I wake up in the morning, turn off the alarm clock, use my toothbrush and hair brush, start the coffee maker, stretch out on my yoga mat—all of these are made with plastics. Then there are the plastics in my car , my office furniture, my campus telephone … the list goes on. For much of human history, everyday tools and products were made mostly from animal skins, bone, ivory, wood, metals, plant fibers, animal hair, and the like.
For example, civilizations in Central America have played games with rubber balls for nearly 3, years. The problem was these natural plastics were difficult and expensive to obtain. As the industrial revolution created huge demand for materials, chemists began seriously searching for new sources of materials—and new materials. A few partially synthetic plastics were invented in the s. In the Roaring Twenties cast phenolics were developed which became very popular for costume jewelry , the emancipated flappers of the era enveloped in colourful beads , bangles , dress clips and earrings.
By the s a newcomer, the American Catalin Corporation of New York came up with a wide variety of new colours and shapes, and also gave its name to this form of plastic after By this time the "Age of Plastics" was well and truly established throughout the industrialised world. Similar plastics were made in the UK, Australia and many other countries. Cast phenolics were made until the end of the Second World War but after that point it became uneconomical to continue their manufacture as each piece had to be individually cast in a non-reusable mould and then carved, buffed and tumble polished.
Nowadays vintage plastics are becoming highly collectable and some can fetch very high prices. For more information on early plastics click on: Xylonite - the British Celluloid. Here is a really useful article on how to repair chipped plastics. Join our Facebook Page so you never miss a thing! Like this Page. The Story of E. Mcknight Kauffer, a lesser known, but hugely important Art Deco poster artist.
See his works and learn more. Find exquisite Art Deco Engagement rings to buy for all budgets As part of the sale agreement with Kodak, Baekeland had agreed not to development any more photographic technology; he would need a new area of research.
By the s, chemists had begun to recognise the potential of natural resins and fibres, but attempts to replicate these in laboratory settings had been unsuccessful. Baekeland familiarised himself with previous work and performed his research in a systematic and well documented fashion, carefully controlling and varying the effects of temperature, pressure and the types and proportions of phenol and formaldehyde. The most plentiful natural polymer in the world is cellulose, the major natural structural material of trees and other plants.
The proteins that make up our bodies are polymers, including DNA deoxyribonucleic acid , the material that carries the genetic codes for all living creatures.
Chemists did not fully understand or identify polymers until around But as early as , the British chemist Thomas Graham had noted that when he dissolved organic compounds in solutions, some of them—cellulose, for instance—would not pass through even the finest filter paper without leaving sticky residues. Nor could these compounds be purified into a crystalline form. Graham thought such substances represented an entirely different organization of matter. He called them "colloids," after "kolla," the Greek word for glue, another material that could not penetrate fine filters.
Many 19th century manufacturers modified colloids and natural polymers to form new materials. In , the American inventor John Wesley Hyatt used chemically modified cellulose to produce an astonishing new product called Celluloid, a plastic that was used for everything from hair combs to silent-movie film. By , Count Hilaire de Chardonnet was marketing the first synthetic textile, Chardonnet silk, made by spinning strands of cellulose nitrate into artificial fiber.
These and other early plastics were made from existing materials. The next step—the creation of completely synthetic plastic—was still to come. During the Victorian era, it was fashionable for wealthy gentlemen to own a billiard table and a set of billiard balls crafted of the finest and most perfect ivory. But 19th century hunters had virtually decimated the elephant herds of Africa and India, the source of ivory.
They never received the money. But they did change history — by inventing celluloid, one of the world's first plastics. Celluloid not only resembled ivory, it had astonishing properties: at normal temperatures, it was a permanent, hard solid; when heated, it became soft and could be molded or rolled into sheets. It soon became the material of choice for billiard balls and dozens of other products. The Hyatts made celluloid by applying heat and pressure to a mix of cellulose nitrate and camphor; it was thus a plastic made by modifying natural materials.
More than 40 years were to pass before the invention of the first wholly synthetic plastic. By , the invention of Velox photographic paper had already made Leo Baekeland a wealthy man. At his Snug Rock estate in Yonkers, New York, he maintained a home laboratory where he and his assistant, Nathaniel Thurlow, involved themselves in a variety of projects. Like other scientists of their day, Baekeland and Thurlow understood the potential of phenol-formaldehyde resins.
The chemical literature included reports written decades earlier by the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer and by his student, Werner Kleeberg. Von Baeyer had reported that when he mixed phenol, a common disinfectant, with formaldehyde, it formed a hard, insoluble material that ruined his laboratory equipment, because once formed, it could not be removed.
Kleeburg reported a similar experience, describing the substance he produced as a hard amorphous mass, infusible and insoluble and thus of little use. In , German chemist Adolf Luft patented a resin made by modifying Kleeburg's composition in the hope that it could compete commercially with celluloid. At least seven other scientists tried phenol and formaldehyde combinations in their attempt to create a commercially viable plastic molding compound.
But no one was able to create a useful product. Hoping to capitalize on shortages of naturally occurring shellac—used to insulate electrical cables in the early years of the 20th century—Baekeland and Thurlow, as well as several other investigators, were experimenting with soluble resins.
Shellac was made from a resin secreted by the East Asian lac bug; it was harvested by the labor-intensive process of scraping the hardened deposits from the trees these insects inhabited. Eventually, they developed a phenol-formaldehyde shellac called Novolak, but it was not a commercial success. By the early summer of , Baekeland changed his focus from trying to create a wood coating to trying to strengthen wood by actually impregnating it with a synthetic resin.
On June 18, , Baekeland began a new laboratory notebook now in the Archives Center of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History documenting the results of tests in which he applied a phenol and formaldehyde mixture to various pieces of wood.
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