Leo Baekeland (born Leo Henricus Arthur Baekeland) was a Belgian-American chemist whose invention of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, led to the creation of the plastic industry and a drastic transformation of the way material products were manufactured, marketed and used.

Baekeland was born in Ghent on November 14, 1863. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Ghent in 1882 and two years later was awarded a doctorate of Natural Science, maxima cum laude, also from Ghent. Baekeland taught chemistry at the university and at the higher Normal School in Bruges until 1889, when he won first prize in a chemistry competition that granted him a traveling scholarship with which he came to the United States in 1889.

Baekeland was already interested in photography, and in the United States he was active in research, leading to his invention in 1893 of Velox photographic paper, a paper which utilizes a special colloidal chloride of silver, enabling it to be exposed and developed rapidly and conveniently. He founded the Nepera Chemical Co. to manufacture Velox, until he sold the patent to Eastman Kodak Co.

Bakeland returned to Europe to study Electrochemistry at the Technological Institute at Charlottenburg, Germany. Returning to America he equipped a private laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York, to continue his research, working with phenols and aldehydes to produce an artificial varnish. In 1906 experiments with carbolic acid and formaldehyde created a hard, insoluble, unmeltable resin. Though not suited for preparing varnish, Baekeland saw its potential as a new material that could be formed into various products. He organized the General Bakelite Company (later the Bakelite Corporation), took out patents, and began to produce the new material in ways suitable for compression molding.

Bakelite was the first plastic invented that held its shape after being heated. Radios, telephones, and electrical insulators were made of Bakelite because of its properties of insulation and heat resistance. Soon it penetrated nearly all branches of industry. Bakeland continued to direct his company until 1939, when it was sold to Union Carbide. By that time plastics had become an important part of American (and international) industry.

During World War I Baekeland was a member of the Naval Consulting Board and the Nitrate Supply Commission. In 1917 he was chairman of the committee on patents of the National Research Council. In 1924, he was president of the American Chemical Society, and he also served as president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Electrochemical Society. In his lifetime Dr. Baekeland received numerous prestigious awards from chemical and engineering organizations and universities. He was decorated as an officer of the Legion of Honor of France, the Order of the Crown of Belgium and he was a commander of the Order of Leopold.

See:

"Dr. Leo Hendrick Baekeland," Modern Plastics 21:8 (April 1944), 89.

Meikle, Jeffrey L. American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 31-61.