Leo Hendrick Baekeland

Leo Baekeland and his family

What could laminate possibly share with art deco radios or Bakelite bangles? The answer is ... chemist Leo Hendrick Baekeland, the inventor of phenolic resin. What is phenolic resin? A synthetic thermosetting (cured by heat) resin produced by the condensation of a phenol with an aldehyde (usually formaldehyde). It is most commonly used as a component of laminates. It is the resin used to coat the kraft paper used as the core of the sheet.

Born in Ghent, Belgium in 1863, he immigrated to the US in 1889. Baekeland was working on developing effective insulating material for the burgeoning electricity industry. Utilizing a combination of pressure and high temperatures he discovered an amazingly versatile and resilient material. He is credited as having invented the vulcanization process as it applies to plastics. Phenol from coal tar is heated up in a vacuum, the vapors condense and form the basic chemical in the mixture.

Baekeland was trying to find a synthetic substitute for wood varnish, but what he produced was too tough. He made the substance even tougher and ended up developing one of the world's first moldable, dyeable - and not to mention commercially successful - plastics.

His first major invention was Velox, a photographic printing paper that could be developed under artificial light. Baekeland sold the rights to George Eastman and Kodak for one million dollars in 1899. He then started his own laboratory in Yonkers, New York, where he invented Bakelite in 1907. Baekeland died in 1944 at the age of eighty years in Beacon, N.Y.

Oversized, toylike pins made of phenolic resin.	Desk fan made by Sears for Diehl.