100+ Years of Plastics. Leo Baekeland and Beyond

Abstract

Leo H. Baekeland (1863-1944) was a pivotal figure in the history of science and technology. As a chemist, chemical engineer and entrepreneur, he made “game changing” contributions in photography, electrochemistry, and polymer science. Bakelite, the product that made him most famous, provided the foundation for the modern plastics industry. Blending skills in theory and application, Baekeland demonstrated that what chemists had long hoped to be true was, in fact true: It is both possible and practical to create wholly new compositions of matter that will deliver properties that are unduplicated in nature. With Bakelite standing as proof, Baekeland opened new doors for generations of chemists who followed, and led them to discoveries and inventions that made possible today’s synthetic polymers industry.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.