuff of everything from cigar holders and rosary beads to radio housings, distributor caps and telephone casings. A 1924 TIME cover story on Baekeland reported that those familiar with Bakelite's potential "claim that in a few years it will be embodied in every mechanical facility of modern civilization."

In truth, Bakelite — whose more chemically formal name is polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride — was just a harbinger of the age of plastics. Since Bakelite's heyday, researchers have churned out a polysyllabic catalog of plastics: polymethylmethacrylate (Plexiglas), polyesters, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC, a.k.a. vinyl), polyhexamethylene adipamide (the original nylon polymer), polytetraperfluoroethylene (Teflon), polyurethane, poly- this, poly-that.

In 1945, a year after Baekeland died, annual plastic production in the U.S. reached more than 400,000 tons. In 1979, 12 years after The Graduate, the annual volume of plastic manufactured overtook that of steel, the symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Last year nearly 47 million tons of plastic were produced.

Today plastic is nearly everywhere, from the fillings in our teeth to the chips in our computers (researchers are developing flexible transistors made of plastic instead of silicon so they can make marvels such as a flat-panel television screen that will roll like a scroll up your living-room wall). Plastic may not be as vilified now as it was in 1967, but it's still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds in a shopper's breast in the instant it takes to decide on the answer.

NPR science correspondent Ivan Amato is author of Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made Of

< < Previous  1 | 2 | 3

Sept. 22, 1924

Larger Cover

		The Appeal By: John Grisham				A Thousand Splendid Suns By: Khaled Hosseini				7th Heaven (Women's Murder Club) By: James Patterson