The glass shattered against the edge of the cast-iron sink. It was the eighth test tube he had broken that month. The amber-colored substance inside wouldn’t scrape out, wouldn’t melt, and wouldn’t dissolve in acid. He was trying to create a liquid coating to paint onto wood. Instead, he had made a rock inside a narrow glass tube.
The year was 1907. The electrical age was wiring itself across America. Every new telegraph line, motor, switchboard, and light fixture required insulation to keep the current from sparking and burning down buildings. The rapidly expanding industry relied on shellac to coat the wires.
Shellac was scraped from the branches of trees in India and Thailand. It was a resin left behind by the female lac bug. It took fifteen thousand bugs to excrete enough resin to make one pound of shellac. The shipping took months. The price fluctuated wildly depending on the weather in Southeast Asia.
Worse, it was brittle. Under the increasing heat of modern electrical currents, shellac had a tendency to melt.
Leo worked in a laboratory attached to his house on North Broadway in Yonkers, New York. The estate was called Snug Rock. He was a chemist who had already secured his financial future by inventing a new type of photographic paper called Velox. He had sold the rights to Eastman Kodak in 1899 for a million dollars.
He could have stopped working. He didn’t. He bought the house in Yonkers, built a private laboratory, and looked for a new problem.
The electrical industry’s desperation for insulation was well known. Leo figured a synthetic substitute for bug resin would sell fast. He wasn’t trying to invent a new category of matter. He was trying to make a cheaper, more reliable varnish.
He started mixing phenol, a harsh, toxic compound derived from coal tar, with formaldehyde.
The reaction was violent and unpredictable. Sometimes the chemical mixture foamed over the wooden desks. Sometimes it created a sticky, useless syrup that refused to dry. The neighbors in Yonkers occasionally complained about the sharp, medicinal smell of carbolic acid. The wind usually carried it toward the Hudson River.
Most often, the reaction resulted in a solid, unyielding chunk that hardened at the bottom of his glassware. The only way to get the ruined experiment out was to break the glass with a hammer.
He spent months just replacing shattered equipment. Records from his supplier show constant reorders of glass tubing.
His laboratory notebooks from the early 1900s document a man fighting the basic laws of chemistry. He adjusted the ambient temperature in the room. The mixture hardened. He added different chemical catalysts. It hardened again.
He needed a liquid. The mixture kept betraying him by turning into a permanent solid. Once the amber substance cooled, no chemical solvent on earth could break it down again. It ignored boiling water. It ignored caustic acids.
He built a heavy iron pressure vessel out of plumbing parts to control the violent reactions. He called it the “Bakelizer.” He used it to force the phenol and formaldehyde to mix under intense heat and pressure, trying to prevent the liquid from boiling into a useless foam.
He ran the machine at 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure gauge hovered near 75 pounds per square inch.
When he opened the heavy iron lid, he found the same result. The liquid had solidified. It took him three years of broken glass and failed varnishes to look at the solid mass and realize his failure was the answer.
He stopped trying to make the substance dissolve. He pulled a molded piece of the hardened resin from the iron vessel. He wired it to a circuit and ran high-voltage electricity through it. The current stopped dead. Nothing sparked.
He held a flame directly to the hardened mass. It didn’t burn. It didn’t melt. It barely even got warm.
He hadn’t made a substitute for tree resin. He had forced entirely different molecules to bond into something that had never existed in nature. He had created a synthetic polymer.
He filed for a patent in July 1907. U.S. Patent Office records show Patent No. 942,699 was officially granted in December 1909. He named the material Bakelite.
He introduced it to the American Chemical Society that same year. He brought samples to the meeting. He demonstrated that the material could be molded into any shape while hot, but once it cooled and set, its shape was permanent. No amount of future heat could alter it.
The electrical industry stopped buying shellac. Bakelite was poured into molds to make the heavy black casings for early telephones. It was used for radio dials, automobile distributor caps, electrical plugs, and light switches.
It was heavy, dense, and cool to the touch. By the 1920s, it was marketed as “The Material of a Thousand Uses.” It went into billiard balls, jewelry, and camera bodies.
The original iron Bakelizer sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History today. The Yonkers house was eventually sold and later demolished.
The material he created in that laboratory was designed to be indestructible, immune to decay, and resistant to the natural forces of time. A century later, the early radios and black rotary phones molded from his accidental rocks remain completely intact in landfills and antique shops across the country, outliving the man who made them, exactly as they were chemically forced to do.
Sources:
United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent No. 942,699, granted December 7, 1909.
American Chemical Society, National Historic Chemical Landmarks, “Bakelite: The World’s First Synthetic Plastic,” Yonkers, NY.
