Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland advanced his work on a resin formed from phenol and formaldehyde, filing key patent documentation that led to Bakelite, the first entirely synthetic plastic. Unlike earlier semi-synthetic materials such as celluloid, Bakelite could be molded permanently into almost any shape and resisted heat, electricity, and solvents, making it ideal for the emerging electrical and consumer-goods industries.
Baekeland had been searching not for a plastic at all but for a synthetic substitute for shellac, a resin secreted by lac beetles and used as an electrical insulator, at a moment when the booming electrical industry desperately needed insulating material that didn't depend on beetles harvested in South Asia.
Working in a home laboratory in Yonkers, New York, he discovered that under controlled heat and pressure, phenol and formaldehyde would form a hard, stable resin that, once set, could never be melted or reshaped — a property called thermosetting that made it uniquely durable. He named it Bakelite and marketed it as 'the material of a thousand uses,' and manufacturers eagerly agreed: it became telephone housings, radio cases, billiard balls, jewelry, and insulators of every kind.
Bakelite is often called the first true plastic because it contained no natural molecules at all, purely synthetic from the start, unlike celluloid, which was derived from plant cellulose. Its success touched off the twentieth century's plastics revolution, for better and for worse: Baekeland's invention meant cheap, moldable, mass-producible material was suddenly available for nearly anything, a transformation whose environmental costs are still being reckoned with a century later.