Families gathered around Bakelite radios (to listen to programs sponsored by the Bakelite Corporation), drove Bakelite-accessorized cars, kept in touch with Bakelite phones, washed clothes in machines with Bakelite blades, pressed out wrinkles with Bakelite-encased irons—and, of course, styled their hair with Bakelite combs. "From the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses will be made of this material of a thousand purposes," Time magazine enthused in 1924 in an issue that sported Baekeland on the cover.
The creation of Bakelite marked a shift in the development of new plastics. From then on, scientists stopped looking for materials that could emulate nature; rather, they sought "to rearrange nature in new and imaginative ways." The 1920s and '30s saw an outpouring of new materials from labs around the world. One was cellulose acetate, a semisynthetic product (plant cellulose was one of its base ingredients) that had the easy adaptability of celluloid but wasn't flammable. Another was polystyrene, a hard, shiny plastic that could take on bright colors, remain crystalline clear, or be puffed up with air to become the foamy polymer DuPont later trademarked as Styrofoam. DuPont also introduced nylon, its answer to the centuries-long search for an artificial silk. When the first nylon stockings were introduced, after a campaign that promoted the material as being as "lustrous as silk" and as "strong as steel," women went wild. Stores sold out of their stock in hours, and in some cities, the scarce supplies led to nylon riots, full-scale brawls among shoppers. Across the ocean, British chemists discovered polyethylene, the strong, moisture-proof polymer that would become the sine qua non of packaging. Eventually, we'd get plastics with features nature had never dreamed of: surfaces to which nothing would stick (Teflon), fabrics that could stop a bullet (Kevlar).
Though fully synthetic like Bakelite, many of these new materials differed in one significant way. Bakelite is a thermoset plastic, meaning that its polymer chains are hooked together through the heat and pressure applied when it is molded. The molecules set the way batter sets in a waffle iron. And once those molecules are linked into a daisy chain, they can't be unlinked. You can break a piece of Bakelite, but you can't melt it down to make it into something else. Thermoset plastics are immutable molecules—the Hulks of the polymer world—which is why you'll still find vintage Bakelite phones, pens, bangles, and even combs that look nearly brand-new.
Polymers such as polystyrene and nylon and polyethylene are thermoplastics; their polymer chains are formed in chemical reactions that take place before the plastic ever gets near a mold. The bonds holding these daisy chains together are looser than those in Bakelite, and as a result these plastics readily respond to heat and cold. They melt at high temperatures (how high depends on the plastic), solidify when cooled, and if made cold enough can even freeze. All of which means that, unlike Bakelite, they can be molded and melted and remolded over and over again. Their shape-shifting versatility is one reason thermoplastics quickly eclipsed the thermosets and today constitute about 90 percent of all the plastics produced.
Many of the new thermoplastics at one time or another found their way into combs, which, thanks to injection molding and other new fabrication technologies, could be made faster and in far greater quantities than ever before—thousands of combs in a single day. This was a small feat in and of itself, but multiplied across all the necessities and luxuries that could then be inexpensively mass-produced, it's understandable why many at the time saw plastics as the harbinger of a new era of abundance. Plastics, so cheaply and easily produced, offered salvation from the haphazard and uneven distribution of natural resources that had made some nations wealthy, left others impoverished, and triggered countless devastating wars. Plastics promised a material utopia, available to all.
See what we're tweeting about
4 Comments
Add CommentThank you for printing this article. It answered a question that I have wondered about for years. My mother would tell us that she thought dad's death by cancer was somehow connected to his work on the Manhattan Project.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe thought she was embellishing reality a bit, because though dad might be considered the father of modern plastics, what did plastics have to do with atomic bombs?
So, thank you for publishing this article and helping to clear up that little mystery.
Very interesting and thoughtful article. However I must say that the spam on this site is getting worse. It is clearly generated by an auto spam-blogger which randomly generates usernames and passwords.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is incredibly easy to stop by using a CAPTCHA - I know this is a little inconvenient for the poster, but so is scrolling through all the annoying shopping ads
ERROR!! "(That nitric acid–cotton combination, called gun-cotton, was daunting to work with because it was highly flammable, even explosive. For a while it was used as a substitute for gunpowder until producers of it got tired of having their factories blow up.)"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGun-cotton is used as an accelerant in almost every firearm, including cannons. It's called smokeless power. Without it machine-guns would be useless because of the smoke. I worked in a smokeless power plant and the dangers were close to an oil refinery. Look out for sparks! Tools were all plastic, stainless steel and bronze.
I enjoyed reading this article it has a lot of depth, I would be interested in reading more about the future of the plastic industry as the effect of plastics on the environment is becoming more of a concern.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have the technology to engineer biodegradable plastics and most uses of plastics could use this, those that are not suitable for biodegradable plastics should be easily recycled. Both of these steps are not being fully implemented at the moment and it is having terrible effects on the environment especially in our oceans. The next step for the <a href="http://wheatleyplastics.co.uk/sectors">plastics industry</a> is to further develop these bio degradable plastics and work with their suppliers to switch.