G. Marshall Naul is an American chemist and plastics molder and an historian of the early plastics industry. He joined Bakelite (Union Carbide) in 1940 and entered the molding material development laboratory at the New Jersey factory, working mainly on raw materials quality control. From 1942-45 Naul was as shift chemist for Celanese Corp. of America working on liquid-liquid extraction and distillation.

Naul subsequently worked in the 1940s for General Electric Plastics Division in Pittsfield, Massachusetts as a development engineer working on thermoset high-pressure decorative and industrial laminates. GE’s molding section was the largest under one roof with 400 presses operated by a central hydraulic system and heated by a high-pressure, super-heated water system.

GE projects pursued in the late 1940s included styrene polymers, acrylonitrile yarn, silicone resins, and even Mycalex, a low-melting glass which could be transfer molded. Cold molded products used asphalt and Portland cement were also under development. From 1945-49 the engineering section was busy molding polyester glass fiber boats in matched metal molds up to 18 feet in length. The section also worked on “jet” molding of thermosets, now known as injection molding.

In 1949 Naul transferred to Cochocton, GE’s new facility for the production of refrigerator door liners and laminated parts. Door liners were molded from paper impregnated with phenolic resin, trimmed and painted at a rate of 30,000 per week.

From 1951-54 Naul worked at International Resistance Co. in Pennsylvania where he tested molding compounds and ingredients for the “inks” used as the active element in molded, fixed resistors. Production was as high as 4,500,000 per day, which made IRC the largest single user of Bakelite material at that time.

In 1954 Naul moved to Micarta Division of Westinghouse Electric Company that made laminated and molded products. In the engineering department he worked on components made principally from cloth, cotton or glass impregnated with resins, phenolic or melamine. These materials were used to mold aircraft pulleys, automotive camshaft gear blanks, textile shuttle forms, food trays, and aircraft antennae among other products. In 1959 he was part of a crew of engineers working for the US government on projects such as heat shields for ballistic missiles, some of which had to withstand 20,000 degrees F for about 30 seconds.

In 1966 Naul moved to the Polychem Division of Budd Co. which made vulcanized fiber and industrial components based on phenolic laminates such as camshaft gear blanks and steel mill roller bearings. The division needed new products, and since he had considerable experience developing textile shuttles, he worked around his own patents developed at Westinghouse and was granted another patent for an entirely different molding method.

Budd closed the Newark factory in 1970 and Naul subsequently moved to Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corp. where he worked on the utilization of scrap glass insulating wool. By the addition of about 20% phenolic resin, potential products of considerable merit were developed. Later projects included the Teflon coated glass fiber tents constructed for the Haj terminal in Saudi Arabia.

Source:

Naul, G. Marshall. “From Bakelite to Teflon,” Plastiquarian: Journal of the Plastics Historical Society, Number 6 (winter 1990), 10-11