Leo Baekeland
Leo Hendrik Baekeland (November 14, 1863 - February 23, 1944) was a Belgian-born American chemist who invented Velox photographic paper (1893) and Bakelite (1907), an inexpensive, nonflammable, versatile, and popular plastic.
Born in Ghent, Belgium, Baekeland was the son of a cobbler and a maid. He emigrated to America in his twenties, inspired by the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Baekeland sold his patent for Velox photographic paper to the president of Kodak, George Eastman, for $750,000.
The invention of Bakelite is considered the beginning of the Age of Plastics. Bakelite was made from phenol (then known as carbolic acid) and formaldehyde. These can be mixed, heated, and then either molded or extruded. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry winning German Adolf von Baeyer had experimented with this material in 1872, but did not complete its development. Bakelite took the industry by storm after 1907.
Bakelite was the first plastic invented that held its shape after being heated. Radios, telephones and England in 1916 and met James Swinburne, who almost ten years earlier had coincidentally experimented with and created a material identical to Bakelite only to find that Baekeland had been awarded the patent the day before. Baekeland made Swinburne the chairman of the new Bakelite Limited, his British subsidiary. Baekeland appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine on September 22, 1924.
As Baekeland got older, he became more eccentric, getting into fierce battles with his son (and presumptive heir) over salary and other issues. He sold the General Bakelite Company to Union Carbide in 1939, at his son's prompting, retired, and eventually became a recluse, eating all of his meals from cans and becoming obsessed with developing an immense tropical garden on his Florida estate. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a sanatorium in Beacon, New York.
Baekeland's great-grandson spent several years in a psychiatric hospital after murdering his mother; ironically, he suffocated himself with a plastic bag in 1981.
