Word: baekeland
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...filed patent applications and soon began leaking word of his invention to other chemists. In 1909 Baekeland unveiled the world's first fully synthetic plastic at a meeting of the New York chapter of the American Chemical Society. Would-be customers discovered it could be fashioned into molded insulation, valve parts, pipe stems, billiard balls, knobs, buttons, knife handles and all manner of items...
...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...
...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...
...Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland patents Bakelite, the world's first true plastic...