When was bakelite invented

Discover collectable salt and pepper sets in wonderful Art Deco shapes. And it wasn't just the kitchen. Plastic infiltrated throughout the whole home with clocks, radios, telephones and toys all in bright, vibrant colours. Discover the best Bakelite Clock designers. Read about Art Deco Radios from all over the world. Jewelry, and designer objects made from Bakelite, Casein and Celluloid appeared at the Paris exhibition from which Art Deco got its name.

The motifs of Art Deco design were expressed in the new plastics among the interiors created by the best artists and designers in each country's pavilion. The beauty and durability of this magic plastic began to be appreciated with luxury items produced which have survived to this day.

It was even used in the fittings and furnishings of the Queen Mary and the Normandie, luxury liners crossing the Atlantic in the s. And just look at this incredibly rare Caravan. How I would love to spend a night in that! 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.

For example, it was resistant to heat and would not conduct electricity, so it was a really good insulator—which made it particularly useful in the automotive and electrical industries emerging in the early s. Like many modern plastics, Bakelite was lightweight and durable, and it could be molded into nearly infinite shapes, so its use quickly expanded as manufacturers realized its potential. Consumers primarily were attracted to its aesthetic qualities: a sleek, stylish look coupled with a substantial, high-end feel.

People bought Bakelite jewelry boxes, lamps, desk sets, clocks, radios, telephones, kitchenware, tableware, and a variety of game pieces such as chess sets, billiard balls, and poker chips. Bakelite ushered in a new era of attractive, affordable, convenient consumer goods, making it possible for a broad range of consumers to enjoy products that previously had been inaccessible. Bakelite made perhaps its largest stamp on the world of fashion. Bakelite jewelry became immensely popular in the s as an affordable and attractive replacement for other materials.

He gained a scholarship from the City of Ghent to study chemistry at the University of Ghent. After gaining his Ph. After traveling to New York on a fellowship in , he was persuaded to move there. He worked at a New York based photographic company for a couple of years, before setting himself up as a consultant.

It was during this period that he developed Velox, a paper coated with gelatin silver chloride, which became the first commercially successful photographic paper that could be developed by artificial light.

Eight years after this discovery, he sold the rights to the Eastman Kodak Company. Baekeland's other big discovery was the synthesis of Bakelite, the first plastic that held its shape after being heated. 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.

An entry made the following day states:. All these tests were conducted in concentrated horizontal digester and the apparatus was reasonably tight.

Yet the surface of the blocks of wood does not feel hard although a small part of gum that has oozed out is very hard. In order to determine in how far this is possible I have heated in sealed tubes a portion of this liquid so as to determine whether there is a further separation of H 2 O or whether this is simply a solution of the hard gum in excess of phenol, then by simple open air evaporation I shall be able to accomplish hardening while I shall not succeed in closed sealed tubes.

I have also heated an open tube rammed with a mixture of asbestos fiber and liquid. Also a sealed tube rammed with mixture of asbestos fiber and liquid. I found tube broken perhaps in irregular expansion but the reactions seems to have been satisfactory because the resulting stick was very hard and below where there was some unmixed liquid A there was an end? This looks promising and it will be worth while to determine in how far this mass which I will call D is able to make moulded materials either alone or in conjunctions with other solid materials as for instance asbestos, casein, zinc oxid sic , starch, different inorganic powders and lamp black and thus make a substitute for celluloid and for hard rubber.

Substance D was "insoluble in all solvents, does not soften.