Leo Baekeland sold a photo paper to Kodak, then invented plastic
A cobbler's son from Ghent, Leo Baekeland got rich selling his Velox photographic paper to George Eastman, then was barred from photography research for 20 years. So he turned to the sticky mess made by phenol and formaldehyde and, in 1907, came out with Bakelite, the first plastic that kept its shape when heated.
Baekeland was born in Ghent on November 14, 1863, to a shoemaker and a housemaid. A city scholarship took him to Ghent University in 1880, and he earned his doctorate with the highest honours at 21. He taught in Bruges and then Ghent, married Céline Swarts in 1889, and that same year used a travel grant to visit the United States. In New York the chemist Charles Chandler urged him to stay, and the photographic firm of Richard Anthony offered him a job.
After going solo as a consultant, illness and dwindling money pushed him back to an old idea: a paper that could print enlargements under artificial light. Two years' work produced Velox, the first photographic paper to succeed commercially. With a partner, Leonard Jacobi, he founded the Nepera Chemical Company to make it, and in 1899 the firm sold to Eastman Kodak for $750,000, netting Baekeland about $215,000. He set up a private laboratory at his Yonkers home and, bound by the non-compete clause, went looking for a new field, admitting frankly that the aim was to make money.
Earlier chemists, including Adolf von Baeyer, had combined phenols with aldehydes and got only a useless black goo. Baekeland attacked the problem systematically, varying temperature, pressure and proportions. A soluble shellac substitute he called Novolak disappointed, but by controlling heat and pressure he produced a hard, mouldable, heat-resistant material. He filed his patent in July 1907 and announced the result to the American Chemical Society in February 1909. Cheap, non-flammable and an excellent electrical insulator, Bakelite went into radios, telephones and countless other products; by his death world output was around 175,000 tons a year across more than 15,000 uses.
He also helped perfect an electrolytic cell behind Hooker Chemical's giant plant at Niagara Falls, and held over 100 patents. Age made him eccentric; he would walk into the pool fully clothed to cool off. After bitter disputes with his son, he sold his company to Union Carbide in 1939, retired to a Florida garden, and died on February 23, 1944.
Source: Leo Baekeland
