Word: baekeland
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With that windfall, Baekeland, his wife Celine (known as "Bonbon") and two children moved to Snug Rock, a palatial estate north of Yonkers, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson River. There, in a barn he converted into a lab, he began foraging for his next big hit. It wasn't long before the burgeoning electrical industry seemed to say just one word to him: insulators...
...initial tease for Baekeland--"Doc Baekeland" to many--was the rising cost of shellac. For centuries, the resinous secretions that Laccifer lacca beetles deposited on trees had provided a cottage industry in southern Asia, where peasants heated and filtered it to produce a varnish for coating and preserving wood products. Shellac also happened to be an effective electrical insulator. Early electrical workers used it as a coating to insulate coils, and molded it into stand-alone insulators by pressing together layers of shellac-impregnated paper...
When electrification began in earnest in the first years of the century, demand for shellac soon outstripped supply. Baekeland recognized a killer ap when he saw one. If only he could come up with a synthetic substitute for shellac...
...Baekeland and others aiming to find commercial opportunities in the nascent electrical industry, that gunk was a signpost pointing toward something great. The challenge for Baekeland and his rivals was to find some set of conditions--some slippery ratio of ingredients and heat and pressure--that would yield a more workable, shellac-like substance. Ideally it would be something that would dissolve in solvents to make insulating varnishes and yet be as moldable as rubber. Starting around 1904, Baekeland and an assistant began their search. Three years later, after filling laboratory books with page after page of failed experiments, Baekeland...
Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish. Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier goo. And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic...